The Return of Kean’s Speech Contest

By Ja’Bria Lester | Published April 21, 2022

Imagine giving a speech on a research topic in front of a live audience and after your speech, you win a big prize. Kean University’s speech contest is back for another year, hosted by Dr. Allison Edgley.

Edgley, a Communication professor at Kean, wanted to focus on special projects to help make their department’s presence more known and also create more opportunities for students to showcase.

In spring 2020, the first speech contest was held. The contest allowed students to deliver a speech, followed by a persuasive presentation. The concept is for the students to create a persuasive pitch, persuasive arguments, and elements in papers. To eliminate the contrast of interest Edgley brought aboard faculty who did not have direct contact with any of the contestants for real objective eyes looking at the presentations.

“We’re starting to get our feet wet and kind of see what options are available,” Edgley said.

Edgley feels that her purpose is to help students find and tune their perspective, persuasive speaking skills for future jobs, or something that they are passionate about… Her job is to not only teach students, but to also recruit students who she feels have a great opportunity even if it’s small, to do a speech to build interest.

 She felt that starting small could be great progress and reach larger audiences to make others aware of some of the research of the behaviors they would want people to take action on.

The goal was not set for how many students could register, even if it were only a handful of students the organization would be lucky to have them and still be able to give them an experience to build their confidence. The contest is to also help spread awareness about the factual information to show what it is to really support an argument.

The winner of the first speech contest was Lauren Ventriglia.

“The speech contest really helped me to see that I am actually able to successfully speak in front of a group of people and get my point across,” Ventriglia said. “I do tend to think of myself as a bit of a rarity in the fact that I enjoy public speaking and look forward to such opportunities.”

There are many values that you learn when public speaking. Ventriglia said that one of the values she learned was the value of practicing and accepting help from others.

“Whenever I do any work, I tend to have the bad habit of not reviewing my “finished” product thoroughly. In fact, it hasn’t hurt me yet, but I am aware that practicing and reviewing are very important skills to have. I also learned the importance of accepting help from others. I am extremely stubborn, but learning to take criticism and apply it to the things that I do is the only way to succeed in anything.”

 Ventriglia gave tips for upcoming applicants who are interested in joining the upcoming speech contest. “The most important tip that I could give is to have fun. I see so many people who worry about the formalities of public speaking and let their anxiety take a hold of them while they are up there. The fear of public speaking is so common that you definitely aren’t alone no matter how alone you may feel when standing up there,” Ventriglia said.

The next speech contest, which will take place Wednesday, May 4  from 3pm to 5pm and will have a grand prize of $250 for the winner. Applicants who are eligible are high school students and current Kean students (all majors).

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