About Me
I’m a junior majoring in Biomedical Engineering and minoring in Writing and Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I like to consider myself a broad thinker − I love words just as much as I love numbers.
This mock TED Talk is actually the result of my work in Writing 220, the introductory course for students minoring in writing. The project represents the culmination of my semester-long efforts to explore different genres, consider rhetorical situation and audience, and incorporate multimodality into written pieces.
As a student in the Minor in Writing, I’ve been able to strengthen my communication skills in ways that I think make me a better engineer and scientist. My days are full of math, data analysis, and computational modeling, and I love what I do, but I don’t always get practice explaining what my data or results mean. Scientists need to be able to write about their work for a number of different audiences − students, fellow researchers, the general public. In order to successfully research, teach, and learn, I need to be versatile, able to adapt my speech and writing in an audience-specific way. The Minor in Writing has pushed me to do just that, and more.
Film
Production Company | Project Name | 2023
Lead Actor
Production Company | Project Name | 2023
Lead Actor
Production Company | Project Name | 2023
Lead Actor
Why a Ted Talk?
Over the course of the semester, my Writing 220 classmates and I were challenged to rework an origin piece − some piece of writing we already had on hand − into three different genres. As a final project, we were asked to fully flesh out one of those “experiments”.
My starting piece was an article I wrote for The Michigan Daily, our student-run newspaper, titled “Study finds electroconvulsive therapy a cost-effective treatment for depression”. While writing the article, I’d discovered that there’s a serious stigma surrounding electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), so I wanted to use the experiment sequence as a means of communicating the truth about ECT. I also hoped to stretch myself creatively; I normally write in a journalistic or scientific style, but saw this as an opportunity to try my hand writing in new genres.
I ended up metamorphosing my article into a short fictional vignette, a TED Talk transcript, in which I took the role of a researcher from the study that originally inspired my Michigan Daily article, and a zine, which is a self-published collection of text and images. The TED Talk genre resonated most with me. Yes, it felt the most comfortable, but I also felt that the TED Talk genre had the most potential for transformation. TED Talks are complex because they’re multimodal, relying on linguistic, visual, aural, and gestural cues. After doing some genre research, I knew that to produce an effective TED Talk, I’d have to incorporate figures, practice my speech and body language, and learn how to write about scientific research in a conversational way. Giving a TED Talk involves a whole lot more than just writing a script.
So, this is my stab at writing and performing a speech that breaks down a pretty complicated topic. I hope you enjoy.