pinning ceremony speech

[NurseHeather]

I am having my pinning ceremony in a couple of weeks from my RN school. I am on the pinning committee and I am the closing speaker. I have been tossing ideas back and forth and I have realized that this was going to be more difficult than I thought. I am asking if any of you could give me some ideas on what to say to send our class out into our careers. Thank you so much for any help. Heather

[Mystery5]

Give profuse thanks to everyone except for your "Instructor from Hell"! For her, you can slip something in her drink that will make her stumble, have slurred speech, and make a total fool of herself!!!

[grentea]

The best advice anyone ever gave me about giving a speech (or interviewing) is to tell a story (a true one of course). It tends to hold people's attention and makes it simple to draw everything into a nice conclusion. For example, I was trying out to be my school's graduation speaker and I included a story about one of my friends who had died and how he changed my life. It doesn't have to be that serious. Maybe you had a memorable experience in clinicals, an inspiring professor somewhere down the line, something funny that happened to you in school, etc. Those make for good stories.

Also having a quote usually helps. This website usually has a great selection of inspirational quotes: http://www.parrotsmeow.com/IQ/QP.htm

Also you might want to check out http://www.quoteworld.org. That has a pretty huge collection of different quotes. I'll keep my eye out for nursing quotes.

Good luck!

:)

[NurseHeather]

The best advice anyone ever gave me about giving a speech (or interviewing) is to tell a story (a true one of course). It tends to hold people's attention and makes it simple to draw everything into a nice conclusion. For example, I was trying out to be my school's graduation speaker and I included a story about one of my friends who had died and how he changed my life. It doesn't have to be that serious. Maybe you had a memorable experience in clinicals, an inspiring professor somewhere down the line, something funny that happened to you in school, etc. Those make for good stories.

Also having a quote usually helps. This website usually has a great selection of inspirational quotes: http://www.parrotsmeow.com/IQ/QP.htm

Also you might want to check out http://www.quoteworld.org. That has a pretty huge collection of different quotes. I'll keep my eye out for nursing quotes.

Good luck!

:)

Thank you very much for your advice. I appreciate it and I will check it out. Heather

[Nightcrawler, BSN, RN]

I have a couple of pieces of advice for you.

If you have more than one student speaker come up with a list of topics among you and assign them. In the course of planning our pinning ceremony I attended the ceremonies of several other classes and I found that most of the speakers went over the same topics. They all talked about how much their families had to put up with, how much they were going to miss their classmates and that one time in clinical when.....

We wanted to avoid this, and to make sure that the speeches that were given reflected the diversity of our class, so we had one person talk about the experience of nursing school and the challenges that we and our families faced, another person spoke of the bonds and friendships that developed among the students as a group and how we were unique, someone else spoke from the male/returning student perspective and we had someone speak about the faculty and their influence upon us. It went beautifully, and with a set topic in mind it was easier to reminisce and organize the material.

As another poster stated, please use stories to bring the people who are attending your ceremony into the world that you have shared with your classmates. Good luck and let us know how it goes!

[NurseHeather]

this is great advice, and I thank you for that. I will post and let everyone know how it goes. Heather