TEDxACU student speaker and performer auditions and steering committee applications are open until 11:59 p.m. on Friday.

According to www.tedxacu.org/studentauditions, students auditioning need to submit a video no more than five minutes of an “idea worth sharing” that convinces the selection that the student would be a great speaker.

Students auditioning to perform need to submit a video no more than 10 minutes “that embod[ies] the spirit of TED’s commitment to ‘ideas worth spreading.’”

“How could your spoken word performance address issues of global justice? How could your improv scene make us reconsider social norms? How could your choral or instrumental performance make us question the world around us? How could your dance routine give us a new way to see science, math, poetry, life?”, the TEDx website said.

Logan Chapman, senior business major from San Antonio and former member of the TEDxACU steering committee, said speakers are evaluated on how committed they are to their idea. 

“You want to look for speakers that are both confident and believing what they are speaking about, and are speaking about things that are relevant to the people that are attending, like students and faculty.”

Chapman said that although this is a great resume-builder, the biggest take-away speakers get from this is their inspiration to others.

“No one is speaking about common knowledge [at TEDxACU], everybody is speaking about something near and dear to their heart, which inspires and encourages those in attendance to find a topic they are passionate about.”

TEDxACU is an independently-organized event from TED events that seeks to serve the same purpose to share “Ideas Worth Sharing” in the Abilene community.

“Our goal for TEDxACU is to create an event that highlights ideas from people on campus and in the Abilene community, brings in speakers from around the world to share their ideas, and fosters conversation about all of those ideas among the conference attendees,” said Dr. Lauren Lemley, director of TEDxACU.

Along with positive feedback from numerous students, Lemley said the TEDx event is growing in influence online.

“This conference is also exciting because each of the videos are published online after the event. At this point, TEDxACU videos have been viewed over 2 million times.”

Additional information about TEDxACU, as well as the application for speaker, performer and steering committee member, can be found at www.tedxacu.org.

Nathan MacDonald at TEDxACU (Photo by Nicholas Cromwell)