A student of the Communication Management Study Program (Mankom) at the Faculty of Communication Sciences (Fikom) Universitas Padjadjaran managed to carve their names on the list of winners of the BINUS 2021 COMIC Contest in the public speaking category for students. COMIC or Communication In Action is a competition in the field of communication at a national level which is held regularly every year by the Communication Department of Binus University.
This year, BINUS is targeting high school students, college students, and the general public to take part in public speaking competitions or photo and story competitions. Even though it was carried out online, COMIC BINUS 2021 has succeeded in becoming a place for participants to channel their creativity.
“I thought it would be fun to try something new!”
Vincent admitted that he found the announcement of this competition from a snapgram of one of his friends. Interested, Vincent looked for more in-depth information about the competition. Apparently, Vincent felt challenged by the public speaking competition because he had never participated in a public speaking competition at all. Vincent, who felt that he had free time, immediately registered himself as a participant in the COMIC BINUS 2021 public speaking category for students/general public.
It turns out that social media scrolling doesn’t always have a bad impact, does it? But if you look at it again, Vincent’s courage and consideration were quite influential at this stage. Luckily, at that time Vincent chose to be brave and get out of his comfort zone.
The competition started and participants were asked to make a 1-3 minute video about “Young People and the Pandemic”. On this occasion, Vincent admitted that he had made adequate preparations.
Preparation begins with creating a video framework, research, writing a script, and rehearsing for performances. Vincent admits that this process is quite time-consuming because he feels he has to give his best for this event. After the video shooting process, Vincent still has to make edits and submissions through an application that has been determined by the committee.
“My mentality is trained after the competition”
The surprise came suddenly. Vincent didn’t know that the competition process was not limited to just sending a video. There is still a final session that needs to be attended by 10 finalists from each category. Fortunately, Vincent was included in the ten selected finalists. Wow.. once you take part in a competition, you can get really cool like this!
To win, each participant had to do an impromptu with the theme that was announced on D-day. This left Vincent and the other participants with no time to do research. In dealing with this situation, he admitted that there was nothing he could prepare other than quotes about youth and the pandemic as well as their mental readiness.
You can call it lucky or not, Vincent got the first turn in public speaking for the student/general category to impromptu in front of the jury. The advantage is that he can more easily attract the attention of the judges but unfortunately, he cannot prepare himself for an opponent of equal standing who may be better prepared.
As the first place in the student category, Vincent has observed the performance of participants from the high school category. From there, it was concluded that all participants had performed optimally with proper preparation. In fact, he saw that many participants had already prepared the materials and contents of the topics to be presented. But unfortunately, not a few of them forgot to attract the attention of the audience as well as the judges who were in front of them.
From there Vincent devised his own strategy, he would add humor and present topics more interactively. The aim is for the relationship between Vincent, the audience, and the jury to be more developed and the atmosphere to be more comfortable. Unexpectedly, it was this decision that made the judges see Vincent as the best and made the decision to make Vincent the first winner of this competition.
It turns out that to take part in a public speaking competition, we don’t only need skills for communication. From Vincent’s story, mental strength, opponent analysis skills, to designing strategies are also needed to influence the audience and judges.
Wow.. if it’s like this, those who want to be good at public speaking like Vincent have to learn a lot, right? For Mankomers, don’t forget to take the Public Speaking course well!
Public Speaking Competition Tips from Vincent Geraldi
Vincent Geraldi wants friends to be able to process and face challenges like him. Therefore, he shared some tips for friends who want to take part in public speaking competitions.
First, prepare the material well through research. Good material is what is true and comes from the latest phenomena around the topic raised. This makes the material more interesting and also easy to understand!
Second, don’t neglect mental readiness! As a communicator who deals with crowds directly, mental readiness can influence how people’s perspectives on you. Mankomers will more easily attract the audience’s attention if they speak confidently, are considered experts, and present topics in an interesting manner. Third, build audience trust. According to Vincent, if the audience trusts the messenger and the relationship between the messenger and the audience is well established, then the message will be more easily conveyed and received by the audience.
Being a student actually brought Mankomers a lot of advantages. One of them is the opportunity to hone talent through competitions organized by many parties. However, this opportunity means nothing if Mankomers does not have the will and courage to start.
Remember that Mankomers won’t be a student forever and the opportunity does not come twice. Take your chance and get as many achievements as possible!
