Fort Worth Medical Student Gives TEDx Talk in Dallas
TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine First-Year Medical Student Sam Sayed shines a light on learning inequities during a TedxDallasCollege presentation on April 22.
FORT WORTH – TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine first-year medical student Sam Sayed gave a talk with his brother, Sharif Sayed, at the TedxDallasCollege 2021 virtual event on April 22.
Sam and Sharif are co-founders of the Arlington-based non-profit Dayna’s Footprints. Their mission is to instill confidence in underserved students by buying them name-brand shoes.
The TedxDallasCollege virtual event used, ‘forward,’ as the theme where the invited speakers gave their take on cross-cultural relations, dismantling social injustices, creating inclusive spaces and overcoming adversity and creating opportunities for people in marginalized communities. The brothers were one of eight featured speakers for this year’s event and titled their eight-minute presentation, “A Day in Their Shoes.”
“Our call to action is combatting learning inequities through less understood ways,” Sam said. “Whether you’re doing it through shoes like us or in a number of other ways that’s what we wanted the talk to be about.”
The brothers created the nonprofit to honor their older sister Dayna Sayed who was killed by gun violence in 1997 at 16 years old. Just before her untimely passing, Dayna, had worked all summer to buy Sam and Sharif their first pairs of expensive shoes. The organization’s mission is to combat learning inequity by providing students shoes to wear proudly, subsequently increasing students’ self-esteem and enthusiasm for attending school.
During their presentation, the duo acknowledged that expensive shoes are not the first thing that comes to mind when people talk about education inequities.
“Most people think about unequal distribution of funding or teaching specialists or the lack of technology or the location of the school,” Sharif said. “But that’s not what kids think about. All those reasons are very important but rarely does anybody think about the disadvantages that persist long before a child even walks out the house to go to school.”
The effect that these kinds of disadvantages have on young children is something that Sam is already searching for a definitive answer for. His Scholarly Thesis & Pursuit 4-year research project at the Fort Worth medical school aims to uncover answers to this persistent problem.
“We’re going to see if we can actually measure this,” Sam said. “Another really cool aspect I’m also researching is the effect it has on the medical students from participating in the shoe drives with kids from marginalized communities. How it’s effecting their cultural competence and their cultural humility over time.”
The TedxDallasCollege, where “x” = independently organized TED event, is a program created by the popular TED organization and their TED Talks programs in an effort to further help spread ideas. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience,” according to the TedxDallasCollege website.
You can watch Sam and Sharif’s TedxDallasCollege presentation using the link below beginning at the 36:24 mark in the video.
TEDxDALLASCOLLEGE 2021 Virtual Event