Speech #1: Ice Breaker Speech

My fellow toastmasters and honored guests, my name is Sami.

Today I am going to share my simple life story, primarily about my village and my education.

I was born and brought up in a tiny village in southern India. My father is an educated person, has an undergraduate degree in economics but he didn’t go to any job, he was simply managing the farm that we have and my mother has not even completed high school.

My parents understood the importance of the education to their kids and they did their best given the financial constraints and other situations surrounded by them at that time.

I have one elder brother who is sitting right there. We all struggled in our small farm for our livelihood in our tiny village.

The village is special in someway. No school, No hospital, No convenient store, No post office and No bank. If you are there, you are on your own. Government is not doing anything for you and you don’t pay tax to government either.

There was another tiny nearby village, which had one small elementary school, one person post office and small convenient store.

I went to nearby village elementary school, which had 1st grade to 8th grade, but under-staffed. 3 teachers manage eight classes. The school is couple of miles from my place and I go by walk with other kids. The education standard was below-average compared to nearby city schools. Therefore, after 5th grade, my father enrolled me into another school in nearby town, which is 5 miles away from my place.

There was no school bus and no public transportation from my place. So my grandpa bought a bi-cycle for me. I was so happy as if I got my own high end luxury car. I enjoyed my bi-cycle ride more than my school.



Fast forward, 4 years. Now I completed my 9th grade.

Now my parents wanted me to go into even better school. So I joined one boarding school in another town which is 20 miles away from my home. Since I joined the boarding school, my focus and dream was to go to medical school and become a doctor. I studied hard for the next 3 years and did my best in the exams. Medical school admission was highly competitive due to limited number of schools in the state. The final result came, I couldn’t make it. I was in the state of denial for quite sometime. I was so disappointed, so did my family.


However, I got the admission to engineering college. But it took sometime to reformat my mind to imagine that I will become an engineer not a doctor anymore. Accepting the fact, I joined engineering college.

Fast forward another 4 years. I finished my engineering. Now I am the job market, actively looking for a job. Fortunately, I got one in the capital of our state and with few months I got an opportunity to come to US.

I have been working in different parts of the country for few years. Along the way, I decided to go for higher education in this country. I joined Rutgers MBA in 2006 and graduated this year.

Now more than anything, I want to improve my communication skills. So here I am and looking forward for all your support and help.