IIT business administration student Shreeyeh Rajan has been covering preparations for the “Countdown to TEDxIIT!” event, slated for Saturday, April 13 from 9:30 am – 6:00 pm in the IIT Tower Auditorium. Here is his report:

With just one week to go, the whole TEDxIIT team has been all over the place. Whether it’s deciding what posters to go up on the main event, what food to buy or what the volunteers should do on Saturday, things have been rather busy!

We had one of our two volunteer sessions on April 4 and it was great. While some volunteers opted to be speaker buddies, others were perfectly fine with doing set up, ushering and clean up. With around 40 volunteers, the team’s getting as much help as possible. As Amy Lee Segami says, “Volunteers help us in bringing the IIT community and the IIT alumni together, beyond the borders of IIT.”

The volunteers showed a great amount of interest in being speaker buddies (an IIT student who assists the speaker the entire day). I emailed all of the volunteers on Thursday night to select the speaker of their choice and then went to grab some dinner at The Bog. An hour later, I checked my messages to find 10 unread emails about speaker buddies. The spots were taken in less than an hour! Thank you to all of the volunteers for taking part in this event. The amount of interest that the volunteers have been showing the past few days is really contagious. We’re now more excited than ever!

There are limited seats to the TEDxIIT event so apply here now. Since it’s a full day event, will there be food? Of course! We will have free breakfast, lunch and snacks. There will be 12 speakers including faculty, alumni, students and members non-affiliated with IIT.

What if you’re really interested but can’t make it? No problem! We will have live streaming available on the TEDxIIT website. Tell your family, friends and relatives across the world that they can watch it on the website. It doesn’t matter if your family is in India, if your friends are in Korea or if your relatives are in Africa. Tell them all!

Let’s be exponential!