Conestoga HS Students Create TedX Talk, Despite COVID Setbacks

BERWYN, PA — A group of Conestoga High School students has been busy sharing information with the community by organizing an online conference, despite setbacks last spring.

TEDxYouth@ Berwyn had an event in the works last March. The high school club's plans to make a TedX Talk last March got cancelled, along with school and almost everything else the pandemic shut down. But, the group went back at it over summer.

By September the team had gathered speakers and found a way to record a conference. Their themed topic was Pushing Forward, and their final product was a virtual conference with seven speakers around the theme: Pushing Forward 2020. It can be viewed on YouTube.

TEDxYouth@Berwyn is not finished. The group will continue planning informational

"Our goal is really to inspire youth to be leaders of change and innovation, whether that be in local or global issues, and we do this through holding one-day conferences annually," lead organizer Unnati Gupta told Berwyn's school newspaper The Spoke.

Though the team members have different interests, one thing they have in common is they came to Conestoga High School from different places.

Aditya Sirohi is the group's operational director. The Malvern teen was pretty shy when he moved from Washington State to Malvern in eighth grade. He joined a Temple University STEM Up program, and got very interested in AI.

Sirohi also started the high school’s AI club to create awareness. "You can't get better just by creating a to-do list. You have to go out of your way and get things done," he said.

Communication director Deepthi Sathya is an aspiring political science student, and aims at inspiring other youth. "I saw all my experiences as lessons that I would use as I take on new challenges," Sathya said. She moved to this area from New Jersey in 2019.

Sathya has finished a Harvard Secondary School Program and completed a course on international relations and comparative politics.

Tamara Rushby, sponsorship director, said the team handled the challenges of COVID and worked hard to live up to the theme of Pushing Forward.

Rushby moved to Pennsylvania from Los Angeles in her freshman year. She's interested in design, robotics, literature and languages and wants to pursue architecture and engineering.

The fifth member of Conestoga High School's TEDxYouth@Berwyn is Manya Gupta, its financial director. Gupta is a freshmen at Conestoga High School. She and her sister Unnati moved here in 2018 from Fort Wayne, Ind. She is also interested in STEM and loves cooking.

The group's bio page is here.