March 16th, 2018 was the last TEDx UniversityofTulsa I’ll help organize. And among the chaos of getting everything ready in the week leading up to the event, I’ve had some time to reflect. When I watched Aaron and Amelia walk onto stage to close out the event, I broke down into tears. I’ve poured countless hours into TEDx over the past few years, yet I don’t think I ever realized how much it meant to me and my college experience.

My freshman year, I heard about TEDx through Katie Snyder, a sophomore who lived in the same building as me. She, along with Hannah Hutchinson, were the type of people who weren’t content with doing just what was required of them to graduate. They wanted to make a difference at The University of Tulsa. And so they started TEDx. The idea went from conception in December to fruition in April, a schedule that seems ludicrous by our current team standards. But they managed to pull it off. There were no gift bags, VIP tickets, or even a red rug that year, but none of that mattered. What mattered was there was speakers on stage with ideas worth spreading. And I, just a freshman, excitedly attended the event after years of watching TED and TEDx talks in class. It was a great event.

In the aftermath, I asked Katie if she needed any help next year so I could get involved. Hannah graduated that semester, so little did I know it at the time, but I had just volunteered to be an organizer. This was probably the second best decision I made in college (switching my major to computer science has to take the #1 spot). Over the course of the next year, Katie taught me how to run TEDx UniversityofTulsa. She told me it would be easy, since we had a whole year to plan rather than just 4 months. That statement was so incredibly wrong in the best way possible. It took a full year to plan that event, but we added t-shirts and gift bags for all attendees, better prepared speakers for their talks, and increased our advertising and community engagement, beginning the tradition of making each event better than the one that came before it. Katie retired after that event, placing her trust in me to keep it going and fins others to help out. And in the days leading up that event, I found another organizer in our stage manager, Aaron Krusniak.

In the next year, we added a red rug, stage decorations, a better tech setup, better gift bags, expanded the team from two organizers to over five positions, and so much more. It was my last year as organizer, and many people complimented me on the event, but one compliment stood out from the rest. It was from Katie. She told me how proud she was with what I had done with the event, and how she couldn’t imagine a better person to pass the TEDx torch to.

Aaron and Amelia, I now pass this same compliment onto you, and mean every word of it. I am so incredibly proud of the event you put on this year, and I could not have imagined two better people to hand the torch to. Just a few years ago, I would have never dreamed of having an event with nearly 500 people in attendance, but you pulled it off without a hitch. Thank you for putting up with my incessant interference throughout the year, and putting on the best TEDx I’ve ever seen.

This event means more to me than I could ever put into words. It seems weird to be so invested in something like this, but it’s more than just an event. The only reason it happens is the determination of a few students who are willing to give up their evenings, weekends, free time, and even class attendance records to make their ideas a reality. We our proud to say that this is a student-organized event. There’s no faculty member, class credit, or degree requirement pushing us to succeed at organizing this. We don’t do it for the line on our resume (which comes woefully short of actually explaining how much the event means to us as a team). I can’t speak for the rest of team as to what makes all the long hours and stress worth it, but for me, I’ve made TEDx a part of my life for the last three years because I truly believe in its mission, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something like this.

And in return for my efforts, TEDx has repaid me generously. Sure, I don’t actually get paid for my work, but organizing TEDx is like being thrown into the deep end: You learn to swim pretty quickly. And I’ve learned quite a bit over the past few years about how to pull off an event of this size, and more importantly, how to manage a team. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the best at delegating (or letting go) but I’ll be taking what I learned about how to run a team and event beyond the TEDx stage to my career.

Incidentally, even though I never gave a speech on stage, TEDx taught me how to be a better speaker. And the related skill, how to curate a talk. When we as a team first began to try and help speakers prepare a couple years ago, my suggestions were small and aimed at not disrupting the talk the speaker had created. I was impressed with how Kyle Meador always looked at the bigger picture of the talk, and how restructuring it could deliver the same point, in a much more salient way. And in the years since, I’ve learned from him and others, and am no longer afraid to go over major structural and thematic changes with speakers, forcing them to write two, three, four, or more drafts, hopefully each better than the last at delivering the point. Just like managing a team, knowing how to write, edit, and give advice for a speech is something far wider in scope than this single event.

Related to preparing speeches, I often say that TEDx has ruined my ability to look at slide shows forever. Just like kerning, once you know what a good slide looks like, you start seeing bad slides everywhere. (If you also want slides ruined, take a look at TED’s 10 tips for better slide decks) A good slide deck blends into the background, enhancing your points. A bad slide deck ruins the entire presentation.

Besides team-management, curation, and slides, there’s so much more this organization has taught me over the past few years that I couldn’t get into in a simple blog post. But of everything TEDx has instilled in me, perhaps the most important and hopefully longest lasting lesson is its mission of ideas worth spreading. In a world constantly pushing everyone to choose a side and demonize the opposition, TEDx’s platform of presenting ideas that challenge your preconceptions is a breath of fresh air. I love the talks that force me to look at things with a new perspective. Talks that make me just sit back and contemplate what I’ve just heard after hearing a draft. Or even just talks that shed light on something that’s important, but I’ve never known that much about. Exposing ourselves to these types of ideas is not always easy, but is an essential part of having a well-informed society. I’m proud that TEDx UniversityofTulsa is part of the solution rather than adding to the problem. It’s a good feeling to have.

At the end of every TEDx event I organized, I told the audience to “not let the ideas die in this room.” Spreading good ideas is not something that should be limited to 4 hours in a Friday afternoon every Spring. It’s something that should be happening all the time wherever we are. This, above all else, is the lesson of TEDx. No matter where in the world you are, or what you’re doing, please, never stop spreading ideas.