TEDx Tackles World Wide Problems
Sixteen speakers took the stage of the Performing Arts Center on March 6 to give their TED talks about “lenses” at the second annual TEDxYouth@Conejo Conference, an independently organized TED event for high school students in the community.
TED is an organization in which speakers from various ethnicities, backgrounds and fields share their takes on a specific theme with the intention of inspiring others or sharing an idea.
Conejo Valley, with the hope of inspiring young adults, holds a TEDx event for youth speakers every year. The students including NPHS students Anthony Wermers, junior, Nikhil Chari, senior, Odysseus Pyrinis, junior, and Rachna Deshpande, junior, used “lenses” as the overarching theme for their TED talks.
“TEDx is unique in the sense that we have students from all three CVUSD high schools working on the committee in an interactive way for diverse opinions on varying topics to be presented to an interested audience,” Brandon Janes, TEDx planning committee advisor and English teacher, said.
The planning committee, along with Janes, put countless hours into the making of this event, beginning the process in late October.
“Aside from putting together the event, the planning process involves deciding a theme, choosing and curating talks … It’s really about helping the speakers with content and assuring that they have the best speeches that they can have,” said committee head Shreya Chattopadhyay, senior.
With the theme of lenses, many students decided to focus on misrepresentation and prejudice within our society.
Anthony Wermers, junior, spoke about the importance of not stereotyping people based on religion.
“The goal of my talk was to raise an awareness of how we perceive others and how they perceive us. My hope is that listeners would realize the biases that they have and how they can work to disregard them,” Wermers said.
Nikhil Chari, senior, also represented Newbury Park High School at the event with his speech about the impact of industrialization on society’s happiness and people’s’ outlook on life.
Chari hopes to “have the opportunity to give another talk after high school at some point.” However he also urges people who are interested in giving a TED talk to wait and choose something that is really important to them. “It was really good for me to wait until I had something I really felt was necessary for me to talk about,” Chari said.
The TEDx event is an opportunity for the community to come together and discuss some of the most important issues that we currently face and problems we may face in the future.
“TEDx benefits both the student population and the community at large by forcing people to re-evaluate the status quo. Often, people become so engaged with what is comfortable that they forget to evaluate other perspectives,” Janes said.
Lindsay Filgas/Prowler
