… Charlson Smith takes top honors in ninth annual event
University of Mississippi MBA students transformed themselves into professional public speakers last week, and two out-talked their peers and were declared winners in the ninth annual Speaker’s Edge event.
Charlson Claggett Smith of Pass Christian was named the overall Speaker’s Edge champion. Smith was also first place winner in the ethical dilemma and informative categories. The other winner was Yankun Jia of China in the marketplace pitch category.
Yankun Jia
Charlson Claggett Smith
The Speaker’s Edge event involves two days of lively public-speaking competition, which provides three hours of academic credit and is required for graduation, helping hone the skills of MBA students. They learn to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their personal speaking styles and adapt their messages to different audiences and situations.
“The most rewarding aspect of Speaker’s Edge this year was to be able to interact with so many accomplished business people and receive their feedback, thus allowing me to improve my public speaking skills in a way that will be effective in my future career,” Smith said. “I felt extremely honored to have been named the champion of Speaker’s Edge 2012 largely because of the competence and skill of the competitors that I was poised against, but also because I was able to successfully engage our distinguished judges in a topic in which I’m both interested and invested.”
The event was co-sponsored by the university’s School of Business Administration and Lott Leadership Institute, Baptist Memorial Healthcare Corp., FedEx, Extreme Arts and Sciences, Rich Gernert, City Grocery Restaurant Group, Delta Business Journal, Chick-fil-A, Bill Chiles and the Bristow Group, Iroquois Capital, Renasant Bank and Judy Watt Conner in memory of William Watt.
Speaker’s Edge has been a hallmark of the MBA curriculum for several years, and this year the competition expanded to include students in the UM Center for Manufacturing Excellence. The CME program brings together the schools of Engineering, Business Administration and Accountancy to provide students with technical skills involved in successful manufacturing along with an understanding of accounting, communication, human resources, leadership, management and marketing.
The overall winner of the CME Speaker’s Edge was Hugh Sloan of Oxford.
“This was an extremely competitive year, and we are thrilled to have the chancellor and provost tell us they would like us to explore rolling the program out across campus,” said Bethany Cooper, director of corporate relations and MBA/MHA services.
The competition recognizes that communication is a vital part of the business world and features a six-to-eight minute informative speech, a six-to-eight minute marketplace pitch, in which students share their best business ideas with industry leaders, and an “ethical dilemma,” for which they have 30 minutes to prepare a seven-minute speech.
More than 60 business and community leaders participated as judges in the competition, and their feedback and encouragement is critical to the learning process. One of the judges was Paula Evans, who has done career coaching with the business school since 2004. She praised the students as dynamic.
“I was impressed with how well they can think on their feet,” said Evans, a UM alumnus whose daughter is an MBA graduate. “They didn’t have much time to speak, but it was interesting to see their minds working. The students always look so nervous but they do a great job. As the day goes on, you can see so many improvements.”