TEDxHaverford: Bringing Conversation to Campus 

On Saturday, April 12, Haverford held its second consecutive TEDxHaverford event — a speaking event modeled after the popular TED Talks, which have become a mainstream media staple. With two sessions and eleven speakers, the event was almost double the size of last year’s.

TEDxHaverford was an all-day affair this year, hosted in the VCAM screening room, beginning with a morning session from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., and concluding with an afternoon session from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Each session featured five to six different speakers, who each spoke for around eighteen minutes each, on topics ranging from space medicine as a tool for hope (Joey Carol ‘25) to the growing phenomena of misogynistic and incel terrorism (Sasha Wertime ‘25). Each session was followed by a catered meal, where the audience, speakers, and TEDx team were encouraged to engage in conversation over the content of the speeches through discussion cards that the TEDx team had set out on the tables throughout the VCAM kitchen area.

Creating a community through conversation was the central theme behind the entire TEDx event. This was first evident in the mission statement of the overall TEDx initiative– to highlight “ideas worth sharing.” Professor Nimisha Ladva, the organizer and lead speaking coach for the TEDxHaverford team, opened the event with a short introductory speech. She highlighted that the goal of TEDxHaverford was to get people talking, emphasizing that “talking is hard” but good for the brain. To drive home her point, Professor Ladva had everyone in attendance turn and talk to someone they did not know for two minutes. Suddenly, the quiet room turned into a chatterbox, as the audience began to create a small community through… conversation.

Ladva then brought the attention back to the front of the room, where she introduced the TEDxHaverford team, which had organized the event. This year’s team of students was composed of Derek Zhang ‘26, Daniel Bhatti ‘25, Simon Bank ‘28, Eli Kwait-Spitzer ‘28, Ivan Palenwonsky ‘28, and Jessica Leung ‘28. Kira Chaney ‘26 also handled videography for the event.

While Ladva emphasized the team’s role in organizing and producing the TEDxHaverford event, she may have downplayed the amount of work required to bring TEDx to campus. TEDx programs require local teams to be fully responsible for contacting TED, undergoing TEDx training, finding speakers, and running the event. All of this occurs while following strict TEDx guidelines that cover everything from copyright issues to what topics can be discussed. Lead Student Organizer Derek Zhang said that TEDx prohibits speakers from discussing “inflammatory rhetoric, political agendas, and religious agendas.” Zhang said this limitation was unfortunate because the team wanted to give “everyone to get creative leeway,” but that to utilize TED’s platform that makes TEDx talks accessible to a broad audience, the team had to find ways to follow guidelines so that all voices from the Haverford community could be heard.

Last year, Zhang was motivated to bring TEDx to Haverford out of his interest in learning more about his fellow students’ interests and in helping to build the Haverford community. This year, Zhang was surrounded by a much larger team that became a small community itself. Despite all this extra help, Zhang said that the team still had to start preparing for the event in September, and they really intensified their work in January. The team’s workload included advertising the event, finding willing student speakers, helping them coach in the writing and delivery of their speeches, and orchestrating the event’s details. 

Luckily, the team’s hard work paid off. This year’s attendance was high, and the speakers were highly successful. Each speaker’s presentation proceeded smoothly, with only a few minor hiccups—a forgotten line or a repetition of an already delivered segment—that the audience graciously overlooked. The crowd remained silently entranced throughout each presentation, and the applause after each one only grew louder as the show progressed. Zhang said that “to see the event go so smoothly, to see the speakers knocking it out of the park, and to see people so engaged, makes [him] really happy” and that he felt that the “whole year of hard work paid off.”

Hard work also paid off for the speakers, who spent a significant amount of time researching, writing, and preparing their talks. And that is all done before the day of presentation, where speakers have to do what is daunting to many–public speaking. Professor Ladva pointed this out to the crowd and also highlighted that many of the speakers were seniors, who, on top of their already heavy thesis workloads, found time to prepare and practice these presentations, out of the belief that they genuinely had ideas that needed to be shared. 

In the first session of the day, standout speakers included senior Joey Carol, an astrophysics major, who tied his passion for space into his presentation about how space medicine has the potential to make Earth a better home for everyone. 

Haverford’s Assistant Director of Facilities Management for Planning and Design, David Harrower, also spoke in the first session. He focused on the history of David Bustill Bowser, a Civil War-era African American artist who designed the flags for eleven of the Union’s African American regiments and helped fight for the “cause of freedom.”

Junior Tiffany Lan added to TEDxHaverford’s call for conversation in a different way than her fellow presenters, opting not to use spoken language but instead using body language. Lan performed Classical Chinese Dance, reminding the audience just how much can be said without a single word. 

In the second session of the day, visiting Health Studies professor Lauren Minsky started the group off strong with a look at how major polluting corporations contribute to increased risk of cancer right down the road in Chester, PA. 

Jadyn Elliot ‘25 wowed with an impassioned presentation tying together TikTok “doom scrolling” and the rise of apathy that “makes injustice feel inevitable” and perpetrates political problems such as polarization and exclusion. Elliott’s proposed solution? Talking. 

TEDxHaverford 2025 concluded with a discussion by Sasha Wertime ‘25 on the growing threat of incels and misogynistic terrorism. Wertime stressed that this phenomenon is “academically understudied and socially underestimated,” a dangerous combination for women and society at large. A slight shake accompanied Wertime’s voice towards the end of her presentation, emphasizing to the crowd how vital—and threatening —the topic was.

Zhang gave the closing remarks of the day, reflecting on how grateful he was for the speakers, his team, and the opportunity to watch TEDx grow over the past year. Asked what advice he would give to other students hoping to bring self-driven initiatives to life on campus, Zhang echoed the concept of community that was so central to all of TEDxHaverford. “I would definitely say don’t do it by yourself, find a big team and connect with that team. When you’re doing an event like TEDx, where there’s a lot of work to do and lofty goals in terms of community building, you need a strong team who is just as passionate as you are.”

Zhang and his team plan to bring TEDxHaverford back to campus next spring. Opportunities to join the TEDxHaverford team will be offered at the fall semester’s club fair, and applications for speaker positions will be available in mid-October.