Blog Post #3: Small Talk Big Deal

For the third blog post, I went to a workshop called “Small Talk: It’s a Big Deal!”. In this workshop, we learn how to interact with people for the first time. The workshop is about interacting for the first time, but somehow by coincidence, the people around me were four other people from the Freshmen Seminar. Even though the people there are the people I know, I got to learn new facts about them after this workshop.

In this workshop, we receive tips on how to interact with people for the first time. The presenter shows an example by going around the room and shaking hands with everyone in the room, looking directly in the eye when giving the handshake, a smile naturally when looking directly to the eye, and introduce self when smile naturally. We have also learned about the different kinds of sense of humor, such as how to separate plain sense of humor from potentially offensive sense of humor, but always remember your sense of humor. Before meeting for the first time, practice different ways of starting a conversation and make an extra effort to remember people’s name (we did an activity in which where write down people name if we share a common trait as them), and beware of open and closed body languages. When having a communication, demonstrate that you are listening by restating their comments in another way, ask a person’s name if you’ve forgotten, and show curiosity and sincere interest in finding out about others.

Overall I believe this workshop is very helpful to use not just in conversations, but also in interviews when searching for a job in the future.