Jayden Barth, a junior sociology major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had an experience of a lifetime speaking at the TEDxYouth talk on August 19, 2017.
“It was an amazing experience and I’ve learned so much,” she said.
She started her application in May at the TEDxYouth conference in Lincoln. Once selected, she worked closely with Lisa Kort-Butler, Professor of Sociology, to narrow down on a topic for her talk. She considered this part of the process the toughest part of the whole experience. After much deliberation, she decided to talk about prisons and education.
She chose to cover this topic because of its relation to her current UCARE research, studying how prior educations affect the success of inmates who are in prison education programs. The topic covers questions like: Why are people in prison? How can we keep them out of prison?
“I think my topic is really hard for a lot of people to listen to because they don’t want to think about people who are in prison,” she said.
She hoped to break the negative stigma people tend to have on prisoners through her talk. Her speech was based on a family friend that was convicted at the age of 16 for a drive-by shooting.
In her talk, she highlighted his experience going to jail and tied it to the high-risk environment he lived in. Due to the environment, he lacked the education to help him make the right decisions. She then emphasized the importance of improving our education systems.
She took three months to prepare for her speech where she met up with speech coaches provided by TEDxYouth once a week and practiced every day. Not only were the speakers for the TEDxYouth consisted of high school and college students, so were the speech coaches. TEDxYouth encouraged peer-to-peer coaching so the speakers were paired up with speech coaches close to their age range for practice.
Before her talk, she was terrified. She had never spoken in front of an audience of this caliber. She considered herself a shy person, therefore, she was thankful that this experience helped push her out of her comfort zone.
She was amazed by how many people approached her after her talk asking how they can help the prisoners.
To future participants, she stressed the importance of finding a good mentor like a professor who can help construct the message and the importance of having a solid support group.
Aside from her talk, there was a wide range of topics covered by the other speakers from stereotypes to NASA. She sees these different topics as opportunities to inspire the youth.
She hopes that more students would participate in TEDxYouth because “even though we are young, we can still do things to help change the world.”
