Theme: Breaking Barriers

TEDxYouth@PMSS 2023 is a 3-hour conference on September 29, 2023. The event will be taking place at Port Moody Secondary School in the heart of Port Moody, British Columbia, Canada. The program will feature 6 speakers from the Port Moody Secondary School community.

The event will serve as an opportunity for PMSS students to engage, learn, and connect with brand-new ideas. Visit @tedxpmss on Instagram to learn more and attend the conference.

Port Moody Secondary School
300 Albert St
Port Moody, British Columbia, V3H 2M5
Canada

Chris Cheng

High School Student

What’s your greatest failure? What’s your most painful loss? These are the questions we don’t normally ask ourselves because of the overwhelming sense of defeat that accompanies them. Therefore, these are the moments that we have not properly made peace with. I believe the first step of breaking barriers is to accept and understand those moments. Chris Cheng is a grade 12 student at Port Moody Secondary School. Chris is a firm believer in the role failures play in successes, and he wants to help his peers to better integrate this idea without experiencing the frustrations. Chris does not ask everyone to do as he says, but to do what they desire knowing they are at peace with their decisions. The stream of time,/ carries the bodies of the defeated,/ until they gather the strength to reach for the bank./ Then they get up,/ well knowing they will fall again,/ but one step closer to success.

Daniel Ashjazadeh

High School Student

Daniel Ashjazadeh's speech, a consideration of the abstract nature of post-injury mental health, is born out of personal experience. A grade 12 student-athlete, Daniel has dealt with numerous injuries due to his participation in Soccer and Basketball and aims to share his findings and anecdotes through the TEDX platform.

Emily Li

High School Student

Emily Li is a student at Port Moody Secondary School with an interest in fashion and makeup. She knows first-hand the struggles with body image and will be discussing the topic of eating disorders in adolescence. In an era dominated by social media, perfection has become standard for beauty. Such standards have distorted our perception of what beauty means, leading impressionable audiences such as teens and young adults to turn to drastic measures in an attempt to fit in. Eating disorders are not a petty expression of vanity, but instead a serious mental disorder that can cause permanent physical damage and emotional trauma. Emily’s goal is to spread awareness about the severity of eating disorders through informative means and her own personal experiences.

Jahau Yang

High School Student

A Grade 11 student at PMSS, Jahau stresses the importance of time management and organization, and how great of an improvement that can have to someone’s life. Having often been stuck with the issue of self-doubt growing up with a perfectionist mindset when it came to anything such as schoolwork, errands or planning, Jahau wishes to share his experience in overcoming the barrier of overthinking and help us all to stop wasting time on thinking but rather just doing it. Don’t worry, the results still turn out great.

Vincent Fan

High School Student

Speaker Vincent Fan, who enjoys engaging in various sports and activities in his leisurely time - in particular cycling, details the widespread benefits of adopting cycling as one’s primary mode of transportation. Through his own experience and knowledge, he hopes to debunk many excuses that the masses have regarding the activity and convince fellow peers to give biking to school a try.

Vincent Zhao

High School Student

Vincent Zhao is a grade 11 student at Port Moody Secondary, and enjoys experimenting and trying new things. Despite being reluctant to step into the cold at first, he learned about the many benefits of cold showers on motivation and energy, which he credits to neuroscientist and podcast sensation Dr. Andrew Huberman. He now uses this strategy to power through those tough mornings where getting up is the last thing you’d want to do.