What speaking at a GullyFuture session actually involves
People assume they need to be senior, polished or famous. They need to have done the work and be willing to talk about it honestly. What a session asks of a speaker, what it does not, and what happens after you say yes.
Most people who would make good speakers rule themselves out before anybody asks. They are not senior enough, they think, or not good at public speaking, or their work is too ordinary to be interesting. All three are wrong in the same way: they assume the session is a talk. It is not. It is a conversation, and the qualification for it is having done the thing the students are asking about.
Here is what it involves, so you can decide with the facts.
What you should come away with
- You need relevant experience and honesty, not seniority or polish
- You talk for a short while and answer questions for most of the hour
- GullyFuture arranges the institution, the room, the students and the format; you bring yourself
- Ordinary work is exactly what students need to hear about — the extraordinary they already get from the internet
- You give a couple of hours; the preparation is remembering your own story
Start with who is asked, because the answer is broader than people expect. Working professionals at any stage past their first couple of years. Entrepreneurs and business owners of any size. Recruiters and hiring managers. Interviewers, for the mock interview drives. Alumni of the institutions we work with. What they have in common is not seniority; it is that they do something students are trying to understand, and can talk about it plainly. A five-year engineer describing their actual job is more useful to a final-year student than a vice president describing the industry, and the students say so.
What the session asks of you is a short account of your own work — how you got here, what a normal day is, what surprised you — and then questions. The questions are the point. We build sessions so the question-and-answer takes most of the time, because that is where students get the thing they came for: an answer to their own specific worry from somebody who has been past it. You do not need slides. You do not need a prepared talk. You need to be willing to answer honestly, including 'I don't know' and 'I got that wrong'.
What it does not ask is polish. Speakers regularly tell us they are not good at public speaking and then do well, because answering a student's question is not public speaking. It is a conversation with an audience. Nervousness is fine and students find it reassuring. The thing that does not work is performance — the rehearsed inspirational talk — and we ask you not to bring one.
There is one rule, and we ask every speaker to agree to it before the session: it is not a pitch. You may explain what you do and where you work, because that is the point. You may not sell to the room, recruit from it, or ask students to sign up for anything. This costs us speakers occasionally, which is how you know it is real. It is also why students trust what they hear.
What GullyFuture does: everything else. We work with the institution to fix the date, the room and the group. We tell you who the students are, what year, what they have been asking about, and what has worked with similar rooms. We facilitate on the day so you are never left managing silence. Afterwards we record what happened — how many came, what was asked — because we count what we do and only what we do. Participation is free for students, and we do not charge institutions for a standard session, so there is no commercial arrangement between you and anyone.
What it costs you: a couple of hours on the day, plus a conversation with us beforehand. Preparation is mostly remembering — what your first job was actually like, what you wish somebody had told you, what the students probably believe about your work that is not true. Most speakers say they enjoyed it more than they expected, and a good number come back.
One more thing, because it is the reason the whole thing works: most of the people on our speaker list were in the audience first. At the end of every session we ask whether anyone could contribute something. If you are reading this because you attended one and are wondering whether you count — you do. That is the design.