Speaking of success

There are many ways to communicate with people: writing, speaking, drawing, or even using your body. To give a speech is certainly one of the most effective ways to communicate. You can mix your write skills with your speak skills.

When I was fifteen years old I experienced one of the bests speeches in my life. I was in my high school in Brazil and an event for older students was happening. One of them was giving his speech about his successful career as an engineer. He was talking about how he get into the ITA, the Technological Institute of Aeronautics, one of the best academic institutions of the country in engineering and related fields. They provide a high level education in different engineering areas. To get in you have to pass one of the most difficult exams of the country, and if you pass you get to study for free and also receive a scholarship.

That speech changed my mind in many ways. As his audience were students, some of them seeking to be engineers, the speaker focused his speech on the challenges in passing the exam. He talked about how hard it was to study so many hours each day and how to organize the time, the challenge of dealing with a high level and life as an ITA student of engineering.

He used a very common language to delivery the message efficiently to his audience and organized the speech in a chronological structure, speaking first about the choosing of the course, the study phases, the approval on the ITA, how the student life at ITA was, and finished by talking about his achievements as an engineer. Something that I’ll never forget is that he told how he abdicated from a lot of good things in his life during studying and how he used to say and do things to motivate himself. He used to buy motivational posters of some famous quotes and phrases, like “No pain no gain”.

As I was seeking to be an engineer, that speech was special for me and I really enjoyed it. It made me more focused in my studies and more familiar with the engineering field. I also improved my studying time organization and started motivating more myself.

Every time is time to learn something new!

There is nothing better than living in a different country and learning more about its history. The United States is one of the largest countries of the world. For people from other countries, like me, the entire history of that country concerns itself with some of the most important facts through the history that we learn in world history books, movies and from general literature.

Living in Lexington, Kentucky gave me a new vision of a specific part of the history of this city, state and country. As a student of Civil Engineering, my classes are all in the engineering buildings, so, I don’t have classes at White Hall. However, my advising conference was there and I spent an entire day in this building. I could never imagine that it was the first men’s dormitory on Campus. I’m living in the Roselle Hall, most called North Hall, and I’m really impressed with the price that first students had to pay for the early White Hall. It’s really cheap compared to nowadays and the price of the housing plan that I have, five dollars? It is almost free!

The Campus is almost everything that I know about Lexington. Since I’ve arrived I have not had enough time to go visit some places like downtown, so I just had a history class reading the article about the Short Street. While I was reading, I was looking on Google Maps to know where every building is and every corner that he was talking about. I also searched the web about the people and I did learn a lot of things! I didn’t even know that Abraham Lincoln was from Kentucky, and now I know the exact house where his wife was born. This is really cool! Now I know about some important figures like Henry Clay, London Ferrill, William "King" Solomon and what they did. During the reading there were a lot of things that I had to search because it was new for me. These things ended up leading me to other readings about US history. An example is when I read about the slave trader Lewis Robards, I went to search about slavery in Kentucky, and it made me read something about the Civil War in the USA.

Learning about the history of the buildings, and consequently about the history of Lexington gave me a new vision of Lexington’s culture and also about the people from here. Short Street is definitely a place that I am going to visit in Lexington.