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Five students were awarded prizes in three categories in the annual Public Speaking Competition on Saturday, March 4, in the Chapel. The finalists were chosen after an open preliminary round held in February. Speakers’ presentations were either persuasive or informative in nature, and in one category, students addressed an assigned topic.

Director of the Oral Communication Center Amy Gaffney is the co-author of a book published recently by Parlor Press.

The Oral Communication Center hosted the second annual Three Minute Thesis competition on April 30. Open to all members of the senior class, the competition offers cash prizes for the students who can most effectively summarize their senior projects in three minutes or less. This year’s competition hosted 15 students whose majors and interests ranged from post-colonial economics to concussion management for athletes.

“Speech” was the word at the Oral Communication Center’s second “Hamilton Speaks: Improve Your Public Speaking in 6 Minutes or Less,” a lunch-hour event on Oct. 28 in the Tolles Pavilion.

Senior chemistry major Liz DaBramo was the champion and Sabrina Yurkofsky and M.E. Ficarra were first and second runners-up, respectively, in the inaugural Hamilton College Three Minute Thesis competition held May 2 in the Taylor Science Center’s Kennedy Auditorium.

Imagine suing your doctor or medical team for the harm of not providing you with the option of terminating your pregnancy.  While it may sound fantastical, this is the actual situation in a subset of medical malpractice lawsuits called “wrongful birth.”  The Oral Communication Center recently sponsored a lecture titled “You Should Never Have Been Born: The Rhetorical Conundrum of Wrongful Birth Lawsuits,” by Vesta T. Silva, associate professor of communication arts at Allegheny College.

The Oral Communication Center (OCC) hosted “Hamilton Speaks: Improve Your Public Speaking in Six Minutes or Less,” an hour-long, lunchtime event on Oct. 29. It featured student workers, faculty/staff members and visiting professionals who were each given exactly six minutes to give advice or information on some aspect of oral communication.

Hamilton College’s Oral Communication Center (OCC) hosted its first TED & Tex-Mex evening on Oct. 1. The event, which drew nearly 60 students, featured a viewing of “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are”—a TED Talk given in 2012 by Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist and associate professor at Harvard Business School.

Oral Communication Center Director Jim Helmer participated in the Summer Institute of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science June 10-13 at Stony Brook University.

Oral Communication Center (OCC) tutor Max Schnidman ’14 and OCC Director Jim Helmer presented at the National Association of Communication Centers (NACC) Conference held April 11-12 at Arizona State University.