Forget spiders, snakes or heights – for some, public speaking is the most frightening thing of all.

Founded this fall, Speech Team @UCLA provides UCLA students with the opportunity to strengthen their speaking skills, said Ernesto Perez, a team membership co-president of Speech Club. The club meets once a week and aims to provide and boost morale for a supportive community, he added.

Kayla Salazar, one of the club’s two general membership presidents, said that meetings are open to all interested people. She added that the club is a safe place for anyone who wants to develop skills to become a confident public speaker – no matter how much experience they may have.

“The environment is super low stakes,” said Salazar, a third-year history student. “We emphasize people having fun and just learning, and if they don’t want to participate in activities, they totally don’t have to.”

The club runs workshops on topics including toast speeches, basics of public speaking, body language and verbal elements, Salazar said.

To further increase the accessibility of public speaking, Speech Team members have contacted local high school forensics and speech and debate teams to organize one-on-one meetings, Salazar said. Recently, the team held a tutoring session with Hollister High School students to teach them impromptu public speaking skills, she added.

Eshal Vadakkan, a general membership co-president and a fourth-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student, said participants can use general meetings to explore confidence and eloquence in public speaking.

“The tiniest things like raising your hand to ask a question or sharing your opinion about something while everyone else is listening – that’s a form of public speaking,” Vadakkan said. “The more you do it, the better of a public speaker you become, and that in turn, seeps into your professional life, your academic life and your social life.”

The club offers three divisions of competitive events: limited preparation, public speaking and interpretation. Perez, a second-year political science and Chicana and Chicano studies student, said he specializes in interpretation – using events like poetry, drama and prose that use emotion, inflection and physicality to portray an impactful scenario.

In a speech, the speaker holds a little black book called a manuscript and captures the audience’s attention with fluid movements, said Perez. He added that while each interpretation differs slightly – for example, drama uses monologues while poetry involves a series of poems – they all contain a rising action, climax, falling action and resolution detailing a subject of interest.

Perez said immigration, masculinity and mental health are all topics that club members explore in their speeches.

“Modern patriotism – and how the idea that patriotism is expressed through social media, mass media, and how sometimes those reflections of flags can be different for other people,” he said.

Along with interpretation, Perez added that the club offers writing and improvisational events. Emma Fernandez, a second-year political science student, said she hopes to attend the national collegiate competition for public speaking.

“My biggest aspiration is to see our team compete in way more competitions, to really show the college community that UCLA has a speech team and that we’re not playing around,” Fernandez said. “We’re serious about going to more competitions, winning competitions, not just attending them.”

However, Perez said he is already proud of how far the club has come.

“I want this to be a family that they can call, they can come to,” he said. “Where people can just feel free to public speak and just call each other like our loved ones. That’s really why I really started it.”