Six Boston College students took the stage Friday night to present diverse talks centered on the theme “Error 404: Refresh” at the TEDxBostonCollege student speaker competition. )
The event’s first speaker, Ella Bagull, MCAS ’29, presented on “Table Talk: What Lunch Tables Can Teach Us About Friendship.”
“For decades now, lunch tables have been the epitome of schooltime friendship building,” Bagull said. “At some point in our lives, we’ve all been the outcast in this situation, excluded from lunch tables for seemingly non-existent reasons.”
Bagull largely attributed this exclusion to social media, explaining the comparison and bullying that it enables. She encouraged the audience to return to kindness and inclusivity.
“Imagine what your kindness can do for someone today,” said Bagull. “The next time you see a person standing alone at lunch, maybe invite them to sit down, even if it’s just for the day.”
The next speaker, Peter Coquillette, CSOM ’26, presented a talk titled “A New Conversation: How to Reset America’s Broken Discourse.”
“If there’s one thing more people on the left and right are agreeing on, it’s that debate isn’t working,” Coquillette said. “I want us to consider how there’s a psychology that happens in all humans, left and right, that is driving this polarization.”
Citing national trends, as well as the drop in BC’s free speech ranking, Coquillete said he hopes BC will do more to instill values of discourse into freshmen and clarify its speech policies.
“The goal of the university is to build up your strength and your courage to be able to combat these ideas, to be able to refute them, rather than to shield you from them,” Coquillette said. “If we want to set the world aflame, if we want to get ourselves off this collision course, the answer is not radio silence.”
The next speaker, Daniel Hannoush, MCAS ’28, presented his talk titled “Weave the Net,” focusing on how societal pressures shape individual aspirations. He explained the story of Richard Hatch, the first Survivor winner, who focused on gathering food rather than entertaining like his peers.
“When I was at Boston College, I was analogous to Richard’s tribesmates,” Hannoush said. “In chasing quick dopamine rushes and short-term fixes, I slowly began to lose a sense of my initial purpose.”
To explain this phenomenon at BC, Hannoush cited similar career goals and culture throughout the student body, suggesting that students focus on their own independent ambitions instead.
“This is why we tend to see so many people who enter the same institutions come out chasing the same handful of jobs,” Hannoush said . “The next time you are placed into an environment and surrounded by the tribe, choose the practice which endures. Find the true north.”
After a brief intermission, Kristina Naydonov, MCAS ’29, presented “Beyond Algorithm: Preserving Human Creativity in an AI Age.” She discussed integrating AI into daily life while balancing creativity, originality, and empathy.
“Today, I want to encourage you to stop and smell the roses, but also incorporate AI effectively into your daily life,” Naydonov said.
Throughout her talk, she encouraged listeners to limit AI use to mundane and robotic tasks while saving the creativity for themselves.
“Don’t use AI as a tool to replace you. Use it to help you, use it to maximize your time and maximize your creativity,” Naydonov said. “In times of grief and conflict, society never turns to data analysis or statistics. We turn to two things: art and community, and at least in our lifetimes, I don’t believe that AI will ever be able to replace these two things.”
Next, Nic Moran, MCAS ’27, discussed the “Morality of Attention,” where he shared his belief that attention shapes your reality, focusing on how each side of the human brain perceives the same things.
“While much has been made today of our lack of attention spans and how it’s getting worse every year, that barely scratches the surface of the complexity and importance of attention,” said Moran. “To give something your attention is to grant it reality and significance.”
However, Moran believes that we are no longer giving attention with love, encouraging us to see attention past mere focus.
“If there’s anything I want you to take away from my talk, it’s this idea that attention itself is a moral act,” Moran said. “It means that we have to start paying a very new kind of attention in our day-to-day lives.”
The final speaker, Mason Wiegand, MCAS ’29, presented his talk titled “Breaking the stereotypes: Why single-sex education works.”
Coming from a single-sex high school himself, he discussed the benefits of single-sex education, focusing especially on how it presents positive same-sex mentors.
“The most prominent claim of all, though, is that single sex schools reinforce gender stereotypes in the case of young men, specifically toxic masculinity,” said Wiengand.
However, Weingand explains that the mentorship at single-sex schools encourages students to break gender stereotypes and reduces toxic masculinity.
“Fifty-eight percent of girls in coed schools felt their opinions were respected compared to, and get this, 87 percent of girls in single-sex schools,” Wiengand said. “[Boys are] twice as likely to pursue an interest in the arts and humanities classes.”
After seeing listeners’ votes, BC community member judges Esteban Crespo, assistant professor in the department of romance languages and literatures, Julie MacEvoy, associate professor of the practice in counseling, development, and educational psychology, and Jacob Bojito, BC ’25 and SSW ’27, voted Moran as the winner. He is set to speak at the upcoming TEDxBC spring conference.
