Toastmasters events are great places to strike up a conversation with friendly strangers. Even if you go by yourself, assuming that you're relatively sane and can string a coherent sentence together, you'll make friends. On the other hand, when I go to science conferences, people seem less friendly on average and more socially awkward. And conversation generally revolves around a narrow topic field. Not to dismiss the scientific community entirely though, they have been known to drink a post-conference beer or three and duly experience 'declining social inhibition as a result of ethanol intoxication'.
But at Toastmasters, the whole focus is on improving communication and interpersonal skills. So if anyone gave you a cold shoulder after you greeted them, it would be they who were in the wrong place.
The 3rd Korea Toastmasters conference and speech competition was held at the Dragon Hill Lodge, on the US army base at Yongsan.
I'd never been here before, and was impressed with the gardening. You know you're getting old when you go to a garden party and get more excited by the garden.
Ka-Hee likes Toastmasters, but doesn't often get to attend due to work commitments. Every time I post a photo of her on this blog, I promptly ask her if she's seen it yet.
The answer is usually no.
One thing we both like are refreshments. I usually wait until she takes the lead.
The conference kicked off in the main building. The MC for the night was the same as last year, a funny man who runs the show with military precision.
"Testing! Testing! 1..2...3! Your attention please! The conference will begin in exactly 2 minutes. Exactly 2 minutes ladies and gentlemen. 2 minutes. Be ready!"
During the event, one of the workshops we attended was on voice projection, run by Jinsuk Lee (a reporter for MBC). Apparently if you practice trying to speak clearly with a chopstick in your mouth, your clarity will improve. Sitting next to my wife in this photo is Ka-Yong, who we just met. She's a student in my department, in the forest ecology lab.
Inspecting the pink camera in this photo is Ju-Hee, an SRTM member who found my blog online. She said she really likes it. Thanks Ju-Hee!
To the right of her is Pil-Soo Oh, the CEO of Lundbeck Korea. I still tutor his employees during the week. He likes to play golf and is a pretty friendly guy.
Around 240 guests showed up for the event, and more wanted to come but tickets were limited. I'm guessing next year they'll have to do it someplace bigger. No one in Korea Toastmasters is paid a penny, everyone is a volunteer and all proceeds go into further club events.
The food was not very good, and there wasn't enough to go around.
But we're a forgiving bunch.
Here's our very own Ron Cahoon who represented SRTM in the speech competition. Ron is a gifted speaker and has a very powerful presence. The standards of all of the speeches were admirably high.
And this is Keith Ostergaard, an international Toastmasters director who flew here from Beijing for the event. He has three DTM awards, which means he has completed at least 165 prepared speeches, plus various other leadership activities. If you earn the DTM award, you get a wooden plaque and a letter from HQ to your employer, explaining what you have accomplished. A single DTM would take a focused person quite a few years.
DTM: The Distinguished Toastmaster award.
And here's our table. We're a happy bunch. Next month we plan on going to the beach together.
The new cancer lab is under construction, so I've been spending the days preparing my research proposal and learning about animal cells. At a very basic level, molecular biology is all quite similar no matter what you study. But I've still got a lot of learning to do.
Plant science and cancer are both interesting to me, but I'm getting more intrigued by the inner workings of cancer cells.
I took this photo when I was working with plants. These are rice protoplasts that I made with Rakshya Singh at Sejong University. Plant cells are different to animal cells because they have rigid cell walls that make them strong. That's why plants are able to stand upright without any bones. But there are special enzymes that you can use to dissolve those walls. That will leave behind little bubbles of plant cells, floating around in solution. They're alive but so fragile that you can rupture them by stirring slowly with a spoon. You can transform the little critters just by adding DNA and increasing the concentration of macromolecules.
The photo above was taken straight down the eyepiece of a light microscope with my handheld camera. The cells are sitting on the gridlines of a hemocytometer, which is normally used to estimate the density of red blood cells.
And if you have a champion of a scientific partner like Rakshya to work with, this is what you should see under the confocal microscope the next morning. These are my protoplasts at 600X magnification, with the top one showing fluorescent reporter gene expression.
It's a nice result, but this is not an easy protocol. It will take you 13 hours straight, and if you make one mistake, you just end up with brown goo. If you're attempting it for the first time and needing some help, ping me an email. I've sent out our old biolistics protocol to quite a few biology students who stumbled on this blog. More than happy to help.
These photos are from the last SRTM speech competition, and have been sitting in my drafts folder for a while now. Nine competitors were up for the challenge and gave speeches on a variety of topics from Spanish love stories to passing interviews. Overall the speeches were quite good.
If you're up for a thrill, try entering a Toastmasters speech competition. I still haven't entered one, due to time and courage constraints.
All in good time.
Here's our friend Robert Cha, giving a speech about perspiration. Robert used to run a blog called Korean 1.5, but it's gone into cryostasis. I've filed it under the appropriate heading in the column on the right of this blog.
And here's the kind of audience you'll find at SRTM. A wide range of working professionals, all contributing their free time to get better at public speaking. Heather was inducted just last week and is now a full member.
Ron won the competition with his distinct motivational style. He was once a USFK soldier here and now teaches management at Dongguk University. When he's on a roll, he's pretty much unbeatable. Now he's going to represent our club at the national speech competition in June.
If you want to watch one of Ron's award-winning speeches, you can see one here.
A few weeks back, we bought a cask of Hardy's wine from Costco. It was a nice 5 litre box, which we rationalized was worth buying because it would last a long time and save us money. Three nights later it was feeling remarkably light. One and a half weeks later and I found myself squeezing out the final remnants, before inflating the foil bag with air, much like my old man used to do when we were kids.
You know you're an expat in Korea when you're sitting down drinking cask wine while eating sundae. Sundae is blood sausage, but it doesn't taste like blood and only remotely reminds me of a sausage. In Busan, the locals prefer to eat it with gochujang (soybean chili paste), but in Seoul they eat it with salt and pepper. But the best thing I like about sundae in Seoul is that they sell it with sizeable chunks of boiled lung, complete with vascular tubes and observable alveoli. There's a whole anatomy lesson sitting on your plate, if you feel compelled to explain it to someone. Korean wife these days is learning a lot more than she cares to know.
Six months have passed since I left the familiar surrounds of Busan. The Korean university system is fairly good, but lags noticeably behind the west in a number of ways. As a summary, those ways would be social conservatism, class quality and student freedom. But to make up for these shortcomings, Korean students work incredibly hard. This puts them on par with the quality of research churned out by their western counterparts. If I were better informed of the conditions here before I came, I may have made a different choice. But I've started now, and quitting is not one of my usual habits.
Perhaps, someday in the distant future, I can be in a position to influence some changes here. For now though, I'll just count my lucky stars and think of myself as fortunate to have even received this opportunity in the first place.
Summer is in full swing and the lab heats up accordingly. Our central air-conditioning system is controlled at the switchboard downstairs, and is turned on sparingly. When it is on, it lowers the temperature to a bearable degree. But often times in the lab, like now while I'm blogging on the weekend, it's completely shut off. So we work in a fairly warm environment. Luckily though, we have a lot of fans to blow the warm air around. I've never washed a fan in my life, but here they get dismantled and washed with soapy water before use. There seems to be a cultural difference towards perception of dust. In Australia, dust is like rain, and just one of those things that you ignore. In Korea, both dust and rain are things to be avoided. Down in Busan, I was once showing Heather my awesome nun-chucking skills with some clean socks of mine. All of a sudden she started screeching "Mon-ji! Mon-ji!", which means "Dust! Dust!" So now I have to refrain from freshly laundered sock nun-chucking for fear of inciting dust-related panic in the local population.
Even though I'm a poverty-stricken student here in Seoul, I still manage to accumulate change in my drawer. Each of these coins is only worth ten cents, and it's hard to use them up on a daily basis.
Wednesday nights are my new weekends. On the weekends, I'll usually be in the lab or down at the greenhouse. But on Wednesdays, I go to Toastmasters, which means I leave early and get to eat somewhere exciting in Gangnam. I've been eating at a different place each week, and last week I went to Din Tai Fung which is a Chinese restaurant chain that specialize in dumpling soups. I had the seafood dumplings in the picture above, and they weren't bad. Definitely fresh but flavoured a little disagreeably, probably a result of too many chives. But the soup was spot on, and quite nice.
Here are the dumpling makers who craft them as you order. I used to make dumplings back in the day, and can still wrap them. It's hard to get the filling right though.
This is the liquid nitrogen truck that visits us once a week to fill up our stocks. Liquid nitrogen is useful for preserving cells in suspended animation and various other things. If you mix it with soapy water, you get lots of cloudy bubbles.
A couple of weeks ago we went out with some of the other labs to celebrate the end of classes for the semester. University hwe-shiks (work dinners), don't happen very often but are pretty fun. We're allowed to drink soju and beer until we get silly. In this photo are some members from the virus and mycotoxin labs.
On the left is Chan-ju, and in the middle is Ye-lim talking to the virus professor. By this stage we had all imbibed a retrospectively inappropriate amount of alcohol.
I met a vegetarian girl at Toastmasters called Mi-Sook. Back in Australia I was a vegan for half a year before coming to Korea. It's very difficult to maintain a vegetarian lifestyle here, and I took the easy road and started eating meat again. But I still agree with the principals of animal rights and intend to convert back someday. Until then, I'm a 'part-time vegetarian'. I took Mi-Sook out to Itaewon to eat some vegetarian dishes. In the photo above is a Pakistani curry. Itaewon is full of interesting dishes like this.
We went for a walk and found an Islamic mosque up a hill. The surrounding views of the city were quite nice.
And then we found some falafel. Falafel is a vegetarian dish made from chick peas and spices. If I weren't so lazy, I'd make it myself at home and eat it everday. Back in Australia, there's a falafel shop downstairs from my old place. They sell some amazing falafel rolls with toasted pita bread and garlic sauce. When I go back in September, I'm going to get one.
Yong-Sung is one of the nicer seniors in our lab and he's leaving to America next month for a post-doc. On Friday we went out to celebrate his birthday and ended up in this noraebang, near the Seoul National University subway station. Apparently, Yong-Sung is very passionate about this song.
Ah, Toastmasters. You know, you should really go to Toastmasters if you can. There are some good clubs around, and probably some not-so-good ones too, but luckily I found one of the better ones. This blog is probably going to turn into Lee's Toastmasters Blog soon. A couple of weeks ago I gave my first speech, called The Icebreaker. It was about my youth in Australia and what led me to join Toastmasters. I won the best speaker of the night award, which was nice. Those little pieces of paper are feedback comments from the audience. The great thing about Toastmasters is that it's such a supportive and positive environment.
And the other cool thing is that it's a great place to network. Pil-Soo is the CEO of Lundbeck Korea, a Danish pharmaceutical company here. These days I tutor some of his workers for my part-time job. I also got invited to speak at a neuroscience conference at the Hilton hotel. I spoke for an hour about how to give effective scientific presentations. I had a free lunch, the pay was good and I felt pretty special about the whole ordeal.
I volunteered for the Webmaster position at our Toastmasters club, which means I'm supposed to look after the website. I'm sure I'll learn pretty quickly, but I've never worked with basic website design before. Lee's Korea Blog is all done on a WYSIWYG template manager and any monkey can do what I'm doing. So I think there's going to be a steep learning curve before I can start improving the club website. The photo above is from our meeting today in Gangnam with the other officers. These people are pretty cool, and I'm sure if we were to start a company together, we'd make some serious money.
And here's Joseph Jeong, the outgoing president of SRTM. Joseph is one of those people who is good at making decisions and can inspire others to get things done. He's off to the University of Chicago later this year for his MBA. Our new president is James Lim, a fellow Australian with a friendly attitude and a penchant for smoking shisha.
Joseph bought that new camera this morning and I'm feeling more than a little dSLR envy.
This murky cesspool is actually the water reserves for our rice field down at Suwon. The water is held here over the winter and is then drained into the fields. Apparently rice crops are not particularly fussy about the water they drink.
Se-Kyung took this photo of me spraying the crops with insecticide. It's an overexposure, and her finger must have flipped the mode switch. That backpack I have on contained 15 litres of a chemical that smelled mysteriously like petrol.
I always spray downwind.
These two shots were taken only two weeks apart. Probably due to the humidity and rains in Korea, things seem to grow faster than they do in Australia.
And to lead us out this week is this photo. It's a little far away but those two girls are holding hands. I would have snapped it a little closer, except it might have been potentially rude. In Korea, both men and women of the same age hold hands with the same sex. It doesn't (necessarily) mean that they are dating though. It's just a way of expressing friendship.
The reason I'm pretty enthusiastic about Toastmasters in general is because they're a non-profit organisation aimed at improving your leadership, social networking, public speaking and communication skills.
And they are fond of alcohol.
Although the first Toastmasters club opened in Korea in 1992, it was only last year that they held the first conference and speech contest. I attended this year out of sheer curiousity.
The venue was the Prima hotel in Gangnam. Quite a nice place with large seminar rooms and outdoor bar space on the top floor. And those columns are Corinthian, I believe.
The day began at 3pm with a few seminars run by current Toastmasters. The first one was on personality, with the aim being to identify your particular character type.
We picked some random cards at each table and had to prioritise them from top to bottom, on how we would describe ourselves. It turns out that each different colour belongs to the same character type.
Then we were allowed to swap and trade our cards with others and try to settle down with cards that we were most happy with. It turns out that I'm pretty green, which means that I like to structure my life. Or something. I often muse that personality tests are rather difficult things to carry out in a scientifically rigorous fashion. Or they may just be a way for people to feel good about themselves.
What's the difference between procedural and sequential?
Then it was time for one of the dudes from our club to show everyone what a seminar is. Ron Cahoon is a management teacher at Dong-Guk University and his presentations are among the best I've seen. He has a very fast and engaging style with plenty of humour.
He ran a seminar on leadership, the basic premise being that leadership is a choice. I think the best leaders are the ones who feel burdened by the responsibility, but still do a good job anyway.
Then we gathered in the dining hall for dinner and the speech competition. There were around 200 attendees from 15 clubs around Korea. They're aiming for a goal of 60 Korean clubs, which means that we'll collectively have 'district' status.
Here are some of the more notable guests of the evening. There was one guy who had been a Toastmaster for 30 years in a lot of different countries. He just passed his 350th club speech.
Up on stage here is Steven Kim, the founder of SYK Global. I'm not familiar with the company, but this guy is now a philanthropist, which means he probably has more money than he should have. If I'm ever rich, I'll give away my money too. I heard that Jackie Chan is planning to give away all of his wealth before he dies.
Now that's going to look good on your epitaph.
This photo is a little dark but on the right is Ju-Ha Kim, a popular news anchor here in Korea. She was quite friendly and spoke English fairly well. During the night, she gave a speech in English about how she thought Toastmasters was a good idea.
The dinner was a buffet menu. I think I've said it before, but almost every hotel's buffet menu is very similar in Korea. It's not a bad thing, because the food is good. But it always gets me wondering about the central buffet school that all of these chefs attended at some point.
If I planned things more carefully, I would have arranged my plate in a more aesthetically pleasing fashion before taking a photo. Next time, I promise.
Here's me standing with Jin-Sook Lee, a journalist who attends the Pacific Sunset Toastmasters. Apparently she travels out to places like Afghanistan to report, but I don't have time for television these days so I haven't been able to see her work.
If I wasn't a scientist, I'd be a journalist. I like the whole idea of finding stuff out and then working it into a story for others.
Here are some of the attendees from our club, the South River Toastmasters. On the left is Richard, who was the host of the speech competition. Then it's me, who is 'do study good'. To the right of me is Annette, who works for a headhunting agency, then Jewel, who is a professional trainer with Dale Carnegie Training and on the far right is Ji-Hyeon, who recently joined a company that sells turbines for wind energy. These are the kinds of people you can meet if you join a Toastmasters club.
Here is Michael Jones, from Sincheon Toastmasters, practicing his speech in his head before going on stage. I had met him once during a club event and remember that he was a distinctively friendly person. Incidentally, he went on to beat the 15 other contestants and won the first prize.
His speech was on procrastination and going to the gym. Very well structured and quite funny.
And here's Michael collecting his prize at the end of the night. One of the rules was for no photography during the talks, because it can distract the speakers.
Here are all the speakers from the night. The speeches were of an impressive quality. All of the themes were inspiring.
If I had to summarise the wisdom gleaned from the night, then it would go something like:
1) Be persistent 2) Don't worry too much 3) Laugh more
All of these things we already know, but it's always nice to be reminded in an entertaining way.
And to wrap up this blog post is Frank Lev from Sincheon Toastmasters. Frank was giving a speech about fashion and personality. He had multiple layers of clothing on and was taking them off as he was describing different aspects of himself. In the end, he was down to his boxer shorts and a singlet. The foregone conclusion was that underneath all the layers of personality we have, is our true selves. But he was told to leave the stage by one of the judges who thought it was a little too much. He left politely, and I have to say that I disagree with the decision. Taking clothes off while onstage may be a little distasteful, but all you need to do is tell the contestant to put some back on before continuing the speech. But he wasn't disqualified from the competition and was allowed to finish his speech after the conference ended. The photo above is of him at the end. Good strength of character.
