Community Collage speech (Aug ‘05)

900 words

Note: I was asked to speak about women at Carnegie Mellon’s 2005 Community Collage, our freshman orientation diversity forum. I struggled for months to write a speech that I thought would be appropriate. Then, two days before I was to give the speech, I scrapped it and completely rewrote it. This is the result.

Hi everyone, I’m Kristan. Let me start by saying that I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make this speech interesting and applicable to everyone. Kind of ironic, huh? I’m supposed to speak to a group of 700 people, about diversity, and I want to appeal to all of them? No way. There is no way.

So what I decided to do instead was to talk about something — or rather someone — who is really important to me. My mom.

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