On November 15, TEDxConnCollege held their first ever youth event in Cummings Arts Center. The event featured talks from over 20 students from several southeastern Connecticut middle schools. The theme for this specific event was “Worlds Imagined,” and it was the first and only TEDxYouth event to ever be hosted and facilitated by a college campus. The idea for the event was created by the TED National organization in 2013 to get more youth involved and engaged in public speaking.
The conference itself was spearheaded by Marina Sachs ’15 and organized by the executive board and events team of TEDxConnCollege. The day started off with the students’ prepared talks in Fortune Hall. Following this traditional component of TED events, over 20 Connecticut College TED members and volunteers then held activities for the students, which ranged from a photo booth to a Rubik’s Cube corner, to a “Design Your Future Self” where the kids were given the opportunity to have their bodies traced. Inside the outline, they wrote their future goals and aspirations.
Ben Ballard ’16, a member of the TED executive board, commented, “It has been a great exercise in creating opportunities for creativity and imagination.”
Perhaps the greatest challenge in making this event a reality was the time constraints. The team received information surrounding this event in the beginning of October, giving the youth speakers involved just three weeks to prepare their talks. Sachs and many other volunteers worked directly with the students and additionally reached out to the English departments at the schools in order to help the students edit and prepare their talks.
The crowd at the event was much larger than anticipated and consisted of parents, children and a handful of Connecticut College students. As described by Sachs, a primary goal of the event was “[to try] to curate an experience that would be attractive for both 11-year-olds and 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds—and have it be meaningful for all of them.”
The talks covered a wide range of topics, all relating back to the theme of “Worlds Imagined.” They varied from bullying to healthcare to the role of technology in the modern world. Some of these talks were more philosophical in nature, while others dreamed of plans and regulations for the future world. While most students presented their talks alone, several of them were also featured as group presentations.
This week, members of the Connecticut College TEDx chapter will be traveling to participating middle schools to speak with the middle school students about their experiences at the conference. Sachs explained, “The students will be presenting their TED talks for their own schools. Afterwards, we’re going to do a debriefing with the students about what they liked what they didn’t like, and what they hope to see at events like this in the future. We’re all very excited.”
The three schools represented were The Williams School, Country Day School in Groton and Clark Lane Middle School in Waterford. Sachs and Ballard both attended Country Day School, and Sachs’s father is the current principal of Clark Lane. These connections allow a direct line of communication between the TEDxConnCollege executive board and the school administrations.
In the coming years, the executives hope to include more New London schools in future youth conferences. The main reason more schools were not in attendance was due to the tight time constraints.
Furthermore, Elizabeth Green ’15, another member of the events team, said, “For the future, we’d like to have a bigger space. Students felt comfortable in Cummings, but it was way too limiting for our audience.”
The TEDxConnCollege executive board also hopes that opening the event to a bigger space will bring higher attendance from the college community. “These children see the world in such an open and honest way and I wish other students at Connecticut College could see that. It’d be great to make it more of a campus wide conference,” Green said.
TEDxConnCollege is holding their main conference in the beginning April with the theme “Genius Loves Company.” •
