On Public Speaking ☂️ #3

I’ve been having some fun weekends recently!

Two weekends ago, I went to Local Hack Day where I hacked a GIF-powered advent calendar together with my team and vlogged the whole thing. Last week, Matt, Darren and I went to Nottingham for GitHub Field Day, an unconference for student leaders in the tech community.

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🔑 Keynote: Getting involved in the tech community

Amy Dickens, lead organiser of the event invited me to deliver a keynote on how I got involved in the tech community as someone from a Biomedical Sciences background. I took the opportunity to improve my public speaking ability, and despite being terrified, to begin with, it was such an enjoyable learning experience! Watching and listening to myself back again has given me areas I want to improve for next time. Big props to Matt for eagerly capturing my talk for reflection and development 📸

I had fun sharing my story with someone who isn’t from a “techy” background and hopefully inspired others who lead their tech communities to encourage involvement in the community from different backgrounds. Diversity = ideas are varied, and everything is just much more interesting!

You can flick through my emoji-filled slides below:

Emojis help express things better – anyone else agree? 🙋🏻‍♀️

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🗣 The day’s discussions

The discussions and talks throughout the day were put forward and decided by the audience.

As you can see, the topics of discussion were varied and different! I learned a lot about the importance of SWAG for events (the free stuff!) and design all the way to the non-coding uses of GitHub (which Matt wrote an informative blog post on – if you’re interested, you can read it here) and Data Bias.

Feeling much more confident, I decided to do a back-to-back talk and discussion session on self-care and building up hype on social media in the context of event organising.

Although I didn’t have much time to prepare the talks (I created the slides in about half an hour during lunch), I felt positive that I knew a lot on each of the topics! There were these “How to Lead a Discussion” information sheets around which helped too!

I’m planning to write a more detailed version of each of the short talk I did on the blog soon, but for now, you can watch each of them below:

🧘🏻‍♀️ Importance of self-care

Realising the impact of your environment & cutting cords & nurturing true connections. Introspection, friendships, resting. Listen to your intuition. @paulienuh @githubfieldday #GitHubFieldDay #selfcare

— a! (@niceotherwise) December 10, 2017

📱 Building up hype on social media

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Concluding the day

Overall, the day was really informative and fun! I love the environment this tech community has – it’s always super supportive and welcoming to all. I never felt judged or scared of what people might think when I was giving the talks! Surrounding yourselves in a positive environment like this is so important for opportunities, development (like public speaking for example) and the amazing friendships you get out of them. 💖