Hey guys. Many of you are wondering what I do outside school.

Firstly, I am the volunteer project coordinator of Heartware Network, a non-profit youth organisation, and the honourary secretary of the Heartware Network Youth EXCO. What the organisation do, is to guide other youth volunteers and groom them into community champions by involving them in community projects.

Anyway, the bulk of this post will be focused on my second "job".

Contrary to popular belief, Toastmasters is not a place whereby you eat bread with kaya or drink wine and beer. Toastmasters International is a US organisation which has clubs worldwide. In Singapore, there are 156 Toastmasters Clubs island-wide. To be a member of a Toastmasters Club, you pay the membership fees (different clubs charge differently). Members meet once or twice monthly, the meetings are termed as CHAPTER MEETINGS. When you join as a member, you'll be given the Basic Communication manual, which consist of 10 projects. Each project requires you to deliver a speech. The first project is the Ice Breaker speech, which requires you just to talk about yourself, for 4 to 6 minutes (each project speech is allocated a certain time). After this, you go on to the next few projects which focus on different skills, like how to organise your speech, how to deliver a speech which needs research, how to use vocal variety, how to utilise body gestures purposefully, how to persuade with power and inspire your audience. The speeches are delivered in front of your club members (of course, you can visit other clubs and present your project speeches there as well). Each project speech you deliver, you'll receive an oral and written evaluation (at the back of each project in the manual, is an evaluation sheet for the evaluation of your speech), which is done by other Toastmasters of your club or visiting Toastmasters from other clubs. These people are usually more senior Toastmasters (I use the word USUALLY). After finishing the 10 projects, you'll receive the Competent Communicator (CC) award, previously known as the Competent Toastmaster (CTM) award. After this, you can go on to tackle the advanced manuals which focuses on more specific areas (eg. Public Relations, Story-telling, Speech to inform etc), which will earn you other awards. The award titles are usually reflected at the back of your name as a toastmaster. For example, in toastmasters, my name is reflected as: "Barry Tan, AC-S, CL" (AC-S = Advanced Communicator Silver; CL = Competent Leader). Of course, the advanced awards have more requirements in order to achieve them.

In Toastmasters, there are appointments as well. I have been appointed President for my club (Punggol Toastmasters Club, blog is at http://punggoltmc.blogspot.com) and also the Area U2 Governor (each club belongs to an area; 4 to 5 clubs make up an AREA, 4 to 5 areas make up a DIVISION, a few divisions constitute a DISTRICT; Singapore belongs to DISTRICT 80, together with Macau, Hong Kong and Thailand). Hence, in Area U2 which I am the governor, I have 4 clubs (excluding Punggol Toastmasters Club which is in Area S3 and not U2), namely: Cristofori TMC (the piano company), TLCS (Tamil Language and Cultural Society) TMC, Raintree TMC and ITMA (Information Technology Management Association) TMC. In addition, as the President of Punggol TMC, in total I have 5 clubs under my charge so as to say.

I also do get invitations to be project speech evaluators at other clubs, and for the past few months I have been club-hopping to do project speech evaluations. In addition, I do get invitations to be a speech judge at speech competitions at Club, Area, and Division levels. For everything I do, I DO NOT GET PAID and instead I pay my membership to be a Toastmaster. Why I do this, I believed I have shared with you guys during our reunion dinner =)

So yup hope you guys won't give me the blur look when I talk about Toastmasters in future =)


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