Public speaking for MIT engineers

Mastery of the soft skills is an important part of an engineer´s training, and engineering schools have been trying to include the instruction of both written and oral communication skills in the curriculum, either as stand-alone subjects or as modules integrated into one or more engineering courses. This paper describes a new stand-alone seminar subject on public speaking that piloted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) in Spring of 2012, and discusses some of the rationale behind the design of the course and the lessons learned in the process.