The Career Center presented Hood’s very first TEDx event, TEDxHoodCollege, to a sold-out crowd in the Rosenstock Auditorium on April 8.
The event, with the tagline “leadership and change in the modern world,” featured seven speakers who were selected from a pool of over 40 applicants. Each speaker had a maximum of 18 minutes to talk.
Several of the speakers were current or former Hood students, including undergrad Lily Tanner, who is majoring in early childhood education. Tanner’s talk, titled “Water is a Weapon of Mass Destruction,” included information about how contaminated water negatively impacts the lives of people all over the world.
Ja’Bette Lozupone, who has a bachelor’s degree in communication arts and a doctorate in organizational leadership from Hood, spoke about transforming her life from teen mother to successful business owner in her talk, “Transcending Wishful Thinking to Wishful Doing.”
Chris Sparks, owner and “game overlord” of Surelocked In Escape Games, spoke about how games and the power of playing unlock the best of what the future has to offer in his talk, “Thanks for Playing.”
Other speakers included Stephanie Miller ’11, with “Broken Healers and Why They’re Necessary,” Adam Cubbage with “Answer the Call,” current Hood grad student Jacob Abuhamada with “Mapping the Horizons of the Mind,” and Joel Beidleman with “The Educational Pandemic of Poverty.”
Lisa Littlefield, dean of career development and experiential education, hosted the event and spearheaded the planning process. Littlefield said that the TED organization granted the career center the license to put on the event before COVID and permitted an extension until it was safe to have the talks in-person.
Littlefield helped develop a TEDx event while on staff at Georgia State University and brought the idea to Hood with her. She said that the TEDx event is a great opportunity to “put a voice to great ideas.”
The event reached full capacity, with 100 people registering for free tickets, reaching the max number of audience members allowed for a TEDx licensed event. The event was recorded by student and staff volunteers from the media department, to be later posted to the TEDx YouTube channel.
“It’s a Hood community effort to put on this event,” Littlefield said. “Like anything you do for the first time, it takes a village to put it on.”
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