The TEDxUniversityofHartford student club was founded in Sept. 2014 with the goal in mind of bringing students together from across all of the University of Hartford campus.
Over the past year, the club has been working to put together a TEDx Talk here at the University of Hartford.
For this first event, it was decided that the deans would select a faculty speaker to represent each of the seven University schools and colleges.
“Ultimately, it’s kind of the face of the University,” assistant professor in ME and Acoustics and club faculty advisor Dr. Eion King said. “We wanted to make sure that the University was happy to support us. We figured for the first event, it would be nice to showcase all aspects of the University.”
The seven faculty speakers will be Carol Padberg from the Hartford Art School, Susan Coleman from the Barney School of Business, Seth Holmes from the College of Engineering, Technology and Architecture, Laura Pence from the College of Arts and Sciences, Mike Wininger from the College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions, Michael Robinson from Hillyer College and Karen Cook from The Hartt School.
The student club also selected their own faculty member to be the eighth speaker. Dr. Joyce Ashuntantang from the Hillyer College was chosen.
“The key was, I suppose, we wanted a speaker that would represent the college and had a message that would be suitable for a TED Talk,” King said.
“As soon as the speakers were nominated, I sent speaker resources to each of them. Like there’s an abundance of information about how to give a good TED Talk,” Coin continued. “It’s a bit of preparation for them. For some of them, it’s condensing that information to a 10-minute talk as opposed to a full hour lecture.”
As for the student speakers, there were two separate selection processes that went into choosing the four speakers.
The first one took place in April 2015 and asked for students to submit a 90-second video explaining the topic they would plan on talking about. From the students that submitted, six of them were selected as a finalist and each were invited to give a five-minute presentation to a panel of judges made up of faculty members.
The two student speakers who were selected from this were Liel Asuline and Hugo Santana.
The other student selection process involved students in the Undergraduate Research and Creativity Colloquium. Any student who was presenting at the colloquium in April could indicate that they were interested in speaking at the TEDx event and could have their research presentations assessed.
The two students selected from the Undergraduate Colloquium were Elizabeth Schorr and Puja Bhardwaj.
“If you give them the platform, you’d be surprised what ideas the students have. The students are more innovative than perhaps they are given credit for,” King said. “I like the fact that hopefully TEDx is giving students a platform to express their big ideas.”
For a full detailed list of speakers and their topics, click here.
Depending on the success of this weekend’s event, the TEDx Talk event may become an annual or perhaps a bi-annual thing.
In the future, it may include more student speakers or even alumni.
However, TEDxUniversityofHartford is still a student club and in addition to hosting TEDx Talks, the hope is that the club would break the “boundaries” between students of different schools and majors to come together and interact.
The TEDxUHart Talk event will be one of the highlights of Hawktober Weekened.
It will take place Saturday, Oct. 17, in Wilde Auditorium from 1:30 p.m. – 5 p.m.
However, the event sold out of tickets very shortly after they went live.
UPDATE: Tickets are sold out, but you can still email tedxuniversityofhartford@gmail.com to get on the waiting list!
— TEDxUHart (@TEDxUHart) October 8, 2015
A live webcast will be available to view online at hartford.edu/view.
There will also be a simulcast viewing party at Suisman Lounge in the Gengras Student Union.
Once the event is completed, videos of each presentation will be uploaded online to the official TEDx YouTube channel, as well as a to-be-determined online University of Hartford location.