The TEDx club will host its annual conference on tomorrow at the Eleven Fifty Academy. The theme this year is “Where You Least Expect It.” The club plans one event each year, modeling theirs after the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference.

Sally Ernst, head of food and breaks committee and senior, joined TEDx during its first year as a club. Ernst and the rest of the committee plan the entertainment for breaks between speakers. TEDx is a two-session event with a break in between sessions. During the break, Ernst said she and the committee have arranged a yoga station, a photographer, art sculptures and catering. Ernst said the event is open for the entire Carmel community to enjoy.

To adhere to the community theme, all speakers will be local, including a CHS student and a professor of journalism at Indiana University. The speakers will follow the theme “Where You Least Expect It.” Everything speakers talk about has something to do with the theme, either through their jobs or hobbies or interests.

Ernst said, “It’s a really abstract theme this year so people have a lot of flexibility with their speeches and everything, so there’s a lot of room for creativity.”

Allyson Wells Podell, TEDx club sponsor and English teacher, said one of the unique qualities of this TEDx conference is the students’ role in planning it and participating in it.

“(The students) brought such a different perspective and that’s one of the things that TED, both the organization and the TEDx club, really value: that diversity and perspective,” Wells Podell said.

She said she loves how students thought about how a variety of speakers would make things more interesting. Wells said a student-held conference is not unheard of, but most TEDx conferences are hosted by cities, such as TEDx Indianapolis.

Wells Podell said she had a video conference with someone from the TED organization who said he was impressed with the amount of planning the students do on their own.

She said, “(While) I’m technically, from TED’s perspective, I am the lead organizer, the students do much more than I do. They make the decisions, so I don’t make the calls. When they need some guidance, I help them troubleshoot, I help them think through the logistics of the event, but it’s all theirs.”

Anna Wagner, TEDx marketing and PR team member and junior, said planning started last year for this conference. This is the first time the conference will be in the fall, because club members decided they would benefit from extra planning time. Ernst and Wagner are on separate committees for the conference.

Ernst said she likes seeing all of the committee’s hard work come together at the conference.

“When we all come together during the conference, it’s all working out. It’s just really awesome to see the final product come to life; it’s just really rewarding to me,” Ernst said.

Wagner said during the planning process for the event, she likes meeting and working with new people.

“I feel like it’s a really unique thing, so it’s fun to be a part of that,” Wagner said, “Our guest speakers are also pretty awesome.”

TED is a nonprofit organization that hosts one global conference per year. The “x” in the club title shows it is an independently organized conference that TED officially licenses. Wells Podell said TED brings together the most innovative and creative thinkers in the world, who then have 18 minutes to talk about a given idea.

Wells Podell said TED talks are unique in that they aren’t just lectures, they’re a time for speakers to convey complex ideas and thoughts through a mixture of a stories and lectures.

The TEDx club began as a final class project for Wells Podell’s Theory of Knowledge (TOK) class, which is an IB diploma requirement.

“A lot of TED’s aims and goals and missions align very closely with the International Baccalaureate’s kind of missions and aims and goals. So a TEDx event seemed like a really great final project for my (TOK) class,” Wells Podell said.

The year after the first CHS TEDx conference, students asked Wells Podell to sponsor it as a club.

Wells Podell said the students in the club love what TED stand for and what TED does. When the members are not in the process of planning their event, they still meet and involve themselves with TED.

She said, “(The) students watch and discuss TED talks. They get involved in the community and projects where they’re sharing and spreading ideas and networking with people who want to talk about ideas, so, naturally (they are) curious people.”