Reflective Essay: The Take Us Higher Program

To contribute to the society we live today, we have to speak our minds out, expand the ideas we believe would make a better world for everyone else, and we cannot do this without having communication in our communities. By means of the community of The University of Houston-Downtown, they have made a progress to improve the success rate of students that want to get a higher education after their bachelor’s degree. This arrangement was produced by the guest speaker, Dr. Sylvia Hurtado, at the “Take us Higher Program” where she developed methods we can introduce to improve this success rate. Although being the guest speaker, she was the last participant to talk in the program.
Right off the bat, the program was introduced with the welcoming and …show more content…
Ashe introduced Mr. Edward Hugetz in a simple manner, nothing fancy, since all that was said was his name and his contribution to the program. As for when Mr. Hugetz took the stage, he presented his presentation skills and they were with a bit of a lag, his communication skills were decent enough to give away the message in his presentation, and along with his story telling, he utilized a lot of his hand to correlate was he trying to say. Nothing wrong with it, but from a personal level I got distracted at several moments because the movement was either too fast or I was slowly drifting away from the topic at hand. At the end of the discussion, Mr. Hugetz did not present the next speaker and remembered when he had taken a seat, although he did not see it as a grave mistake, and pulled it off as no big deal by saying “ah, I should have introduced you” to Dr. Michael Olivas. Neither party put much emphasis on the situation so it ran smoothly without a problem even with the lack of …show more content…
Michael Olivas as a close personal friend, was the guest speaker of the program, Dr. Sylvia Hurtado. She was the main speaker in the program causing her speech to run longer than the other people speaking. She introduced herself and went directly to the key points she was going to be discussing in her PowerPoint presentation, utilizing statistics to get the attention of the gentlemen that were part of the audience since they filled about two-thirds of the floor, along with, student voices, quotes from actual students that refer to the emotional side of the people and give an insight into the program’s benefit for a stronger thesis. Although her presentation was long, she did, however, provide a lack of audience interaction during her speech making several of the audience members and staff to dose off, and check their electronic devices for a brief second causing the “noise” to increase in her speech. Her speech represented more of a lecture and so it concluded with the questions from the audience. At the start of the question session, there were a lot of interruptions between the sender and the receiver since the microphone was having technical difficulties causing the communication to fail from time to time. This was later fixed but for the first question, the program did have a struggle for everyone to