Members of the Tufts community will gather tonight in Cabot Auditorium for the second installment of the Tufts Idea Exchange (TEX), during which 10 speakers from across the Tufts community will deliver 10−minute talks about their ideas in fields such as philosophy, service work and engineering.
TEX, sponsored by the Institute for Global Leadership's Synaptic Scholars Program and OneWorld, is modeled off of TED, global conferences at which the world's most prominent thinkers present an overview of their area of expertise in 18 minutes or less. The first TEX took place last semester.
Tonight, six undergraduate students, an alumnus, two professors and an admissions officer will present their ideas on a range of topics.
TEX is designed to expand intellectual life outside of the classroom, according to Ben Perlstein, one of the chief organizers of TEX and a synaptic scholar.
"We're living in a university ... where there are ideas everywhere," Perlstein, a junior, said. "We believe that part of what Tufts is all about is the interdisciplinary learning and it's about people really being able to think creatively by virtue of having ideas in unique arrangements and being able to apply different theoretical frameworks to a lot of different subject areas."
Perlstein will return as emcee tonight with Katie Greenman, a senior who presented a talk last year.
Perlstein said that while choosing the speakers out of the application pool was challenging, the TEX organizers strived to create a strong, well−rounded group of 10 speakers representing diverse interests.
Senior Maia Majumder, whose talk is titled, "Theta + Pi = ?", will be presenting her ideas about how theory and practice are emphasized different in various types of education.
"A lot of my talk is about the difference between the theory that is very much emphasized in a liberal arts education and the practice that is very much emphasized in engineering education," Majumder, the only engineer presenting a talk, said.
"Theta" stands for theory while "pi" stands for practice, Majumder explained.
Sophomore James Sagan will present a talk titled, "What is happiness, really?" and will investigate the foundations of happiness.
"I think happiness has been immune from scrutiny for so long," Sagan said. "It's been held as an ideal not to be touched, and I want to take down that boundary and sort of investigate what it really is and whether we can strive for it or not."
Sagan hopes to challenge the audience's beliefs about happiness.
"My hope in my talk is … to be a caricature of myself, as an extreme skeptic of everything," Sagan said. "I hope to upset the audience in a sense, or at least to be provocative and to question some of their beliefs."
Other student speakers will ask "Is TV gay enough?", "Should you be going on your service trip?", "Which corporation are you a citizen of?" and "How do you change society?" The student presentations will accompany talks by Associate Professor of Psychology Sam Sommers, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Tufts Medical School Naomi Steiner, Senior Assistant Director of Admissions Daniel Grayson and Meron Langsner, who received his Ph.D. in Drama at Tufts earlier this year.
Perlstein hopes that the talks will generate dialogue on issues that students might not have previously considered.
"We're just trying to spark new conversations and open people up to ideas and questions that they wouldn't have had access to otherwise," he said.
TEX organizers are trying to ensure that there is adequate time after the event to allow continued discussion.
"We've booked all of the downstairs area of Cabot as well, so we're hoping to have all of the speakers be really available after the event," Perlstein said. "There isn't really a Q&A between all of the speakers ... but over the course of the evening, we're going to have a lot more access to the speakers and we're hoping to even have an online platform for the discussion to be continued after Tuesday."
Majumder hopes that after the event the audience will ask her details on how to best implement her ideas.
"A lot of what I'm looking forward to is the questions that the audience will have about the practical piece," she said. "I think that just by design, this forum is really intended for us to talk about our ideas, not so much the implementation of those ideas."
Perlstein hopes that bringing members of the university together in this type of forum will lead to new discoveries and innovations.
"We all know that when we come together, we're greater than the sum of our parts," he said. "If we don't have access to each other, we don't get there. So that's what TEX is all about."
