Voxmasters Recap: Elevator Pitches: Getting to the Point

As part of MLDP, we encourage student participants to attend other Rockefeller Center programs in order to enrich their Dartmouth experience. Read two student accounts of a Rockefeller Center program, and for more information about MLDP, click here.

The theme of this week's Voxmasters was the Elevator Pitch, which student leaders Sarah and Shoshana described as a situation where we only had two minutes to convey a pitch for a project or idea to a powerful individual.

Each participant in the group was given five minutes to come up with a pitch. The student leaders suggested that we be concise, animated and genuine in our pitches. Furthermore, they encouraged us to show why our pitches were important and explain how the individual could be beneficial to us. After putting together notes about our pitches, each of us went to the front of the room and presented our idea to the imaginary individual that we had chosen.

Both Sarah and Shoshana provided constructive critiques on everyone’s presentation. For instance, they pointed out the importance of having a firm stance, projecting one’s voice, avoiding fillers and leaving the opportunity for the individual we were speaking with to ask questions.

Getting the opportunity to hear how different students framed their pitches helped me in developing my own ideas and articulating them in a clear and compelling way. I appreciated the helpful insight that both of the student leaders gave, and I hope to attend more sessions in the future.

--Nana Adjeiwaa-Manu ’16, Fall 2013 MLDP Participant

***
 
At VoxMasters, we were taught what an elevator pitch was. An elevator pitch “demonstrates two or three clear points and demonstrates why the person you are pitching is an important part of what you are trying to do.”

This session was very informative and applicable to our everyday lives because we never know when a day may come in which we bump into an important person who can help achieve the dream job we always wanted to have. This session was very clear that elevator pitches needed to be straight to the point and leave a lasting impression.

During the session, I got to hear many elevator pitches from other students and I was very impressed with how we fleshed out our individual ideas in a manner of minutes; critical for delivering an effective elevator pitch. Each of us had 2 minutes to deliver our elevator pitch and it was definitely a fun experience but also challenging because you have to really focus in on the few very important points that you really want to get across. Doing other things like complimenting the person you are speaking to or demonstrating your knowledge and passion of the subject matter are also vital to the elevator pitch and most of us successfully achieved these characteristics in our elevator pitches. Overall, Dartmouth students would benefit from learning about elevator pitches simply because advertising yourself in a concise, straightforward manner is always going to be a skill set necessary for our professional lives.   

--Latrell Williams ’16, Fall 2013 MLDP Participant