TEDx Talk

Experience Overview

Program: TEDxSemesterAtSea

Why you don't have to choose between your passions to be taken seriously, and why the people who live in their "and" become connectors who bridge disciplines, ideas, and people.

Drawing on my own path from lifelong artist to a student who unexpectedly fell for marketing strategy, the talk reframes breadth as an advantage rather than a lack of focus. Creative storytelling and design thinking, it argues, are exactly what today's cross-disciplinary problems demand. As proof, I point to a class project with the American Heart Association on getting Gen Z to learn CPR, a challenge that spans behavior, communication, healthcare design, and law, and one a team of connectors was built to solve. The closing case is for the future of education: not just producing specialists, but producing connectors who see the intersections between fields, because the problems we are inheriting do not respect traditional academic labels.