On Saturday, Hopkins hosted its first TEDx event at Hackerman Hall. The event featured eight speakers, with backgrounds ranging from music to neuroscience. All the speeches had the common theme of “firsts.”
“They are pioneering this at Hopkins but it’s really cool that they organized the speakers, the food, the venue and everything. I’m pretty impressed by it,” sophomore Ian Colrick, who had previously attended TEDx Baltimore, said.
TED, an acronym for Technology, Entertainment, Design, started out as a conference in California that featured eighteen-minute speeches by outliers in various fields. TEDx events follow the same format but are independently organized by smaller institutions.
Tickets for the event were in high demand, selling out within 24 hours; however, this was partly due to the fact that TED regulations limited the number of attendees to 100.
“In order to have a larger event, someone on the team has had to have attended an actual TED event but no one on our team has because those tickets cost thousands of dollars,” junior Ardian Latifi, the main student organizer of TEDx, said.
“We’re thinking of finding someone who has [attended a TED event], but we’re not sure if we want to go that big because what we had yesterday was a small event and with a great atmosphere and we don’t know if we want to lose that,“ Latifi said.
The event was made accessible to a larger audience via Livestream. Over 1,000 viewers from twelve different countries watched it online.
“I thought the 100 people made the event seem exclusive, which has a certain appeal to it,” freshman Liam Haviv said. “That being said, I'm really excited to see the program grow, because I know there are audiences of many more who would thoroughly enjoy going to another TEDx event.”
Mark Meadows, a professional musician, opened the event by improvising a jazz number on the keyboard. He went on to explain the process of improvisation by drawing comparisons to the components of language and then demonstrating these ideas by improvising a rendition of “Come Together” by the Beatles.
He was followed by Jeff Pulver, an Internet entrepreneur best known for co-founding Vonage and Zula. Pulver discussed how opening up on social media and being vulnerable to his friend network gave him the motivation to lose over 100 pounds. He did one-arm push ups on stage to demonstrate the extent of his transformation from his former 334-pound self.
“I think it was really cool that he founded all these things like Vonage, and you would expect him to talk about that, but he was talking about something totally different. I think that was surprising, but interesting,” Colrick said.
The next few speakers were faculty members.
Richard Brown, director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Mathematics, talked about his academic journey, which began with architecture and eventually led to math. He talked about how math is more than just numbers; he described it as an art form that tries to create value systems.
“I hadn’t really thought of math in that way before,” sophomore Simon Marshall-Shah said.
Professor Bruce Marsh from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences discussed his adventures traveling to remote places like Antarctica and the Aleutian Islands to research the subterranean magma system.
Some of the other Hopkins-affiliates who shared their ideas were neuroscientist Mark Mattson, theoretical physicist David Kaplan and PILOT Learning program coordinator Laura Foster.
“I’m interested in getting to know my colleagues a little better,” William Ball, a professor from the Environmental Engineering Department who was in the audience, said.
New York-based Swiss entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller closed the event with a speech about finding success. Pfortmüller founded a company called Holstee with a 17-sentence manifesto inspiring people to live happy lives. Despite the manifesto becoming popular, Pfortmüller struggled to find what would come next for him. He said that once he stopped searching for success, he remembered what loving life was like, which he viewed as success in itself.
Although the event lasted just 5 hours, it took almost an entire year to organize. The idea was conceived last March by Latifi.
“I’ve been watching TED videos since high school and I’ve always wanted to go to an event,” Latifi said. “I noticed last year that other universities had TEDx events but at Hopkins, it didn’t exist. So I decided, let me just do it. It will be fun.”
In March 2013, Latifi teamed up with junior Brian Tung, senior Daniel Willen, and junior Yvana Ahdab to try to execute his idea. In September, they recruited another eight team members at the Student Activities Fair, some of whom had prior experience organizing TEDx events at their high schools.
“It was a long process,” Latifi said. “You have to apply to TED for a license and that’s a whole application process to go through with paper work and essays. Then you have to apply to the school they have to let you be a club. And then you have to book a venue, get all the speakers ready and get a whole team together.”
The team is looking to build on this year’s success and attract even more interesting speakers for TEDx next year.
“It’s bittersweet that it’s over. We all sat after the event after we cleaned up and thought now what? Next week we’re meeting and we’re starting all over again,” Latifi said.
Latifi said that next year they hope to include student speakers as part of the line up. The team also hopes that next year’s lineup will be more gender balanced. This year only one out of the eight speakers was a woman.
Haviv is looking forward to next year’s event.
“My favorite speakers were the ones, interestingly enough, that spoke about the subjects I would never imagine myself being interested in. For example, Professors Brown, Marsh and Kaplan (Mathematics, Earth Sciences and Dark Matter, respectively) opened my eyes to things I fear I may have been missing. Even more so, they showed a true, love and passion for something they loved, and that, in and of itself, was inspiring,” he said.
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