TEDx Comes to Campus

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On February 15, the Barnard Speaking Fellows held their first-ever TEDxBarnardCollege event on campus, featuring nine talks delivered by students and one alum. While varied in topic, all the speeches included a call to action, from reckoning with the history of gentrification and climate vulnerability in Harlem to shifting one’s attitudes toward first-generation, low-income (FLI) students.

“We were highlighting the fact that student speech can be a tool for meaningful change and advocacy both on campus and in the wider community,” says Abby Bonat ’25, one of the Speaking Fellows who helped organize the event.

Olivia Bobrownicki ’24, whose talk illuminated some of the more covert ways society caters to men, discussed how the majority of medications are never tested on women. “Think back to the last time you took a medication. When you looked at the bottle, did you see a different dose based on your height, your weight, or your sex?” Bobrownicki asked her classmates. “Chances are you didn’t because we live in a society where we treat all bodies like the average male.”

Olaedo Udensi ’26 shared the power that comes with reclaiming your identity. At age 11, Udensi left Nigeria for boarding school in the U.K. After dealing with a litany of incorrect pronunciations, she began using her childhood nickname: “I renamed myself Ola to make sure that I didn’t stand out any more than I already had.” Her message to her peers was one near and dear to her own experience: Don’t let the fear of society dictate how you present yourself to the world. “What I hope we can all recognize is that every person, regardless of their name, deserves to showcase their complex identities without having to think about how palatable they are,” she said.

The event, organized by the Speaking Fellows Program, drew around 100 in-person attendees as well as additional viewers tuned in via Zoom. In handing over the stage to their peers, the Speaking Fellows were making the point that everyone has something to say — and there’s no one right way to say it. The program’s motto — “Say what you mean” — served as their guiding principle.

“In offering students a platform, we were quite literally allowing them the space to say what they mean,” says Anusha Merchant ’25, one of the organizers.

Another motivation for the event was to get the Speaking Fellows Program — what Merchant calls an “underutilized resource” on campus — on more people’s radar. 

Operating against the backdrop of an increasingly interconnected world, the Speaking Fellows are helping students develop their verbal and nonverbal communication so that they can effectively voice their thoughts when the right moment arrives, whether in the classroom or elsewhere. The space allows students to practice their speaking style and receive constructive feedback from peers without judgment. As explained on the program’s web page, “Authenticity and ethos matter more than any form of rhetorical device.”

Given TEDxBarnardCollege’s success, the Speaking Fellows plan to turn it into an annual tradition. As Merchant explains, the event — and the Speaking Fellows program — is more vital now than ever before. “The most important thing we should be using is our voice, given the consequences of the world that we live in,” she says. “So we wanted to kind of amplify and echo that resource.”