By Silma Suba
Speakers in TedxEducationCity addressed topics like the sense of identity and belonging, acceptance of failure and seeking wisdom through social service this Saturday.
Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s (HBKU) Student Center opened its doors to approximately 450 people from all over Doha to attend TedxEducationCity (TEDxEC).
Six speakers who came from HBKU’s different branch campuses and the Doha community spoke at the event, which ran for three hours. The theme of the evening was “Branch Out.”
TEDx is a program of locally organized events that aims to bring people together to share their experiences. TED talks started as a four-day conference in California 25 years ago and have now branched globally to allow people around the world to share their ideas through TEDx.
“Your success is not defined by others’ hateful comments,” said Susan Pak, assistant professor at Northwestern University in Qatar who spoke about failure and her own stories of failure and acceptance. “The opportunity to fail is a luxury in itself, so accept it and pursue your passion.”
TEDxEC was initiated and led by NUQ’s journalism student Jaimee Haddad and her co-curator Ahmed Raza Hashmi, an Information Systems student from CMU-Q, along with a team of students from the six universities in EC and Qatar University.
“It doesn’t matter what community it is, ideas that are worth spreading should be shared so that there can be room for the next big thing,” said Hashmi.
“Education City (EC) is a diverse, interdisciplinary and co-cultural community where different people do things differently on their respective campuses, and TEDxEC provides a platform for all these people to come together and learn from each other,” added Hashmi.
According to Hashmi, the TEDx team put in long hours of research and planning to select the speakers for the event.
“I was terrified, upset and nervous when I was first asked to speak at the event, but then I was grateful that people were interested in my story,” said Pak. “I’m glad this event happened, I’ve learnt a lot from the other speakers; mostly I’ve learned to do what I love.”
Many of those who attended gave very positive reviews, with most people saying that more such events need to happen at Education City.
“EC is a very diverse community, but we’re not as pro-active as we could be,” said Abdurrehman Naveed, freshman at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar (GU-SFSQ). “This event sparked off activism in EC, and it was different being here in real life as opposed to watching other TEDx events on YouTube.”
Some students, however, felt that the event should have been more publicized and expressed their discontent at not being able to attend the event.
“I heard about the event on the day it was happening when I saw someone tweet about it,” said Angel Polacco, A junior at NU-Q. “I had no idea it was being held at the Student Center, until it was too late.”
