Today we learned about the art and structure of the 30 second elevator speech. You've got a short amount of time to grab someone's attention and leave them with a lasting impression. Here is mine:
Energy affects more people on our planet than all diseases, natural disasters and bad TV shows combined. Burning fossil fuels for energy heavily impacts our environment; and regardless of your stance on climate change, fossil fuels are in fact a limited resource. So what happens when we run out!?** My lab is re-writing the code of life to engineer microbes that will someday make fuels and renewable compounds for us using electricity. The world is full of microbes - let's use them to keep the world full of people too.
Not too bad!? The COMPASS workshop class liked it. I deliberately tried to make it funny from the start, since being funny reflects my personality. I took out this sentence at the ** point because I thought it would be too long:
Imagine something between a zombie apocalypse and Michelle Bachman running our country.
Without the above sentence I was clocked at 29 seconds, which was just what we were asked to shoot for.
