Giving a TED talk is really cool.
Or is the cool thing perhaps being able to say... "I gave a TED talk once"?
Either way, thankfully, I had the opportunity to do both.
It was in 2019.
Every year in my university (Delft University of Technology), they would organize a competition called the "TEDxDelft Award." This consisted of a pitching competition with several rounds where the finalists had the chance to give a TED Talk.
Although my pitching skills are not perfect, I had an excellent idea since I was working on a Natural Disasters detector at that time. So I said... Why not? And I decided to go for it and talk about this idea.
First of all, I had to pitch it to 2 women who were in charge of the competition's selection process and told me that my idea was brilliant and I could definitely participate. I didn't see that coming, to be honest.
For the next round, every participant had to pitch their ideas in front of around 50 people. I was really nervous, but at the same time, I was quite confident in my idea, and I gave a decent presentation. Eventually, in March 2019, I received an e-mail saying I was selected as a finalist. I couldn't believe it! But there was so much work to do. The TED Talk was in 20 days.
As I said before, my pitch consisted of me explaining why and how I developed a Natural Disasters detector (I'll explain how I did this in a different post). The important thing is that my solution was working at that time, and I had a working prototype, but I wanted to take my pitch to the next level.
I started writing the script, and once it was ready, I started practicing every single day. I would call my friends to practice my pitch in front of them. I remember I even booked rooms at the library to do this. They gave me great feedback, and I improved my script constantly.
I practiced so much that I ended up knowing every single word in the script by heart. I wanted to make sure that the talk went fine and I didn't make any mistakes.
The organizers contacted me for the rehearsal. After it, they told me that since my prototype was working, it'd be great if I could take it with me to the talk. The problem was that this was on Tuesday morning, the day of the talk, which would be that afternoon, and my prototype was in my home country (Spain) while I was in the Netherlands. And the worst part was that, for some reason, we were not allowed to use slides whatsoever in the presentation.
I started thinking, and I came up with a solution. I asked my parents to send me some pictures of the prototype. I went to the closest print shop in my city (Delft). Unfortunately, all the printers were malfunctioning there, so I started looking for a different one. I found it, and I printed out all the pictures in the largest size possible (A1 if I remember correctly). I wanted the pictures to look more professional and not just a random piece of paper, so I wanted to attach them to some sort of cardboard. Another problem was that I didn't have any of it, so I started asking my neighbors for cardboard boxes. Eventually, I had enough of them, so I prepared the pictures, and I rehearsed the talk one last time in front of my flatmates.
I headed to the event venue before it started together with my fellow speakers. As time went by, it was getting more and more crowded, and I got more and more nervous. I would have to pitch in front of around 400 people.
Eventually, my turn arrived, and I walked up to the stage feeling so nervous and right before starting talking, I realized that the lights in the spotlight were so high that I could recognize anyone in the audience. This made it so much easier, and probably the fact that I practiced my speech like 1000 times helped. Either way, my talk went perfectly, just like I wanted, like in my rehearsals.
In conclusion, it was a great experience, just a small moment of discomfort for an experience that I'll remember for the rest of my life and that I learned so much from. I realized that with practice, initiative, help from others, and a little bit of luck, you can achieve whatever you want.
