As covered in The Western Hemisphere’s October issue, freshman Maddie Waters was selected from the TEDx Charlottesville Open-Mic night to speak at the official TEDx program. Waters explains what it was like to present at the sold-out event:

“At Open Mic, everyone had the same amount of time. But at TEDx, everybody had different amounts of time. And mine was the shortest, out of everyone’s. I knew that with my amount of time I had to make it as good as I could, because otherwise I wouldn’t make an impression on people.

At the actual Paramount stage it was lot more nerve-wracking beforehand because they had made the whole deal out of makeup, and ‘get down to the ready stage room,’ and ‘make sure your mic is on right.’ It was a bigger audience, and a bigger stage, and it was more overwhelming, the second time.

Overall, from the experience I learned that, well, I don’t want to say that people won’t think differently of you for your age, the thing is, people won’t think badly of you for your age. They’ll think higher of you for your age. But aside from that, I learned that people can be really supportive – it doesn’t matter if they don’t know you or if they do know you. I had so many strangers come up to me afterwards and say that they were proud of me. They didn’t know my name, I didn’t know their name, but overall it was a lot of fun.”

Watch TED talks and find out more at the TEDx Charlottesville website.