Programmes Undergraduate Programmes Student and alumni stories

My TEDx experience at CityU

BBA Information Management student
Rosen Wong Yat-kwan
Rosen Wong, student stories

The first ever TEDxCityUHong Kong was held in CityU in November 2016, attracting eight awe-inspiring speakers, and an audience of more than 200. The theme was Challenging Conformity, and explored various ways of making breakthroughs. I was glad to be the lead organizer of the TEDx CityU event. The reason for bringing TED into CityU was rather complex, but mainly to address two areas: community learning and personal adventure.

The TED community has always been a platform for learning and sharing. Speakers and audiences frequently share great ideas to create a cycle of inspiration towards each other. Personally, I see a lack of place for ideas sharing in Hong Kong, and so I wanted to help create a platform and a community of learning and sharing in CityU, hoping to pull great ideas into this incubator and to transform each idea into a feasible action.

Growing up as an introvert, calm and thoughtful, the TEDx in CityU gave me another opportunity to explore my abilities, potential and dedication, and to build something from scratch, for the purposes I aspired to reach – bringing people together, share great ideas and shape the world into a better place.

I ran into many problems, ranging from communication to task management, when organising such a great event. Yet, after a period of time, the team worked things out and ultimately made the show a great success. Without the team’s endeavour, the event would not end up in a success. I would like to express my deep gratitude to all the support we have received from: Office of Education Development and Gateway Education (EDGE), mentors, sponsors, audiences, and many others.

I hope to see Hong Kong to experience a major cultural shift about innovation, where people do not treat failures as taboo, but rather embrace them. Undoubtedly, the young generation is very innovative. I see a lot of problem solvers and creative thinkers around us. The problem undermining innovation in Hong Kong is not lacking of capability, but lacking of room to fail, to test creative ideas. It is only when society is no longer treating failure as an end that innovation can thrive. Therefore, I want to spread this message out, starting from my own campus.

(Written by Rosen Wong. January 2017)