 Hello everybody part of me hopes that the slide actually won't work because they aren't very pretty but anyway About a year ago. I graduated from this very place MIT And I thought I was fairly ready to face the world and then I realized there was a lot of stuff I had to learn After graduation, I got pretty lucky and I was able to land a job with Al Jazeera America with these lovely colleagues They've taught me a lot over the past year things like how to wear fake mustaches I swear my fake mustache looks a lot better now than it did then But one of the biggest things that I've probably learned of the past year is how to talk to people so Talking to people is something that I was always able to do if I had a goal in the conversation So if I was doing interview, I always knew what I want to get So I'd be able to talk to them if I was working on a p-set or a project with people I always knew I want we always knew what the goal was so it wasn't hard to talk But it always made me a little anxious to walk into a room of people and just do like the little Conversation chit-chat thing like still kind of makes me a little bit nervous So coming from MIT well I'm not going to say people from MIT don't know how to talk because you can see lots of people from MIT here who can actually talk And actually like in my major there's actually a required class, which is basically dubbed the social skills class And every January that one of the most popular classes you can take is a class called charm school Which is the class where they teach you how to ask someone out teach you how to go on a date What do you do with all those crazy forks and spoons and plates when you go to a fancy dinner? But I can say that academic environments where about 80% of like 90% of the conversations are about Having not slept for the past three days having not seen the Sun for the past three days or Quantum mechanics. It's not exactly the same thing as when you go out into the real world So how did I learn to talk to people this year? Well, I'm still learning and I was going to talk about five lessons But I'm going to sneak one in really quickly six because I learned a really important one tonight Don't try to talk to people when they're watching the World Cup doesn't work So back to the actual talk Well, I was prepping this talk I tried to crowdsource tips for my friends the do's and don'ts of talking to people So I asked 544 of my closest Facebook friends what the do's and don'ts should be one of my friends just answered don't Some of my other friends gave me some like more useful advice things like you know share a little bit of information about yourself to build trust Set a goal of conversation smile bring cookies But one of the things that most of them also said was I'm terrible at talking to people. I'm an awkward penguin So this leads to me leads to the first lesson that I'm going to talk about which is probably the most important one I've learned this year Most people aren't totally comfortable just walking up to strangers and talking to them And that's okay because everyone else is in the same boat So lesson number one is stop thinking that everyone knows how to talk better than you do The second lesson I'm going to talk to talk about is talking to people requires actual talking so Let me demonstrate Imagine you're walking into a room and you want to be able to converse with someone but you're terrified of talking so instead You might try something like this Do you want to be my new friend? You might end up having to send like Okay, bye But in all seriousness talking does require actual talking a g-chat a text or just a yo isn't really as sufficient So I'm gonna move on to lesson number three now That's gonna be a pretty short one this one's one that I've learned as a reporter over the past year It's been pretty important. You carry a big camera and multiple microphones. You don't have to talk to people They will come and talk to you although sometimes that's just to yell at you and say to get out of my face Moving on to lesson number four ask questions as a journalist has been really really important for me But also what I've noticed is that if you don't like talking to people the more questions you ask the less You actually have to talk to them So but just do remember to actually listen to them and look them in the eye and actually maybe ask some questions that are follow Up to what they say and lesson number five finally practice makes perfect And that's actually part of the reason why I'm standing up here today because hopefully I will be talking a lot over the next Couple of days and that leads me to my challenge to you all and I hope you guys all Also will be talking to each other and hopefully also to me over the next couple days So maybe by next year I'll be able to give a talk like how to make friends the real world But in all seriousness talk to each other and come talk to me afterwards