On February 18th and 20th (Sunday and Monday) the Business Professionals of America (kind of a corporate 4-H club) will be staging their annual speaking competition for high school students from across the state.Deb Jones of Iowa Lakes Community College is the event coordinator.
The event will be held at the Merle Hay Holliday Inn on Merle Hay Road. In her latest correspondence, Ms. Jones stated that the conference starts on Sunday and that the competition runs all day Monday. This is a departure from a year ago, so I hope to follow up just to be sure.
The students have two separate competitions. One is a Table Topics style business / office setting situation. There are five different scenarios and the pupils are unaware of the exact issue, merely that it might come up in a true to life office setting. These are two minutes.
The prepared speeches are 5- 7 minutes in length. Judges are urged to submit a written feedback form to help participants understand and benefit from, areas which might stand improvement. The evaluation forms feature a point system which is similar to the forms we all use to judge International speech competitions.
The ideal is for there to be three judges and a timer at each segment of the event.
The students acquitted themselves rather well last year earning third in the nation. As I understand it, this allowed several of them to earn scholarship funds to off-set (partially) the soaring costs of attaining a degree.
I enjoyed the event last year and am eager to be a part of the process again this year. The presentations last year were upper echelon in quality, I was quite impressed and somewhat surprised.
contact info: www. iowabpa.net
Thank – you,
Bob White, Toastmaster
robertwhitets