By Bari Cohn
Staff Writer
Mira Costa held the first TEDx Costa conference which took place at on Nov. 18 during second office hours in the small auditorium and was aimed to help students learn how to manage stress.
The student members of Mayor’s Youth Council put on this conference as the first of their three total TEDx Costa conferences that will take place throughout the school year. The next two conferences will be on Jan. 13 and Apr. 13. Each of the three conferences will have different themes, which will feature multiple speakers for the specific theme.
‘’The kids from Mayor’s Youth Council picked the subject and speakers,’’ Mayor’s Youth Council Co-Chair Penny Bordokas said. “We had a workshop at the beginning of the year and the kids that wanted to get involved got into groups to discuss and picked a theme and found speakers and a published TEDx talk to accompany it.”
According to one of the TEDx planners and sophomore Lily Raffety, members of Mayor’s Youth Council chose the theme because of how relatable it was to many students at Costa. Mayor’s Youth Council wanted to find something that a variety of students would be interested in hearing, and from there they chose their speakers.
“I think the main goal of the conference was to bring something new and interesting to Costa,” Raffety said. “Overall, I would consider it a success and I felt as if everyone in the audience could gain a lot from what the speakers were saying.”
A video of a previous TED talk by Kelly McGonigal was shown to the audience in addition to the two other live speakers. The students chose all three of the speakers because of their relevance and importance to the theme that was chosen.
“The students were given complete control over the theme and speakers and got together and figured out what they wanted,” Mayor’s Youth Council volunteer Amy Howorth said. “They worked with the speakers to make sure they were ready for the presentation.”
Costa sophomore Shelby Friedman, along with her mother and Haute Yogi owner Tiffany, taught the audience exercises to control their breathing, which gives them the power to calm themselves down and take control of any stressful situation.
“The main theme of my talk was about how to breathe in order to combat stress,” Friedman said. “I hope that after listening to my talk people learned how to ease their breathing in order control anxiety and stress because it is something I believe is very worthwhile to share.”
Psychologist Dr. Kelly Warren specializes spoke on stress management. She talked about how everyone deals with different stress in their lives. Each of the three speakers discussed different angles on the central topic of stress.
“I talked about how anxiety/stress affects teenagers, especially during the challenging transition from high school to college and adulthood,” TEDx speaker and psychologist Dr. Warren said. “I hope that those who experience anxiety would be able to alleviate it to some extent by utilizing the techniques that were discussed and potentially seek help if needed.”
The upcoming TEDx Costa conferences have different themes, the one in Jan. is based on the crossover of creativity and business and the Apr. theme is still undetermined. The students have chosen all of these themes, but do not have any sort of correlation with one another.
“I expect the future conferences to be even better because the students are able to see some things they could improve on,” Bordokas said. “They had a few small glitches on the production side that was not foreseen but I think they will be able to work them out before the next one.”
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