Melissa
Marshall's TEDTalk "Talk nerdy to me" seminar is something I found to
be particularly interesting. Marshall,
who is a communications teacher by profession, reflects on her experiences
teaching a communications class to a group of engineering students at Penn
State. Marshall goes on to relate this
endeavor to Alice In Wonderland, and compares her own feelings with that of
Alice’s when she enters a whole new world.
One
thing that Marshall happened to touch upon in her seminar was the intellect of engineering
students and their occasionally overwhelming love of jargon. The first thing I thought of when I heard
this information was Sheldon Cooper from CBS’s Big Bang Theory. So often in the television series, Sheldon,
who is a big-brained engineer himself, rants on and on about even the simplest
of concepts, which of course, leaves more simple-minded characters heads’
spinning. This relates back to Marshall and
her class because like her Sheldon, Marshall’s students do not realize that
their detailed accounts of the space-time continuum (or whatever the topic may
be) are far beyond the comprehension of ordinary people. The following is a clip I gathered from the
Big Bang Theory, which is something I thought to be quite humorous. It shows Sheldon Cooper’s sad attempts at
communicating without his lengthy verbiage.
As you can see, this video is
easily relatable to the troubles engineers encounter when it comes to
communication. Marshall’s class was
aimed to improve these particular skills so that we can further our research in
many fields of study, and perhaps move forward together as a whole.
After watching Marshall’s video, I
have found her to be a great candidate for teaching engineers the skills they
need to be great communicators. Marshall
herself is a memorable speaker, who uses great inflection in her presentation
and keeps the audiences interested in what she has to say. After all, who wants to listen to a lecture
about engineers and communications? By giving
the seminar the title “Talk Nerdy to Me” and incorporating it into her actual
script, Marshall has twisted a topic that would normally not be appealing, into
something quite riveting.
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