Today I decided to attend the Building Your Brand: The Personal Pitch Career Workshop. For starters, I’ve always been a person interested in improving myself and learning any type of new information that can help my career. This workshop seemed like a great opportunity to do just that: inform me on how I can improve to benefit my interview experiences.

The workshop began with a general discussion on what a personal pitch is, and what it includes. After giving our opinions, we proceeded to watch a video example of several people delivering their personal pitches twice; once in the “bad” or “incorrect” fashion, and the other in the “good” or “correct” way. This video alone was extremely helpful to me, and surely, the rest of the group, as it helped us visualize good and bad aspects of delivering a personal pitch.

A good pitch, for example, includes formal speaking and proper body language. It details strengths about yourself, work and academic experiences relevant to the field you are interviewing for, and relevant personality traits. A bad pitch includes speaking informally, acting nonchalantly, and having little information about yourself, or information that is irrelevant to what field you are applying for.

After watching the video and further detailing what a personal pitch was, we began writing our own versions of personal pitches, mainly brainstorming main points to focus on, and presenting it to partners. I especially enjoyed this, because it allows me to contemplate what I want to include in my pitch, and presenting it to our partners helps receive positive feedback on what was good and what needs improvement. It also served as an “ice breaker” to interact with our peers.

This was an overall great experience, and one of the more memorable and helpful ones I’ve had at Baruch so far. I look forward to attending similar workshops in the future, and improving my own personal brand.