A Momentous Pecha Kucha

I’ve been interning at Greenville Forward for about six weeks, and have learned a few things. The first is that there are a lot of really innovative, dynamic people out there. The second is that they don’t all live in Los Angeles or New York.

For example, the Momentum Series has been hosting events gathering people from all around Greenville simply to sit and talk about different topics over lunch. When I first found out about these I assumed they were sparsely attended, and that the few people who did go were the same people I saw coming into the office every day. Boy, was I wrong. The first Momentum, called “Town and Gown”, had big wigs from Furman, Clemson, Greenville Tech, and Bob Jones, including Dr. Shi. Not only did all of these people show up, but each listened to the other and made important contributions to the conversation (including our own Kate Hofler).

A couple of weeks later we started working and collaborating on a very interesting project. Pecha Kucha is a kind of blitz presentation where presenters get twenty slides and are allowed twenty seconds a slide. The idea is to disseminate knowledge as rapidly as possible. After struggling with the various pronunciations and spellings of this event, I found out that these are hosted all over the world, propelling Greenville from our normal comparison towns of Charlotte or Charleston to London and Tokyo.

The common thread that I’ve found between these projects, and between everything I’ve done here is this; Greenville has a lot of incredibly intelligent, motivated people. I think that it is because of these people who come here from all over the world (our second Momentum this summer proved that) that Greenville is such a great place. We have to keep working to maintain and improve upon this, but I feel that if the people I’ve met this summer are any indication we should be alright.