The Upper School’s annual TEDx event will feature seven speakers, booths from Bay Area companies and a mentor luncheon on Saturday in Nichols Hall and the gym.

Talks from the featured speakers will run throughout the day. In the morning, booths set up around the atrium from different Bay Area technology programs, including XROUND, Alchema and VEX Robotics, will present their products to attendees. Participants will be able to have lunch with 25 to 30 Silicon Valley professionals in the mentor luncheon.

“The mentor luncheon has been a staple of TEDx for the past few years,” said Aditya Dhar (12), a co-curator of the Harker TEDx team. “All in all, every team in the event is doing a really fantastic job. They’re all coming together really well.”

This year, five featured speakers from outside Harker will present at the event, as well as two seniors, Sarisha Kurup and Alexander Lam.

The speakers from outside of Harker include Shahid Buttar, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Stanford University; Umi Garrett, a 16-year-old classical pianist; Katherine Isbister, a professor of computational media at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Prateek Joshi, an artificial intelligence researcher.

The Harker TEDx teams have been planning this event since last school year. The marketing team launched a social media campaign on Facebook to promote Harker TEDx.

“We’ve promoted a little at the preview night to the parents, and we’re probably going to be sending out emails to the entire campus to let them know that [TEDx] is happening, and we’ve also been keeping up to date on social media with posting on Facebook, especially,” marketing associate Shania Wang (10) said.

Tickets for the event can be purchased for $25 in Manzanita Hall during lunch.

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on October 10, 2016.