Students get pitch training from world-class speaker coach Dr. Penn
© 2019 EPFL
Following great student responses in past sessions, Dr. Laura Penn, Founder of The Public Speaking School returned a third year to help EPFL’s Entrepreneurship students improve their new venture pitch in the run-up to one of their final course deliverables.
The Bachelor’s course “Introduction to Entrepreneurship,”—which is part of EPFL’s Social and Human Sciences program (SHS)—provides a 14-week coaching through the process of creating a new venture. In this course, students are exposed to key steps in the entrepreneurial process, including idea evaluating, identifying potential customers, and developing an initial market entry strategy, and gain experience in using tools to master those activities. Each semester, the course’s instructors also bring in multiple entrepreneurs, from various industries, which have gone through the process of establishing their own venture, and are able to report on how they were able to overcome the challenges along their way.
As one of the key elements of launching an entrepreneurial venture entails convincing various stakeholders to support their ideas and the venture—generally through pitching to them—we were pleased to provide hands-on pitch training for students from renowned professional speaker coach Dr. Laura Penn, whose distinguished list of clients include leaders from IMD, The World Economic Forum, the International Olympic Committee, and Fortune 500 companies. After receiving great feedback from students in the previous year’s cohorts, we were very excited to welcome Dr. Penn back to this year’s course.
In this year’s course, students learned that “it’s not about you, it’s about the audience”. Dr. Penn highlighted that this mind-reframe is the foundation of all good speaking. Students also learned about essential aspects of effective speaking: (1) presence, (2) voice, and (3) body. Three lucky volunteers who had prepared a 1-2 minute version of their new venture pitches had the opportunity to receive live coaching on the spot. Dr. Penn helped these students to understand how to use their presence, voices and bodies to effectively share their messages. They walked away from the experience knowing how to refine and improve both the content and the delivery of their pitches.
Once again, we received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our cohort, in that they truly value the takeaways from this unique and interactive session.
We thank Dr. Laura Penn for her valuable contributions to our course, and look forward to working with her again in the years to come.