Dos Pueblos High School hosted its second annual TEDx event featuring eight students, who gave TED talks at the Elings Performing Arts Center. This year’s TEDx event was hosted by Tyler McCutchen (11) and Kaitlyn Marden (12) on Dec. 12, 2025. The event included speeches that revolved around mental health advice, life lessons, and more.
(Leo Quinkert)
This year’s event was the first to feature paired talks by students; McCutchen said the reason for the change was to “help encourage students to feel comfortable [with] public speaking.”
McCutchen and Marden both spoke at last year’s event, which led to the previous organizers, graduated DPHS students Sienna Valentine and Amelia Vander May, contacting them afterwards.
“Amelia and Sienna reached out to us after the event, asking if we wanted to take over and organize,” McCutchen said.
This year’s TEDx event opened with a talk by Elaine Hu (11) and Evelyn Yang (11), who discussed their perspective on the importance of communication in people’s lives, highlighting how it’s necessary to communicate to ensure good relationships.
“Saying something is always better than saying nothing,” Hu said. “I’d rather hear something than nothing at all.”
The pair shared the importance of understanding tone and conveying emotion over text and email, combined with how body cues are important when talking in person.
“[Over text] using things like emojis, abbreviations, and even changing things like the capitalization or punctuation can be ways to make your message better,” Yang said.
Next came Sonia Flathman (11), who shared “cross-cultural wisdom” from Japan regarding mental health and how it reflects on our society. Her TED talk focused on the motif of “wabi sabi,” and went on to discuss the beauty in imperfection.
“Simplicity and imperfection are two qualities that often go unappreciated in our society,” Flathman said. “Imperfection is not really appreciated around here. In fact, it’s barely tolerated.”
After Flathman spoke, Seth Maranion (11) and Gio Alfaro (10) took the stage and spoke about the repercussions of bullying and how our community can prevent it.
“Be an upstander and not a bystander,” Alfaro said. “A bystander is someone who just watches the bully, someone who doesn’t take action. Now, an upstander is someone who stands up to the action. They defend the person that’s being bullied.”
Maranion shared personal experiences from his life, while Alfaro shared how society can overcome bullying by standing up for those who are bullied.
“Bullying can lead to suicide,” Maranion said. “But that’s not as likely as depression or fear.”
Nam-Anh Le (10) spoke next, sharing her opinion on the lack of women represented in the media. She explained how she utilizes the Bechdel test when watching movies. If the movie passes the test, it means that at some point during the movie, two women have a conversation together that is not discussing a male.
“In 2022, only 57 percent of movies pass the Bechdel test, which is crazy, considering that a study in 2015 showed that movies that passed the Bechdel test earn a total of $2 billion more than those that fail,” Le said.
John Duffy (11) spoke after Le and addressed the stress that high school students face through assignments and extracurriculars, connecting it to social media use. He ended his talk by promoting Ready, Set, Play Sports, a project that he has been “building for months” that provides sports equipment to kids.
“What if the key to alleviating academic pressure is easier than we think, because success starts outside the classroom,” Duffy said.
The event concluded with a talk by Nicollette Pfeifer (10), who spoke about how achieving success in life requires having faith and taking risks. She used the metaphor of planting an olive as opposed to planting an olive branch to make her point.
“You want to plant an olive tree, do you plant the olive or the branch,” Pfeifer asked. “Planting an olive means taking a chance. Relying on faith, planting a branch is the safer option, and yes, you can indeed plant a branch by placing it in water; roots will form, and leaves will grow. It’s the low-risk, more predictable option.”
Since McCutchen will be a senior for the 2026-27 school year, he plans to pass along the responsibility of being the DPHS TEDx event organizer to another student.
“Next year I want to … pass the torch,” McCutchen said. “I feel like that’s what the TEDx event is about, community and giving everybody chances.”
