Arielle, this is your life!

One of the best parts of my program is a speaker series called TALK '10 (I graduate in 2010, yo) that one of my classmates started last year. Every few weeks, 2 classmates will give 20 minute talks about their lives, with some PowerPoint slides of pictures up in the background. After that, there's 20 minutes for Q&A. Attendance isn't mandatory, but each talk gets a decent turnout from fellow students and a few faculty. It's been pretty amazing listening to my classmates tell their stories, as everyone who's gone so far has had really great things to say.

The pairings have always been sort of theme based. We started off with 2 people who had started their own businesses, moved on to 2 military stories (this talk was f'ing INCREDIBLE), and finished out last year with 2 tales of working in Washington. The first talk this year was by 2 international students who told stories from back home and what differences they faced when they came here.

The next talk is on October 14th, and is more ethnicity/culture based. One of my classmates will talk about what it was like growing up half-Persian in a supremely white area. He is paired with...ME. ACK.

My talk will be focused on telling my grandparents' stories from the concentration camps, being the only not-super-religious family at an orthodox Jewish private school, and other fun things like how I accidentally majored in Judaic Studies in college (for those of you who read my other story recently...it's a lot of overlap with that). And even though it's not related, I'm going to talk about my 3 years working in NYC because being a veteran of a no-longer-existing investment bank is pretty cool.

I'm pretty excited to give this talk, and opening emails from my mom with lots of pictures from my childhood and organizing them in PowerPoint has been great. But on the other hand, I'm pretty nervous. I'm pretty sure my life has not been nearly as interesting as the lives of many of my classmates, and I don't want people to come away from my talk thinking it sucked and that I was a bad choice. I also imagine that a lot of people will come primarily to listen to the guy I'm speaking with (people definitely have strong opinions as to who they think is fascinating enough to listen to for 20 minutes and they voice them openly whenever a discussion of who should be picked for TALK '10 comes up. I probably fall into the category of "not interesting enough"). So I feel like I have to impress those people.

I will probably post about it again as the talk approaches, and I'll let everyone know how it goes. The email announcing the talk hasn't come out yet, and I'm sort of curious to see if anyone asks me about it before the event happens.

But in the meantime, I will keep putting my slides together, reminiscing about my childhood, and thinking of what stories to tell to fill my 20 minutes.