TEDxNYUShanghai Presents “Momentum” in a Time of Coronavirus

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Mar 18 2022

Making a quick pivot from an in person event to a livestream due to new COVID-19 restrictions, TEDxNYUShanghai presented its spring conference "Momentum" to an audience of about 150 online viewers on March 12. This year’s conference speakers were asked to focus on the physics concept of “momentum” and how students might build momentum toward achieving their dreams during a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty. 


“We have never had a more urgent need to find new momentums, both as individuals and as a community,” said Chancellor Tong Shijun, who opened the conference.

 

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Recounting  his personal journey of building a business around finding a sports shoe to fix his knee pain, Jikexietan.com founder Sun Yanfeng offered advice on how to avoid being misled by marketing and to find lifestyles that fit our real human needs and desires. “We consumers buy shoes because of advertisements. How often do we think and judge the shoes by asking questions like: Are they really a fit for me? Are these new selling points good for my health? Will I really become more healthy than before? … Let your brain control your body,” Sun said.

 

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NYU Shanghai Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Business Wang Jing, a financial technology (“fintech”) researcher, shared her own journey of engaging with fintech and urged the audience to consider “the human side” of innovative technologies. “China has a large population with diverse characteristics. Fintech should meet the demands of different individuals instead of treating users as homogeneous.”

 

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Dai Kai, a partner of RetailEye Intelligence, an artificial Intelligence company, said he tried many different career paths before finally transitioning from a civil servant to an entrepreneur. Dai walked the audience through his career voyage, explaining how every step moved him closer to where he needed to be and taught him something valuable about himself. “Because of the unknown state of the future, general skills, transferable knowledge, and passion will be more and more important. I learned that if you build momentum, you will move somewhere, even if it isn’t where you expect. I see it all as a single journey to build up momentum, a journey to explore society and myself. And I believe this journey will never end,” Dai said.

 

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NYU Shanghai Associate Arts Professor of Interactive Media & Business Emily Tsiang shared her experience of traveling to her grandparents' ancestral villages across China with her two-year old son and how she realized that travel could be an opportunity to reveal more of ourselves, instead of to escape reality. “Travel is a huge opportunity for self transformation because it easily provides a non-normative environment that challenges your frame of reference or belief system, creating a ‘disorienting dilemma,” Tsiang said.

 

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In her talk, “Through ‘Mind-Body Alignment’: Fashion Industry’s Rewiring Its Resilient, Sustainable, and Humanized Momentum,” NYU Shanghai Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes Zhang Meng gave audiences a crash course in how the global fashion industry can turn the problems posed by the pandemic and the impact of e-commerce into opportunities to improve sustainability. “Since the outbreak of COVID19, people were asking ‘has fashion, once a multi billion-dollar global enterprise, been declining and gradually losing its momentum in history’? After I did research by myself, collected data and evidence, consulted experts, and participated in discussions with my students,I see the fashion industry is now standing at a crucially important turn, economically, environmentally, and socially—it is now rewiring itself as a system and climbing to an ever more resilient and sustainable momentum.”

 

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The TEDx Leadership team and their Program Advisor also took a group photo on Zoom right after the conference concluded. Club members who were in-person to assist the speakers and coordinate the production in the campus auditorium took a group picture after their production wrapped.

“Considering the rapid change that occurred to this event, we believe that it was not only a great success, but also set an example for major events during the pandemic times,” said TEDxNYUShanghai President Li Peirong ’24, who is studying away in Washington, D.C. and helped guide the event remotely. “We could not have achieved the fast response without the resilience and adaptability of our team and the support from different departments of the school.”