Toastmasters is a club on campus that is a non-profit organization. They are currently in the process of rebranding their club to be the Professional Speakers Club, an international speaking organization.
“It is geared to develop our over 330,000 worldwide members into better public speakers,” said Jamison Orr, former president. “Each meeting is strategically planned out to the minute in order to fully benefit all members in the hour we have.”
During their meetings there are leadership roles including the Toastmaster, who essentially runs the meeting. There are other roles like the General Evaluator, who is tasked with giving constructive development ideas to the members. The meetings are member-run and consist of one or two speakers with five to six table topic participants and six to eight leadership roles giving announcements.
“Overall, the PSC is focused on building each member’s public speaking, time management and leadership abilities,” Orr said.
Orr started the club and became the founder and president of PSC because he wanted to build a public speaking organization since HPU President Dr. Nido Qubein is heavily involved in public speaking.
“I only thought it was right to be able to develop our public speaking and communications clubs on campus,” Orr said. “Additionally, our generation is victim to communicating through technology. Many of us would rather die than speak in public and many of us would rather text and email than pick up the phone or have a face-to-face conversation. My task was to change that mentality and build leaders and speakers out of our organization.”
The PSC meets on a bi-weekly schedule on Wednesdays at 6 p. m. in the Graves Collaboratorium in Cottrell Hall.
