By: Angela Dimaano, Features Editor
On November 13th, 2020, Mills Students Anjuli Niyogi (12) and Leanna Yu (12) held a virtual TEDxMillsHighSchool event with the theme “Seeds of the Future”. The event showcased four incredible speakers who gave unique TED Talks about topics they are knowledgeable in, that also pertain to the overall theme of the event. Initially, the event was set to take place in person this past spring, but was constantly postponed until ultimately needing to be cancelled. Niyogi and Yu were able to move the event online through extensive planning and coordination, leading to the success that was TEDxMillsHighSchool, “Seeds of the Future”.
Planning for a TEDx event takes many months of preparation that began in the Fall Semester of the 2019-2020 school year. At the time, Niyogi and Yu were the presidents of the Mills TED Ed Club–which for the time being has been disbanded–that had its first successful Tedx event the previous school year. Yu recounts the previous event’s success in stating, “We started planning our first TEDx event in sophomore year, which we were able to hold in person on April 24th, 2019. After that, we wanted to make it an annual event because we received a lot of positive feedback from the audience members who attended.” When asked about the pair’s initial ambitions towards organizing TEDx events, Niyogi remarks that, “both Leanna and I are very education-driven, curious students who genuinely enjoy learning about new experiences, ideas, and innovations happening in the world. We wanted to share our passion for this with others and allow students at Mills to take this curiosity somewhere, so TEDx events seemed like the perfect idea”. Taking their ambitions, Niyogi and Yu geared up for planning the second ever TEDxMillsHighSchool, “Seeds of the Future”.
The first order of business was to contact potential speakers through personal connections or community advertising and secure them for the event. Originally, the event was slated to have six speakers, but the final count came down to four speakers for the virtual event. These four speakers were Armand Domalewski, Dara Connolly, Michael Stanton, and Threya Sakshi. Armand Domalewski is a Business & Analytics Manager who gave an informative speech titled “The Future Freaks me Out–How to Prepare for the Jobs of the Future”. Dara Connolly, a Confidence Coach, gave a riveting talk on “Building Confidence in Teens… One Parent at a Time”. Clinical Health Psychologist Michael Stanton gave a powerful speech on “Resilience & Training Your Mind to Tackle Tough Times”. Finally, Eastlake High School Sophomore Threya Sakshi gave an intriguing talk on “Self Contentment: Planting the Seeds to a Healthier Future”. All four talks were given live and recorded to be uploaded to the TED Ed Mills Club’s Youtube channel.
Although an online event was not what Yu and Niyogi planned for, they were effective in hosting an event that replicated some of the feelings of a live TEDx event. Niyogi was able to point out three out of many aspects that cannot easily be replicated online: “the way you can experience the speaker’s talks with the audience, interact with others, and the activities you get to participate in prior to the event simply can’t be replicated with a virtual event.” However, the event itself exceeded expectations and was highly professional despite online restrictions. The most prominent issue of configuring Zoom brought many questions, such as, “Do we want their cameras to be on to replicate actually seeing audience members or would this be too distracting? Do we want to allow the chat, even though we might not be able to monitor what students might say to our speakers?”, to be answered by Yu and Niyogi. The event had a turnout of over 150 participants, of which 160 total showed interest in attending, which is an unbelievable statistic in comparison to the turnout for mandatory online events. Although mainly for the Mills student body, there was heavy interest and attendance from the greater community. Parents, siblings, alumni, and more came together to immerse themselves in TED talks for the event duration, which was around one hour. Positive Feedback for the online event was highly apparent. Senior Benedict Abadilla thoroughly enjoyed all the talks stating, “I loved all the speakers. They were very impactful through their words and they made me reevaluate myself and wanted to improve myself even more”. Nicolas Bours (12) spoke similarly to Abadilla in saying, “The talks offered an interesting and positive take on how to cope and act during COVID”.
Being Seniors, Yu And Niyogi anticipate that this will be the last TED event the pair will host and look fondly upon their experiences from the past two years. “We’ve definitely learned so much out about ourselves and how we work with people from planning our two events, so I’m really glad we were able to do this in high school. Hopefully, some underclassmen are inspired from this year’s event to reinstate the TED-Ed club and continue holding TEDxMillsHighSchool events!”, comments Niyogi. Yu feels similarly and hopes to pass on the torch of the TED-Ed Mills High School Club to aspiring underclassmen. “We still have TEDx letters for the stage and the famous red circle carpet for speakers to stand on. Also, we bought a lot of goodies to give away during the live event scheduled for March, so we have hundreds of TEDxMillsHighSchool stickers, TEDxMillsHighSchool pens, Seeds of the Future t-shirts, and seed packets. We plan to either donate these to the school or give them to any interested future TEDxMillsHighSchool organizers.” Niyogi and Yu are grateful for the turnout of their last TEDx event and hope they were able to inspire others through the talks given by the phenomenal speakers.
