TEDx speakers encourage students to reinvent their lives

TEDxJHU held its annual conference on Saturday afternoon at Mudd Hall, hosting a total of seven speakers with the theme  “Under Construction.”

To commence the event, sophomore Ansh Bhammar, director of communications of TEDxJHU, explained the meaning behind the conference’s theme this year.

“TED organizations across the globe, we share this slogan: ‘Ideas Worth Spreading,’” Bhammar said. “But here at this specific TEDxJHU conference, we’re focused on: How are these ideas derived? And shaped? And under this process of continual change? And hence, ‘Under Construction.’”

The first session of talks began with Shilpa Alva, founder of Surge for Water, a non-profit organization dedicated to making safe water more accessible. Since its founding in 2008, the organization has provided water for nearly 400,000 people.

Prior to her volunteer work, Alva was an award-winning businesswoman. She discussed how she gradually became disillusioned by her lifestyle.

“My life was full, so full of meaningless minutia,” Alva said. “And that’s when I realized I had to do something about it.”

Alva encouraged her audience to try and find a higher purpose in their lives.

“Are you living a life that the system has preconditioned you to live, or are you living the life you really want to live?” she asked. “When you embrace the comfortable and start making mindful conscious choices, change becomes possible. And perhaps tomorrow, because of you, one more person will have the privilege to choose.”

Following Alva came Braphus Kaalund, who studied trumpet at the Peabody Institute and is now the foreign service officer to the U.S. Department of State.

“People often ask me: ‘How is it that you went from being a classical musician to a diplomat? That’s a huge leap.’” he said. “It didn’t feel that way for me. It felt actually kind of natural.”

He advised those who had a variety of seemingly disconnected interests to use what he called ‘building blocks,’ or broad, core ideas for how to lead a fulfilling life irrespective of one’s career experiences.

Finding building blocks, he said, was important for dealing with ‘pivot points,’ or stages in life where one has to undergo seemingly dramatic changes.

“We’re all under construction,” he said. “It’s really easy, especially these days, to just feel that your own life is unstable. And then you look out in the world and you see nothing but instability around you. So you just feel like you want to shelter in place, and withdraw... But life doesn’t always allow you to do that.”

Next, Co-founder and Execution Director of Impact Hub Baltimore, a civically oriented innovation lab,  Michelle Geiss discussed the importance of incorporating various people in an initiative and keeping an eye out for “who’s in the room.”

“In order to create change, we also need to learn to invite every voice around the table,” she said.

The final speaker of the first session was Nicola Fox, the principal Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory space scientist leading NASA’s Solar Probe Plus Project.

The second session began with Natalia Trayanova, Murray B. Sachs Professor in the Hopkins department of biomedical engineering.

Trayanova specializes in cardiac research and discussed how computer simulation could be used to improve cardiac care. She introduced personalized virtual hearts, or virtual heart arrhythmia risk predictors, which could more accurately assess patients.

After Trayanova came the youngest of the speakers: Hopkins undergraduate Seal-bin Han. Han, who will graduate in 2017, founded FitMango, an online fitness training program that helps users form workout groups and find personal trainers.

Han recalled how, as a pre-med student who felt dispassionate about the career track he was on, he started FitMango as a side project. While he initially envisioned himself as a surgeon, he decided that what really mattered was the experience of developing his startup.

“For me, it wasn’t necessarily about the result of how this would end up but the fact that every minute of the journey was something I genuinely enjoyed,” he said. “This got me out of my bed.”

Reflecting on his own experiences, he advised those present to be open-minded about their goals.

“I knew how many people we could impact with technology,” Han said. “If I can leave one piece of advice for any of you, it’s that I would rather be at the bottom of a mountain that I want to climb than halfway up [one] that I didn’t.”

The event’s final speaker was Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, associate dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He evaluated what he saw as America’s problematic health care system, which he saw as too costly considering the nation’s ranking as 31st for life expectancy.

Instead of “paying hospitals like hotels,” he suggested a greater reliance on global budgets. A global budget system would mean that hospitals would be paid through a fixed amount of funding for a certain period of time rather than fixed rates for individual services.

Sharfstein was introduced to global budgets at the Western Maryland Regional Medical Center, where he met Barry Ronan, CEO of the Western Maryland Health System.

“Under a global budget, [Ronan] knows his annual revenue in advance, across all payers, public and private,” he said. “Medicare, Medicaid... all the rest. It doesn’t matter how many people come. Without the need to keep the beds filled, he can actually invest in prevention.”

The event was followed by a reception during which students were able to network with remaining speakers.

Students like junior Piunik Sarkisian found the experience rewarding and was pleased to have female scientists like Fox at the event.

“Having women represented at the top of STEM fields was very important,” Sarkisian said. “I love that they had some sort of gender balance in there with their presenters.”

She found Kaalund’s talk especially relevant to her.

“I don’t know how my very different passions connect together, so it was good to see that maybe someday down the road they will connect in unexpected ways,” she said. “I also admire multidimensional people very much so that was great to have: a classical musician also being a diplomat, also being a traveler, also being an economist.”

TEDx Co-curators Steve Park and Clementine Guelton explained how they sought to widen the range of speakers this year.

“This year, we definitely wanted to broaden to different Hopkins enterprises that are not just within the Hopkins Alumni Association but also with the [Applied Physics Laboratory]. That we had with Dr. Fox, where we can really expose the Hopkins community to a lot of different things that are happening,” Park said.

Guelton added that having a political scientist was unusual and that they worked to have one this year.

“We’ve always done a lot of science, research, public health, because that’s what Hopkins specializes in,” she said. “So this year, getting someone in political science was really a big deal and a big change for us.”

TEDxJHU also displayed artwork by Baltimore artist Daniel Stuelpnagel. Park said that it helped create a unifying visual identity for their theme of “Under Construction,” and Guelton said that this was part of the organization’s goal to incorporate a wider range of professions.

“We really thought that we should get a bigger artist presence within a TED conference,” she said. “TED nationally focuses a lot on design. We really wanted to incorporate artists into the space... because we feel like there’s not that many arts or artists at Hopkins, and there’s a lot of artists in Baltimore.”

Exchange student Polina Tishina appreciated the way the event legitimized a variety of passions and encouraged students to adhere to them.

“All of them kind of delivered their idea, that you might not know right at the moment what you want do in your life,” she said. “Sometimes it’s not the question that you need to find the answer to. You just need to try and do what you enjoy. And later in life, it might somehow come together.”