Angelina Vita: Filling that Awkward Silence
Almost two years before I transferred to Lander University, I was sitting in a Public Speaking class during my freshman year, listening to a professor I didn’t necessarily like as she scolded the class for being unprepared. She had assigned us midterm speeches to deliver the next week, but had shown up that morning with a surprise ‘pop speech.’ She wanted us to think on our feet and deliver anything we had started working on for our midterm speeches. No one had anything to say. I knew what topic I wanted to discuss in my midterm speech, but I hadn’t researched it or even considered how I would relate it to my classroom.
She ordered me out of my seat, stuck me in front of the podium, and told me to talk. I failed. I stood up there for a full minute doing nothing but enabling a very long, very awkward silence.
She was furious and she singled me out in front of the entire class.
“In the real world, you aren’t allowed to have nothing to say. If you’re attending a meeting, always have something to bring to the table. Otherwise, why are you even showing up?”
It was harsh but I learned my lesson. I started prepping speeches and research projects weeks in advance because I was terrified of being ‘that student’ up in front of the class. She didn’t call me up on the spot like that again, but I never forgot it. Going forward, I prepared research and drafted assignments weeks before deadlines for all of my classes.
Three years later, I landed a position as a Digital Marketing intern for my Summer 2021 breakaway. It was a ten-week-long program that was built to be entirely virtual due to the pandemic.
The first five weeks of my internship were hectic, to say the least. The department was flooded with demands and I was immediately assigned to six different teams. I had no down time and I was expected to pull weight alongside senior leaders. But, everything ran according to a tight schedule and most days were controllably designed week in advance. Until one wasn’t.
One Monday morning, I logged into work at 9:00 am. By 9:30 am, I was informed that I needed to attend a 10:00 am multi-departmental research meeting on behalf of my manager. She wanted me to take notes that she could use to catch up on what was said. Easy.
By 9:40 am, my house had lost all WiFi connection. I mean all. There must have been a wreck nearby that took some important wires down, because my house went totally dark in a second. Nothing would reboot.
By 9:50 am, my 15-year-old brother had agreed to drive me around town in his truck so I could use satellite to attend the meeting.
By 9:55 am, I was in the passenger seat of his truck with my laptop balanced on my lap, my notepaper in the seat beside me, and more sweat sticking to my clothes than I thought was possible. It was 100 degrees outside and apparently his truck’s AC had stopped working a few days before. So it was hot. Very hot. We had to drive with the windows down to try to keep cool. This wouldn’t have been much of a problem if his truck wasn’t an ancient dually with an engine that’s louder than a Fast and Furious car scene played at full volume. It was deafening inside his truck.
My brother’s deafening truck
By the time I had enough satellite to connect to the meeting, I was ten minutes late. I joined in the middle of a conversation that ended with me learning that someone in the 20+ person call had volunteered me to present research. Me, the person who was visibly late.
Another awkward silence.
Apparently, my manager had mentioned off-handedly that I was working on a Psychology Safety project to implement in the Marketing department. People had talked about it, brought it up in my absence, and now somehow thought that I was attending the meeting to deliver the project.
Surprise: I was not joining the meeting to deliver the project.
I had a moment of absolute panic. I sat there, sweating my makeup off, deafened by the dually’s engine, having flashbacks to my Public Speaking class. This was exactly what that professor had done to me. She had claimed that she was “preparing” us for the “real world.” Sure, I had taken her advice and had spent the past three years preparing research weeks in advance of deadlines, but in practice, I’d never really needed to. No one knew I prepared ahead out of panic driven motivation. I had concluded that her choice to single me out had been just that: a choice.
But now, it wasn’t. That choice saved me.
When the entire Microsoft Teams meeting fell silent, waiting for me to speak, I had something to say. It wasn’t amazing, I didn’t rock anyone’s world with what I said, but I wasn’t standing in front of my classmates with nothing but empty air in my head. I had an early PowerPoint draft ready to share, I had preliminary suggestions to make, and I had a line of questioning built to run the rest of the meeting.
Afterwards, I received several emails from the people who had attended. They wanted me to share my PowerPoint so that they could use it within their departments and teams. When I explained that it was an early draft and wouldn’t be completed for about a week, one of the team leads scheduled a follow-up meeting with everyone so that I’d have the chance to finish what I’d started.
By the time I completed my internship, two departments had started to implement three of the five suggestions I’d made during that first impromptu delivery. The image I’d carried of myself standing dumb and silent in front of my speech class was replaced by the realization that little intern me had come up with ideas that were benefiting the company in the long run.
I sent an email to my speech professor and truthfully thanked her for her decision to make her classroom carry a piece of the “real world.” I apologized for how I’d reacted to her criticisms and explained that I believed I had gotten an offer for a future position with the company I’d interned with because of her training.
She answered me with a permanent offer to help me in any way, whether it was to practice interview questions with her, deliver mock presentations over the phone, or work on research projects together. She went from that scary professor that I believed hated me to someone I now rely on as a mentor. I can trust her to never lie to make me feel better about myself. She pushes me like she pushed me in class, and her training continues to save me just like it saved me during my internship.
If LU Honors College had not required that I take an internship, I probably would never have ended up in a Digital Marketing role. I probably would never have had the chance to erase the image of me standing silent in front of my classmates. I probably would never have had the chance to reconnect with my old Public Speaking professor and see her not as someone who was out to get me, but as someone who saw a future for me and refused to let me ignore my potential. This internship completely changed not only how I approach future research projects, but also how I view myself. I no longer feel like the student standing in front of the podium, listening to the longest silence of her life. I know I can trust myself to sit down at any table and have something worth saying.
Angelina Vita is a senior English major at Lander University. She completed her Summer 2021 breakaway at Equitable and plans to return as a full-time employee after her Spring 2022 graduation. She currently runs a popular online blog at www.thepotentiallypossessedhorse.com.