Drop The Mic! English Letters Students Becomes Professional MC!

MEDIA-As a social creature, people do communicate with each other in order to achieve their purpose; either it is to persuade or to inform something. However, communication is not as easy as it looks. People sometimes get confused in arranging the proper sentence to be delivered or they don’t feel confident in telling their opinion. Therefore, public speaking is one of the essential skills that everyone should have, especially students of English letters who will be working with groups of people.

Since public speaking is necessary, the English Department has held a seminar under the theme: Drop the Mic! Master of Ceremony from A – Z! The aim of holding the seminar is to enhance student’s enthusiast in practicing public speaking, specifically in leading an event as Master of Ceremony. Albertus Agung Yuwono, a professional MC, was invited to be the keynote speaker of this event. In the seminar, he explained the theories and techniques related to MC skills and the participants, who are the 4th-semester students, looked so excited to the way he delivers the material. He started with a warming-up session to “wake them up” and then began to do some opening statements about the topic. He delivered the whole session in English and only a bit Indonesian but still, the words he uses was easy to be understood.

Mr. Albert told the participants that actually public speaking skill is not only needed in leading an event as an MC but in the other work-fields too, for example: teacher, motivator, storyteller, and even president. However, the topic focused on the MC guides and how to prepare ourselves to be a good event leader. It was told that the theme Drop the Mic! does not mean literally dropping the microphone but to be a professional MC, so that the MC will not tremble during the event leading. Drop the microphone means to relax and confident, so that the words flow from the MC’s mouth naturally and sometimes improves spontaneously.

At the end of the seminar, there was a QnA session and most of the questioners asked about how to avoid feeling nervous or how to be confident in front of the public. He then told us some additional tips related to the questions.

The seminar has gone well and most of the students felt worthy to come to this opportunity. After the seminar ended, the committee had a short interview with Mr. Albert. According to him, this event was beneficial and also a good investment to improve speaking skill. He was happy and excited to be the keynote speaker. Mr. Albert hopes that next year, there will be other MC’s from bigger city with more experiences so the English letters’ students can figure out something new and better.