Kaylie Urichuk
Networking Assignment Part 2
Management (2013/2014 Spring Term (1133)) (EL30)
Instructor: Drew Wolsey
Wednesday August 3rd, 2014
Networking Assignment Part 2
On July 3rd I participated in my first Toastmasters meeting. My objectives were to take myself out of my comfort zone, meet new people, and receive constructive criticism on my overall presentation. I feel as though I did achieve each objective well. I practiced my presentation to the point that I did not need to rely on my notes, which helped me feel much for comfortable presenting in front of an audience. With regards to meeting new people, I met tons of people throughout the company. People who I would never have met otherwise, which can always help open up doors down the road. I spoke with a couple of managers and one senior manager from HR, which was very promising as I found out in the next couple of years they are planning to grow their team substantially. Getting a position in HR is my personal biggest goal in the next couple of years. And my last objective “Criticism” was pretty short lived. I only received a few comments, and more from the people I knew going into the event. I was given some tips on how to look even more comfortable up there and to speak a little louder. However not many comments on the speech itself, so I am hoping that means overall it was a good speech. Overall I am pleased and walked out of there feeling as though I met all my objectives, and did not humiliate myself in the process.

Out of the three objectives I listed what went the most well, was meeting people from all different departments within Enbridge. I had the chance to network and gain valuable knowledge in certain departments that are going to be growing in the couple of years such as HR. I also met a few people in I.T, which never hurts in a company as large as Enbridge. I.T people can always help with questions or problems regarding things like software or creating new sites; which seem to be quite frequent for me. I would also have to say I was particularly proud of myself that I was able to stand up in a room full of people and give my presentation and not rely on any of my notes. This made me feel at ease and that if for some reason my power point did not work it would not affect my speech it would only lack visual aids. There are always things you can do better the next time, but overall it went extremely well. As far as things that did not go as well as I hoped was criticism, I figured being apart of Toastmasters there would be much more critiquing. That is the only downside I took away from this event, and even so it still went quite well.

One thing I would do differently next time is, come a little more prepared to network. What I mean by that is bring more business cards; unfortunately I only took a couple with me and ran out. And also ask for more feedback, as that was my least fulfilled objective. I think that because this was my first speech, people were a little hesitant to give me to much feedback and make feel as though I did a poor job. I need to make it known I will not take it personally and truly just want to know where improvements need to be made.

My strategy for engaging in conversations was to ask people what they agreed with in my speech and what they did not. This got the conversation going in a good way, and by me not