TEDx Student Speakers 2026 — Education for Hope
Mali Delargy
In the words of Co-Director Zoe Paddock, TEDx offers “a more holistic view about how [you] could improve [your] life.”
As I settled into my seat and took in the 2026 TEDx Student Speaker Competition, held at the Buchanan Lecture Theatre on the evening of the 10th February, I saw a promising line-up.
The evening consisted of twelve speakers, each contributing a ten-minute talk on a topic of their choice. Together, these comprised a curated set of engaging educational talks — from politics to medicine to personal experience — all offering hope in the face of uncertainty. The audience then votes to decide a single winner to speak at a larger event taking place in March.
I have condensed my three favourite presentations that (I hope) will offer a taste of the evening:
1. Cian O’Regan — Why You Should Never Run a Personal Best
O’Regan ran a 100km ultramarathon in St Andrews as part of the Movember campaign for men’s mental health, encouraging people to donate by setting a seemingly impossible target. Having achieved his incredible feat, he found himself experiencing “arrival fallacy”, the anticlimax of reaching a long-attained goal.
He noted that, while he has since lost the moustache, he gained something much more valuable — the realisation that life is not like climbing Everest, and does not have a single end goal, but is instead a series of peaks and troughs. O’Regan’s personal challenge teaches us that happiness can be found by living in the moment.
2. Bryan Uwanaka — The Meaning We Are Missing
How do we cultivate a life free from destructive habits? To answer this question, Uwanaka described how exposure to pornography in his youth led to a harmful pornography addiction. He described porn as a “fake connection”, with an estimated 1/5 of young men experiencing an active habit.
Uwanaka offered a solution. He highlighted the importance of having a robust philosophy in the face of unavoidable pain. Don’t try to avoid it, reduce it if you can, and don’t make it worse. He called for a search for love and connection instead of pleasure and power, like Victor Franco: this is how we can find the meaning we are missing.
3. Logan Elliot — The Bravest Acts Get No Likes
Elliot’s grandfather, Guido Gorgey, was a Hungarian war hero who enacted good in the face of evil and impacted countless other lives. Elliot told us of how, during the Second World War, Gorgey would don his military uniform to escort and protect his Jewish neighbour. After becoming a freedom fighter in a resistance group, he was charged with spying, was imprisoned in a camp and eventually was forced to flee his country for the USA. Elliot emphasised his grandfather’s humble altruism, his internal force for good. Having won the Ethnic New Yorker Award, he is an example for all of us.
After the voting, I asked Paddock, Co-Director alongside Katie Riddick, what drew her to TEDx. She told me of her first experience of the conference:
“There was [a presentation] on grief and how it was expressed by men in medieval manuscripts, which was put beside a talk about bacterial growth. It’s the eclectic mix, the breadth of topics, that ignited my passion to have a bigger role in TED.”
I had experienced this, absorbing small pieces from a wide range of disciplines in the same sitting; how to enact hope, that bees have a concept of zero and can count to four, and that task switching decreases productivity by 40%.
Elliot, the winner of Tuesday’s Student Speaker Competition, will go on to speak at the TEDx conference on 29th March at The Byre Theatre. The event will run from 11am-3pm, where Elliot will present alongside seven speakers, curated under the theme of “Mind and Matter.”
Expect to find “distinct voices” as well as dialogue between talks as varied as record-breaking sailing, psychiatry and AI. As Paddock asserted, “you can always take away a message with you”… but next time with the bonus of professional insight.
Photo by Mali Delargy
