hi everyone we're gonna get started thank you so much for joining us today my name is Rachel parata and I'm a junior here at Vanderbilt University I serve as editor-in-chief of the Vanderbilt Hustler which is Vanderbilt's official student newspaper and so to start off I want to highlight one of our commitment to action and want to invite to the stage Ellie Armstrong of Vanderbilt University and Gina U of Vanderbilt University [Applause] so these students are tackling the challenge of how cardiov
ascular disease is the leading cause of death for men women and people of most racial and ethnic groups in the United States accounting for one death of every 34 seconds while food organizations free health screenings and advancements in medicine all help people with cardiovascular disease access to information about daily Health Management is lacking and so these students are attempting to address this problem by creating Heart to Heart a text message based program for chronic management of car
diovascular disease friendly text reminders are sent to at-risk and low-income patients to promote positive and sustainable Health engagement Outreach will primarily Target low-income neighborhoods in metropolitan areas to improve medication adherence healthy behaviors and healthy outcomes the program is scalable and accessible to anyone with a smartphone and so these students are partnering with Healthcare food and education non-profits to help develop tailored content based on individual users
needs and they hope to Future to expand this program in the future maybe with clients of food food insecurity organizations Refugee institutions schools retirement homes and the general public and so now I'd like to present these two students with their certificates [Applause] and so now I'd like to call to the stage our speakers for this event and so our first speaker is Larissa May who is the founder and executive director of half the story and also a Vanderbilt alumna our second speaker is J
oelle bervel who is a cgiu Alum of 2018. he's a social media medical educator and is a fourth year medical student at Washington State University [Applause] and our final speaker for this event is Abe Lopez who is the cgiu Alum from 2012 and he is a managing partner of light Ward [Applause] thank you guys all for being here today and speaking to our attendant our audience and so I just want to start off with asking you guys to briefly introduce yourself in one to two minutes what you do why you'
re here what you're passionate about my name is Larissa May and as you mentioned I actually graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2016. So This Moment means the world to me I stand here today as a Survivor seven years ago I almost ended my own life on this very campus due to my struggles with depression and the digital world so I made it my mission at that critical Turning Point as a student to be a part of the future and shift and build a world where youth would have an agency over their devi
ces and their emotional health so today I stand Here proudly with my family and my team members who are actually Vanderbilt graduate and undergraduate students as the founder and digital well-being activist of an organization called half the story we were the first organization founded by youth at the intersection of emotional health and technology and we've built policies and intervention-backed education programs that were scowling around the United States and UK thank you that's incredible th
ank you for all you do hey everyone my name is Joel barbell I'm a fourth year medical student at Washington State University but I'm currently doing a research here at Johns Hopkins online and better known as the medical mythbuster for creating content about Healthcare disparities um the overlooked aspects of medicine that we don't often talk about and the ways that medicine needs to change to be more Equitable for all systems so my journey really started about I'd say three years ago when I was
sitting in medical school and we kept talking about skin conditions but not showing what they looked like on darker skin and there was one time where we were talking about cyanosis which when the skin can turn blue and my the doctor that I was talking kept saying oh yes I know this look for blue skin that's what you can understand what's happening to the patient and I kept looking at myself and saying I'm not going to be turning blue what's going to happen to someone that looks like me and I wa
sn't sure if I should ask the question but I ended up raising my hand asking professor and he had a great answer he said you can look at your mucous membranes you can look at your eye beds there's all these different ways to look at it but I kept asking myself if I hadn't asked the question who would have asked it if I wasn't there and at my medical school I was in the first cohort of black students so there's no other black students before me and I keep thinking about how many opportunities wer
e lost like that so I ended up doing what I think most people in our generation would do now I made a tick tock about it and it ended up going viral and I realized there was an opportunity to talk about the over alert aspects of medicine where there's so many things that need to change whether it's talking about skin tone we're talking about race-based medicine that's still used today but doesn't make sense and figuring out how do we educate the public so we can understand what should and should
n't be taught in medical schools [Applause] hey everyone thanks for coming out today my name is Abe Lopez I'm a managing partner at a global Enterprise that deals with technology and creative projects I'm also a very joyful person and I share that Journey online I'm a photographer a plus size model and a health Advocate I started sharing my story on social media six years ago when I started a hashtag called Abe minus 100 I was living in chronic pain where I couldn't walk or do mostly anything wi
thout extreme pain I couldn't wash dishes I couldn't stand up every step that I took I was in excruciating pain and I started sharing that on my Instagram just in a vulnerable attempt to show people that living with chronic pain is hard and I started doing that and the I created a hashtag called a minus 100 and I started sharing my journey to become a more healthy holistic person and since then I've been a health Advocate sharing my story very vulnerably online for the last six years and it's in
spired people to take advantage of all that the world has to offer in terms of taking care of yourself in a myriad of ways and that is one of my passions today so that's why I'm excited to be here thank you all for that brief introduction and so you all kind of talked about how you have different types of uh presence online on social media and I know that creating and sustaining that presence can be very overwhelming very time consuming and so what advice do you have for those who are just start
ing to put their ideas into action and how do you manage those pressures why don't you take it yeah um so I talk a lot about how do you build a personal brand that's authentic I think the more you're able to to build something that is true to who you are the less it feels like work and so when it comes to social media it should be an extension of yourself it shouldn't be something different that you're putting out there should be who you are already so I always advise people to think about what
are the things you are you're already passionate about things that you can't stop thinking about and I think for all of you here that have a commitment that's your kind of north star that you should be looking at what is it that's guiding you and driving you and what's the core of that once you figure out what that is you start finding other people who are also within that same realm you can follow them on social media you can read their blog posts you can watch their speeches or talks that they
've given and you can find and distill down what your idea is and start kind of really kind of narrowing and focusing on that so I always say that it can be really hard putting stuff on social media but the closer it's aligned to the things you already care about the things you already are talking about every single day talk to talk on social media like you're talking to a friend or you're explaining your idea or your commitment to whoever it is that you want to know and I think it makes a lot a
lot easier thank you for sharing that I firmly believe that stories have the power to change the world and when I was a student in my darkest moments here storytelling was a way that I coped with my battle with depression and the digital world was the way that that story touched millions of people around the world and I remember sitting in my dorm room right over in branscom and thinking about what is it about social media that we aren't talking about and it was the idea that social media is on
ly half of the story which is where I started by sharing my own and through that journey I learned three critical skills one is that ideal is ideas ideas that last change Hearts not just Minds the second is you need to get an advocate in your corner as a student it can be very overwhelming to build a business to create content on top of everything else that you have on your plate so what I did is I found a professor that would vouch for me and give me a small Grant as a student and allow half th
e story to serve as a course so that the project that I had could benefit myself personally professionally as well as in the school ecosystem and the third thing I learned is the importance of understanding active versus passive screen time consumption which is something that we focus on in our intervention work not all screen time is created equal when you're actively engaging or storytelling that can be a positive way to use technology but if you're so focused on how people are responding to y
ou and you're getting lost in the rabbit hole it takes you away from that mission and sometimes yourself so it's important to get right and get fit within before you start Translating that story onto these digital platforms so that you can feel empowered that you can motivate others and that you can build something that stands the test of time seven years later and I'm not stopping now can you repeat the question please yeah so just kind of um with these media presence and with the overwhelming
nature that they can you know impose on you how do you manage that and how do you do so in a way that is able to affect other people I think this kind of relates to my whole journey in health a lot of people talk about um people getting on a weight loss Journey like I have and um reverting back to Old Habits or something and I think a key tenant to my success over the last six years in one my health Journey period because that a whole life transformation is actually really hard so giving myself
the time and space to learn about the things that make me pumped up to continue the journey is really important but two I think another tenant that has helped me is approaching my strategy with the key word of sustainability at the front of my mind it is easy to burn out right now there are so many things happening in the world you're getting so much information thrown at you every second that you opt into it and I think that you really need to ask yourself the critical hard questions of is is m
y Approach sustainable can I see myself doing this in four years if not that's fine but if you can be honest with yourself in your approach coach then I feel like um you will have kind of a regenerative approach that kind of sustains the long-haul Journey can I ask you follow-up question to you two so one of the greatest challenges I think that youth find is this digital overwhelm there's Tick Tock there's be real there's Twitter I know that I started with Instagram but what platforms did you al
l start with and own because it can be very overwhelming when you feel like you need to be everywhere and I'd love to just get your your perspectives as well as yours yeah I started I'm old I started at Facebook and I really just was a person that started sharing my life before a minus 100 and when Instagram started um I started approaching that as a really good platform to share because of the hashtags now hashtags aren't as helpful unfortunately but um yeah I transferred from Facebook to Insta
gram yeah and for me um I guess I'm I'm I'm in this weird kind of generation so I'm a millennial but also gen Z so I call myself as Millennial I don't know if I'm stealing that word or whatever but um uh so I feel like I was using Facebook like I remember growing up using Facebook and I used to post these quotes when I was in high school I thought were really funny so there's one that was like um like you name your iPod Titanic you plug it in it says Titanic is sinking and you like pull it out a
nd you save your iPhone from syncing the Titanic uh but I did a little stupid things like that and when Instagram came along I started sharing my journey in medicine um and just like as an undergrad what it was like but it wasn't until Tick Tock that it really took off um and I started off on Tick Tock actually by talking about my journey going to an undergrad an Ivy League institution how I got I paid my own way through through college with scholarships and so scholarships that I got in I think
the first video that got a million views for me was a video that just talked about five scholarships that I got in and applied to in high school and like the benefits that you can get from that and then I started going on kind of back to Instagram and taking the Tick Tock model short form content onto there but the way I try and minimize the amount of work is it does get overwhelming I hate having like to look at my Twitter and then my LinkedIn and then my Tick Tock and Instagram and Facebook a
nd everything um I think figuring out how do you like minimize the content you're creating to be able to live on all these platforms has been huge and so short from content is nice now because I can make a video on Tick Tock screen record it and post it everywhere um and now that shorts is out you can post it on YouTube shorts as well so that really helps out with kind of managing but it does get overwhelming and I always encourage people to to kind of focus on one platform at first master that
before you go on to the different ones and the importance of that is because you build a following in one area then you also figure out the differences between that platform versus another so on Tick Tock I post some things I don't post on Instagram and vice versa and using their Tools in very different ways to approach different audiences and go ahead and clap that was a great answer there's a uh really kind of famous entrepreneur I forgot his name but he uses his Twitter to test out his ideas
of about his content so he has like 100 000 followers and his Twitter feed is simply just like stating ideas out and seeing what traction that gives um to help him kind of decipher which content to make into videos um so all of you guys kind of talked about how these different platforms and your different efforts on all these platforms really corresponds to not only your personal Journeys but also to a greater goal of helping others you mentioned specifically interventions you mentioned specific
ally helping people who might have conditions they don't know about or helping other medical students and helping people on Journeys similar to yours and so you know how do like how do you create something out of your personal drive for someone else how do you turn your words and thoughts and emotions into action like that well one of the most important things to do out of the gate is to use your own journey and experience as a form of research research is the most important thing that you can d
o in any business any project or any idea and it starts with yourself testing yourself in your own journey and interviewing other young people half the story started as a circle of students that I would bring together every week on Vanderbilt's campus which then led to me speaking to young people all over the world and I spent five years just listening and doing research until I could bring on our head of research in the back here to ultimately build a scalable solution based on what we had lear
ned over that time period and so I think it's important to leverage stories regardless of where you're at in your journey to shape and test and learn and to not be afraid of failure we are here because we are building solutions that have not existed in human history and it is much easier to sit up here and point out what isn't working to peers or other people but you have to channel your intrinsic power from within and know that as a Trails Blazer you're not going to always be right but you are
going to fight until you get to that solution so that it can scale and support young people all over the world yeah I absolutely love that answer and I think it's so key to really understand that first about your own story um I think I shared a little bit of my story yesterday on stage on the video about my grandma um and how she really was my drive to better understand Health Equity at that point it was from a Global Perspective But as time went on I started to realize that even here in our own
communities that someone's zip code is a better genetic indicator or a better indicator than someone's genocoder of their health that depending on where you live in the United States that's going to impact your health care outcomes more than whatever genes you have and when I started learning things like that and how it impacts people it was crazy to me that we don't often talk about it more and so whenever I create a video I imagine I'm talking to my own family member and a lot of my videos ta
lk about how race is still used in medicine so as an example there for a long time was an equation called the GFR equation which stands for glomerular filtration rate GFR is a measure of how well your kidneys work if you have a high GFR number they work well if you have a low GFR number your kidneys are working very well but for decades there'd been this racial correction for GFR equations that a lot of doctors didn't even know about and what it essentially assumed was that all black patients sh
ould have a 1.3 times multiplier added to their GFR equation assuming that all black patients have better kidney functioning than any other race and this was only a black versus a non-black equation there was I've seen confused looks out there but yeah this existed there was it was a black versus a non-black equation no other race was included and I remember I learned I heard about it and I was like what this makes no sense what is it that's predisposing people to black people specifically to ha
ving different Kidney Health and it turns out when you follow the literature it came from this assumption that black individuals have higher levels of what's called creatinine it's a muscle waste protein a breakdown and so they were making an assumption that black people have greater muscle mass so they lose more of this like creatinine protein so let's add this 1.3 times multiplier and the idea behind it was It was supposed to be an anti-racist effect to essentially say Let's help out people th
at are black to actually be able to kind of match it but what ended up happening was the cohort they used was too small and so they were making a mistake and what and that led to 3.3 million black Americans it's not being diagnosed with a higher stage of chronic kidney disease as they should have been it led to Black Americans not getting kidney transplants referrals out to nephrologists when they should have gotten those referrals out and so when I learned that story I just kept thinking about
my own family I have family who has kidney problems and so I try to think if I was when I created that video how do I use 30 to 60 seconds to talk about a deal like that in a way that makes them understand it and so for me it's really breaking it down to the level of the family member to someone that's never heard about a science topic and understanding how it actually impacts them and has can impact their life wow that's beautiful every data point is a story I think it's really important to rem
ember our humanity and social media I think that when I started my journey I was nervous to show up and share that I was in chronic pain or show up shirtless uh at a time that I wasn't really comfortable in my body actually I had a lot of self-hate at the time um and I think when you you get quiet and you ask yourself like why am I doing this and um you also recognize that fear is an important part of the journey because it teaches you something and it shows that you care but I think moving past
that fear and showing up knowing that we talk the mentors talk a lot about um you know you might know step one and two in your sharing your journey on social media or whatever project you're doing but you might not know what steps seven or eight is and not a lot of people talk about like when you're kind of mid uh mid-journey um and that's okay you don't need to know how you'll show up next Tuesday you just need to show up right now and I think that's what inspired me to share my story I was li
ke I have no idea where this is going to take me and now six years later I'm in a couple advertisements for food delivery healthy food delivery companies in the U.S and I didn't if I hadn't like got quiet if I didn't get quiet with myself and encourage myself that some people remind myself that some people needed to hear this in order to take advantage of their own health then I wouldn't be here today thank you um and so I know um some of you have mentioned especially you Larissa that you starte
d your work and your advocacy when you were here at Vanderbilt and how have you kept that Mantra of Youth advocacy in half the story and what does youth advocacy mean to you th voices are the most important voices in any room where a decision is being made about them and from the time that I was 21 years old I listened in at the Capitol I listened in with CEOs of tech companies and I realized that these adults were making decisions about the future of our mental and emotional and social health s
omething that we call digital well-being without having Youth voices in the room and so from a young age I realized that I wanted to build the first youth-led organization to ensure that we could not only identify the most important issues for youth in the digital age but so that we could train youth like you especially the voices that aren't heard and bring their voices to the Capitol to the press and have them be at the center of the policies that are being made because back to what you were s
aying our culture likes to study digital addiction and digital problematic use but guess what Tech's not going anywhere so in order to study and optimize for digital flourishing and bridge the gap between digital equity and digital well-being youth voices need to be the most important thing that we are elevating in the space and every day might team here works with 40 to 100 youth that are refining our content coming to us to the Capitol and also speaking their own truth about what's affecting t
hem in their communities so youth is the future you are the future and I always say teenwork Makes the Dream Work yeah I couldn't say better than that I think understanding that youth had the most powerful voices is important you're going to be the next Generation Um and I keep asking myself how long can I call myself a youth like when does that like trade is it like age 30 because I'm I'm still holding on you know I'm not 30 yet but I'm reaching can you you're the doctor you tell us I don't kno
w they're you know maybe that's a new study there's no like what is the Gen Z well we know but yeah it depends it's like it is but it depends but like I think no matter even if you're 40 years old you can still be a youth you know you through the future and just understanding that when you're younger you actually have the most power because I think people don't expect much of us you know they're like oh these people are still you're in your 20s or you're a teen still like you're still trying to
figure things out but when you have an idea that you latch onto and you can Inspire others around you you have so much time to build that and to inspire others to join you on that Journey so I think remembering that as a young person at first I think people that are older might be like this person isn't like they're young what do they know but the more you stick with it the more you show that you care about it the more people will be impressed and the more that you can gain and Garner trust from
people around you that are young and older and exactly what you were saying a lot of older people don't have young people in the room but they're making decisions about our future I mean you can look at just what's happening here in Tennessee right now right with so many anti-lgbtq legislation even though a recent report came out and said that 20 of people in gen Z identifies as lgbtq and I think those types of policies that affect our generation in a way that aren't affecting older Generations
are really important to understand and be able to advocate for I'll just add a little snippet um I really think that um we're in a digital age where we're not just watching TV or movies like we are consuming things when we are waiting for the bus when we are in between classes when we're uh laying in bed at night unfortunately which um helps us not sleep um and I think that we need to capture this moment where we need to understand like people are watching and people are consuming um digital uh
digital content on Tick Tock and various different platforms and that's how all of our ecosystems are changing just on the society level um every day all the time like what's important today might not be important tomorrow so we need to capture like this moment right now and I think one thing really quickly we've talked a lot about like the positive social media and I I think we'll probably get to some negatives too um but mental health is a huge problem with social media right now I think one
of the biggest problems in our country is we do not have digital literacy we don't teach it in schools we're probably on our devices more than anything more than we see other people more than we talk to other people et cetera we've all gotten that Apple notification you've been on your phone for 11 hours exactly or that like Tick Tock scroll like why are you still here get off go outside touch some grass um but it's it's it's serious and like think about it we are on our phones so much but have
you ever learned in school about how to be digital digitally literate how to look through and sources of a video and be able to tell if it's true or false it's something that we learn on our own but if you don't have anyone to guide you you can learn the wrong things there's misinformation out there there's disinformation out there and I think that's an opportunity for us to step in and say how do we teach digital literacy to our peers so that we're not going down a negative path can I challenge
you on that and take it a step further so at half enter half the story but ultimately we believe as an organization digital literacy is critical however it is not where we should stop digital well-being is what we are focused on which is the intersection of our emotional health and our digital habits so what that means is in order to actually contribute and improve the emotional health of our youth we have to help them understand how tact impacts their emotions rather than just focus on the tec
hnology piece so for us when we work in districts and schools and hopefully we'll be all over the United States that is my my end goal in five years we believe we just have to start with the emotions because the opportunity cost of technology is emotional intelligence for youth these kids are on these devices the thing that I'm most afraid of is the digital apathy and so we want them to feel something so that they can change something and so that's why I always like to say digital literacy is a
part of this greater conversation of digital Equity but did digital well-being is the ultimate state it is a spectrum it is a journey and something that we're fighting every day to get in schools I love that yeah so you guys are kind of talking about how to be smart on social media how to use technology in a way that is beneficial in a way that helps you as a way that as opposed to ways that can hurt you and so what are your personal I'm assuming listener you might have a list of things that can
kind of help you get toward that digital well-being but where would you suggest that someone maybe you know a student in our audience a college student where would you suggest that they start I did this personal experience actually when I was when I walked out of the PCC on Vanderbilt's campus and I realized asked me about every drug except for the one that was in my pocket and so what I did is I took out my phone and I had a notebook and I captured for a week the amount of time I was spending
on my device and whether it was active or passive and what that really means is was it mindful was there a purpose or was I going on it to numb something and so before you start getting into what can I do you need to understand what your pitfalls are and what I learned in that space was that but I use technology when I felt less than I used technology when I was seeking emotional support in the real world but I couldn't get it there so I relied on the false dopamine hits that Tech gave to me and
then from there I changed my story and I realized that mindful modifications can change your life small hinges can move big doors and that looked like a couple things it looked like one hacking my tech so you know hey Mark Zuckerberg you're trying to hook me in but this is what I can do I can turn my phone in Grace scale I can log out of my social media account so that every time I have to think twice about whether or not I actually want to be on it but then the third most important thing was h
ow do I get out of the echo chamber and the algorithm that Tech created for me because that is the thing that is most destructive socially and politically in our world and so what I did is I actually created a completely different account so I could get out of the algorithm that was showing me beautiful woman and then suicide tips I needed to create a new reality and that started with taking charge and building an inspiration platform and that was where the story started and I'm still on the jou
rney today [Applause] there were so many gems in there I really like the idea of like hacking technology because that's what I do right now it can be very overwhelming being on social media getting notifications having people want your attention at all times of the day so one thing that I I do exactly that I turn on grayscale on my phone when I'm trying to not use it my notifications I've zero them on I don't get notifications right now and I think that's huge because we're always like looking f
or the next thing the the ding as soon as it gets it like it's now it stresses me out and I'm just like I can't have it on um so like grayscale or like turning off notifications or just making sure that like I have someone's number or I'm calling people instead switching up the ways I'm using social media as well right now I sit on this Council called the council for responsible social media which we need to talk like yeah I'm like hello you coming to DC with me next yeah so Century's it's a bip
artisan group of policy makers Congressman congresswoman um and kind of people within the private sector space that are coming in to talk about how do we reframe digital media and understand it better for overall some of our main priority focuses are mental health which is a big one so there's been some cases on the hill right now but it's another case going on right now Gonzalez V Google which is talking about whether tech companies can be sued for things that happen to people whether it's arou
nd mental health crises etc for things that happen offline because of online things I think it's going to change the way that social media is used right now and hopefully one of the things that comes about is transparency of these things that we're so talking about that tech companies right now have us in this dopamine Loop of just checking on us right um and literally like if you think about it a lot of these the tech leaders don't even let their own kids be on these phones on their phones most
Google's Tech leader like Facebooks all of them their kids don't have phones or they're not allowed to have social media I think that says a lot when you think about it about how negative it can be if it's not used in the right way or how it can change the way we think about ourselves or other people there's recent studies that just came out talking about the Mental Health crisis and how social media is exacerbating that Dr Vivek Murthy the surgeon generals have been talking about a lot as well
and so I think really one thing that I prioritize and try to suggest to everyone understand the algorithm how it's impacting you what it's doing how short form content impacts us and then exactly what I said rehack it so that you don't get impacted by that if you can I I also just wanted to add and give him a round of applause but um yes there is so little that we know about this the brain is the least looked at organ in the body yet one in four Americans lives with a mental illness and there a
re just studies starting to come out to show yes that kids that are on technology might actually be at risk for early onset Dimension Alzheimer's this is about real cognitive shifts this is not only just about a mental health and depression and anxiety these devices are changing our brains and there's so little that we know about it 20 years versus the amount of time that Humanity has been around is basically a blip in the universe I use social media for my job and it can be sometimes stressful
knowing that I have to pick up my phone and use it a lot throughout the day I think three approaches that I use one of them is to remember that like you were saying our brains are not meant uh to take in the amount of information we're taking in every day we're just not evolutionarily humans have not uh taken in this much information specifically in a time with so much happening across the world so I remember that I asked myself also am I stressed right now how am I feeling like am I going to pi
ck up my phone and like increase my stress increase my anxiety or am I in a good mood can I can I ingest the war happening can I ingest bullying and I asked myself honestly and if I can't uh then I don't pick up my phone um it's kind of a balancing act though because again we use technology to expand our messages our projects run ads for different things we're doing um and then also I utilize it for what it's meant to be used for uh connection I don't just scroll I have like really deep and mean
ingful conversations in DMS with many people from around the world and oftentimes opens up new opportunities for me and my projects people want to connect we're not just here to like scroll we're here to engage with one another so those are the three approaches I use thank you and so Joelle you kind of mentioned um the role that policy makers and lawmakers can play in really fostering an environment of safe and promo safe technology use in digital well-being and so what do you think that role is
and how can students get involved at that level I think that role's changing a lot and especially in the next five to ten years it's going to look vastly different than what it looks like today for a long time Tech has been kind of this unregulated industry when it comes to this idea of transparency with the algorithm they've been able to have their own algorithm not really have to put it out there that's going to be changing soon I think I think Congress is now thinking about the Mental Health
crisis and the links to social media companies and what can they be doing does that mean Facebook announced they put needs to put out their algorithm and show how they're actually lessening it or I don't know how many people have um I'm figuring the name of it the the Netflix documentary that was about social media the social dilemma I don't know how people how many people saw that but how Facebook had this whole algorithm that was literally kind of these two different camps of like showing hap
py content versus sad content and testing on people you know I think it's as simple as understanding that if there's a test like that going on that that needs to be disclosed that's an FDA disclosure that should be made because it's literally a research project on people and so I think things like that that regulate social media so that if you're testing on people if you're changing how people are thinking if you're literally impacting Millions if not billions of people every single day that you
are held to a higher standard don't you look at that and not having it be un as unregulated anymore for how students can get involved in that it's a lot of different ways I think from even if you want to go in the tech route from within the companies it's understanding how can I go and work at this company but then change the culture of it right and talk about the things that can be done it can be done from the policy side there's a lot of different senators and Congress people right now workin
g on issues to understand legislation so drafting Tech legislation there's a lot of different student groups that are looking at this as well to understand how Tech impacts every single day lives of people that are gen Z and different Generations so I think either Grassroots organizations are great ways getting involved in policies that already exist by going on just like Googling it um and looking up what people who are who's working on it or even just starting to talk about it and doing your o
wn research to see what's out there and what are the gaps and what we're not talking about yet [Applause] I want to add into the action piece a little bit here so over the last couple years half the story has been in a position where we have been able to bring our youth from around the United States into positions within the Congress both Statewide and nationally to give you the Next Generation the voice in the platform on the stage that you should have and so right now because we're living in a
world where there hasn't been a national legislation since 1998 that holds Tech accountable is we are fighting to have Tech have the same protections that we have for cars and that we have for children's toys and that we have for food and so there are actually two key policies that I'm actually going to Sacramento next week to bring a bunch of Youth to one is a social media harms bill that is ultimately going to get the state of California to be financially either accountable or incentivized de
pends on what day what way you look at it to invest in building software and infrastructure and architecture that will reduce the amount of harms online and the sex the second is actually around social media and sex trafficking this is something we don't talk about but over 55 percent of sex trafficking cases for minors happen on digital platforms and there are virtually no systems in Place Within These platforms to prevent them from happening so that's the second Bill we're working on in Califo
rnia and my ask to you is if any of you want to get involved do you want to write op-ed do you want to come testify at Congress we have a youth policy group that we will educate you on all the policies and connect you to these opportunities so you can find all that at half the story and I'd love for you to be the voices of the future foreign thank you and so we've kind of talked about different aspects of creating your presence online and taking action so we talked about youth voices we talked a
bout how to not be overwhelmed yourself while doing what platforms to use how to affect other people with your own personal story and all this is great information to know when students or people in general are working to really make a difference I think the one biggest hurdle that people might have in this progress is how to make it big how to do all this and how to get someone to notice how to make it so that it's on a large scale and you're achieving those big goals that you set for yourself
what's your advice on that my argument for that is actually not to think about that which you know sounds weird but um I think if you go into it with thinking I'm going to hit this number you're going to stress yourself out you're automatically going to burn out because you can't control the algorithm things are changing all the time when I went into it I kind of just thought I want to put information out there if people like it that's wonderful I didn't know how big I wanted the community to be
I just knew I wanted a community um and so it just started off by like just posting things and over time it kind of grew and now I kind of look at like oh wow that's actually kind of crazy to think about the numbers that there are but I try not to focus on that right and so I think on Tick Tock it's like 600 000 followers on like Instagram it's like 150 000 and then others like in different places too but the idea wasn't about building that building the numbers it was about building a community
and some people can have amazing numbers but have no Community right the what matters a lot is how are you speaking to people how are you empowering them to be able to share their voices and how do you get them involved in the vision that you're trying to share I would also say um don't just look at the numbers don't just try to become another Tick Tock viral star there are I know New York time bestsellers that have less than 10 000 followers I know millionaires that have a thousand followers u
m you don't need to be famous to make an impact and I think that's an important thing to take away it can be so easy to be like I mean I have the least amount of followers compared to y'all and that's fine but I think my impact has been um as impactful in certain uh communities like you said I have a community that's really engaged and focused because of my content um also a more strategic a strategic approach could be uh approaching someone in your marketing department uh at your college and if
you have some funding um partner with them to make some strategic ads the power of a 20 boost for post is really powerful you don't need a lot of money to have a message spread love that point and I I will say half the story started with a 250 grant that I printed stickers from from the art center at Vanderbilt's campus and the one thing that youth can do that understand Tech better than any other generation is spread a story like wild fire and there are a couple ways that you can do that very
tactically one is create alliances with others that have platforms that are bigger that are are there to believe in you you will never be I mean you might be we're all students of life but when you are in college you have the ability to reach out to alumni and ask them for help and get them to help you share your story so don't don't forget the power of reaching out for help the second is pitch yourself I would send 100 pitches a day when I was a student there's a platform called decision and yo
u can find editors emails from all around the world and you can pitch your story and you never know where that can take you and it's 399 all you have to do is put in a little bit of elbow grease and then the third thing is is focus on a local mentality I think in the social media world I see all of these kids that say oh I need to create a non-profit be a CEO by the age of 18 in order to make a difference no you don't if you change one person's life whether it's your roommate or your friend or y
our family or someone that you meet on on the street one small change every single day can change the world and there were many times in my journey where we didn't have money for funding no one took me seriously as a 22 year old that said the future of mental health is understanding technology and it was really hard but you know what I did I leaned into the people around me and the places that I could make an impact with the resources that I had and I feel so humbled to even be here today on thi
s platform because this is just another step towards the future and the world that we want to build and we all get to do it together I really want to pick up on that piece that you talked about with storytelling because I think that's something that's under talked about especially on social media but it's key to building any following is that story and I don't think we learn enough about how do we actually create stories so one of my favorite books I've ever read that helped me with storytelling
was called made to stick by chip and Dan Heath I don't know if people have read it but incredible story Incredible Book essentially they use This Acronym success to describe how do you make a compelling Story the s in success stands for simple the U is unexpected the C the first C is concrete the second C is credible the E is emotional and the last is story and so if you have all those six different elements into anything you can really grab people's attention and with every video I make I try
and keep it very personal and use that model if it's kind of a storytelling model so it's how does it how does it how do you get a simple idea Healthcare unfortunately medicine can be complex to understand how do you make it simple how do you make it unexpected so what the story told you about GFR it was unexpected in itself that most people probably didn't know that race was used is actually still used today in medicine and equations like that it's concrete because it impacts every single one o
f us here it's credible because there's research you can go to Google you can see it in the New England Journal of Medicine and Jama in every single different article it's emotional because it has direct impacts on all of us and our loved ones and it's a story because we all have that story that will impact us when we go to the hospital so I think remembering those six different things check out the book it's really good and I think creating content like that helps you bring people in to underst
and who you are as a person and how they can get involved in your own story I I also was just going to say the very very simple but it works and every story with a call to action and a question so you'll spend 30 years of your life online what would you do with that time back those are the types of ways that you can create authentic engagement and that story will fuel itself also if you spend your time really stressing about the numbers or how many clicks you're going to get that takes away from
the energy and creativity in for the content so many people stress out about that and you can utilize a lot of more energy with really um intentional content versus thinking if this is going to go viral or not yeah and I'll say I've posted content before like multiple times and I'll post it once it'll get literally five million views I posted again it gets five thousand you know it's not like different content it was the same exact thing same video it was just a timing so really understanding t
hat is all about like sometimes it's not about how great your content is just about the time it's posted what else is out there and the algorithm that's out there thank you guys for your great answers and advice for our students and so we're going to actually turn it back to the audience and ask you guys to ask our speakers some questions so they'll be from some microphones going around the room um if you have a question feel free to raise your hand just wait for the mic to come to you and we'll
get to it I see a hand over there in the back hello and and this is actually just uh more of a comment I appreciated your point earlier about trying to Define youth or what how we feel and uh about a month ago I think it was in the Atlantic uh there was an article about the gap between the age we actually are in paper and how we feel within ourselves the data showed that each of us feel about 20 percent younger inside than we actually are and it then explored how that works in advertising how t
hat works in communication if you know that someone is a certain age but they feel a different way how can you speak to that it's just a quick comment I appreciated your your point about Youth and just wanted to offer that I love that I think I feel like I'm 50 younger but I like the 20. hello thank you um I actually have a question for Larissa at the beginning when you were talking about um the idea for your project you talk about how you realize that social media was only half of the story and
how that was significant but I don't think you ever touched upon the reasonings for you thinking so could you elaborate on that for a little bit absolutely so technology is changing rapidly and back when I started half the story which I have a little pocket of the logo that my friend Drew for me on Vanderbilt's campus that was back in the era of perfect avocado toast do you all remember that era it was everyone was eating avocado toast we have beautiful filters and it was it was the filter era
it was uh before the video era and for me in this moment of reflection the other part of my story that you all don't know is that I was a entrepreneur I had a fashion blog I was building my own brand as a young person because I felt that that was a way that I could have the most powerful voice in the room at a young age when I went to a city like New York and so on one hand social media afforded me the opportunities to make money as a college student so I didn't have to get another job on campus
and it gave me a personal position in the world that was the power of it the negative piece was everything I shared about before and what I realized is that social media was really a non-binary experience we like to put things in categories of good or bad black and white yes or no take it or leave it cancel or not cancel but I believed that in order to get to the root of social media we had to move from a culture of connecting into a culture of connection and that was through sharing the other
side of the story and so if you look back and you look at the half the story hashtag you'll see young people from all over Vanderbilt's campus in the world that started with their own narratives which field of fueled a fire that I'm still trying to keep up with so thank you for asking so my question is primarily for Joel but like you guys can contribute as well so uh you like put out information about like medical stuff and all that right so I follow someone similar you you might know him as a d
octor Mike so he likes sometimes upload videos about like mythbusting Tick Tock videos and all that stuff right medical stuff so you guys talked about how you should be like about digital literation how you should be aware about the media you consume but like while this sounds like good on paper and like even I like believe in it some when I see like his videos and the like video he reacts to I feel like if I saw that I would actually believe it because like the whole business model of all the s
ocial media is to like not have not having to do much work and just like getting dopamine hits right so if I'm bored by a bit I can just skip it and like I don't want to like put in the work so if I see a video about someone posting I'm a story about how you can like make like have better health even though like he might not have the qualifications that is required to give that information out right I won't like even I want like property research and I might actually like believe in it so like t
o counter it we can say one thing would be like for the consumer to be aware about the media he's consuming but this well sounds good on paper is like really more complicated than how it sounds and like so recently there was this whole Saga on Twitter about like free speech and like they added something like fact checking on their like people's tweets so if it's misinformation the consumers can actually like point it out and like see that it's it gets labeled machine information something right
so how do you guys think like it should be counted as I counted aside from like the consumer actually being aware about it so one thing I really like about is like the Twitter's initiative so do you have something similar because if someone Wears Like medical suit and like starts talking about stuff out people are gonna believe it right and most of most people aren't gonna like research more into it so yeah there's three ways I think about it I think from the company perspective like you mention
ed they need to be doing things to actually say how do we make sure that we prevent the spread of misinformation and disinformation so during the coveted pandemic that's really where I started posting a lot and I worked with the World Health Organization to look at actually putting together a group of influencers doctors who can actually post and fight against negative or incorrect information so there's one one aspect of companies how do you bring people together people who know what they're ta
lking about and are accurate then how do you put tags on it whether it's on Twitter saying this is this actually is not true which has been great I think especially since like Elon Musk for example tweeted something that was incorrect and it corrected him even though he owns Twitter and that's really important to say no matter how big your platform is if you put information that's misleading or not true we're gonna hold you accountable so so that's one uh companies two I think for Physicians I a
lways tell them we should be on social media one in seven people in the United States get their medical information from social media right now that's Tick Tock that's Instagram that's Facebook Etc and when doctors aren't in the place where people are getting their information they're getting wrong information from other people who may be putting out like you're saying incorrect information that is harming people and their health and so really I think getting more Physicians and people that are
in the medical industry online fighting against it is really important and doing it in a way that's not aggressive and counter to it but adding on and supplementary so if there's a video that's talking about kidney disease really making sure that someone stitches it and says actually here's where they got it wrong but here's where they get it right and it's hard to do because that means needs to be a lot of people out there and then three I think it's all of us and I think we all have an individ
ual responsibility to understand that information is put out there with a ulterior motive right and so to be a skeptic first whenever you're on social media to understand that you can go online you can look something up and if something sounds really good and you think it might impact your life look it up first don't just take that advice and start doing that Trend or whatever they're saying right speak to people who have trained for it who understand it before you jump into it I think those thr
ee things are really important the company side the individual side and then also just the physician side lots of hands hello my name is Victoria Defrancesco Soto I'm the dean of the Clinton school but my question is with my hat as a mom so I have an eight and a nine year old uh We've kept the phones away in the iPads to a minimum so my question is for someone like me a gen xer where I'm I'm looking about how to onboard my children into that because it's inevitable they are going to be in this n
ew Digital Universe but how do we curate and experience for these children and also what is the training that can be given to the parents to then impart that on that next generation of digital citizens as you can see that's a commitment idea right there for anyone like that needs one I think it's because I don't think there's enough organizations that do that right that are from students teaching parents how do you on people onboard people into this new generation of ideas and it's hard um and s
o like things that I like I know I'm doing for my kids I like kind of in this like limiting screen time I think that what you're doing is great already understanding the landscape you know like asking them like oh what are you seeing right now or what are your friends seeing um asking teachers what they're noticing in schools because I think that's a huge place where kids are talking about it teachers are hearing about things that are happening but not totally understanding it um and so so I thi
nk really asking your children like what kind of things are you watching right now Eric what accounts do you have they're not always going to be honest with you and so I think figuring out the latest trends is really important by keeping up on the news and things too so for example be real is like this new thing which how many people part of b-real in this room and that asked how many people's b-reels are actually be real okay because I'm like up here with like triple chins under here and I see
these Glam shots on be real I'm like what is going on yeah I hate to say it though but I definitely saw a generational divide when I asked who was on be real even right now and but like that those are like the big places to understand like how our kids and people in our generation are like jumping into these new social media and how are they used and so I think honestly the best way is to ask questions about it um and keep up to date on like recent news well I'd like to jump in first of all on t
he parent side from our organization perspective we have youth at the Forefront but our Delta and chase our Delta of change requires the students the admin and the parents so we work to shift ecosystems by educating each one of those touch points so hopefully half the story can come to your kid's school but outside of that I want to challenge the story that Society likes to tell parents and that the story that Society likes to tell children and that it is that all screen time is is created equal
at half the story we do not believe that all screen time is created equal it is the easiest first degree messaging that our society holds on to as an indicator of our own health in relationship to technology and so for as a parent our methodology at half the story is actually very much very much so rooted in play and positivity and thinking about instead of focusing on the deficit or taking phones away how do we make that fun how do you how do you say hey kids you know we're going to actually a
ll put our phones away today we're going to give you Polaroid cameras we're going to go to a scavenger hunt as a family and we're all gonna put our phones away and have some sort of Adventure or experience but then the second piece of that is I think parents always come to us asking what to do for their kids and it starts with your own relationship and it starts with your ability to be vulnerable and Foster conversations about how technology impacts you so that you can set that that model for yo
ur kids and the third piece is create boundaries that are empowering for your kids the number one thing we hear is we wish our parents created more boundaries and um as a parent you never think your kid wants that but they need that and so what we like to say is you know always have a dedicated space every single day where your entire family is green free replace TV and screens before bed with a family book or learning to play a new game these analog activities which are critical not only for co
nnection but also for neuroplasticity and cognitive development and you don't want your kids brain health to be behind because they're behind their device and that's the conversation that I think we need to have so we should talk later and would love to support in any way um I don't have I'll just jump in real quick I don't have any kids but I have some anecdotal evidence from friends who do um a lot of them ask their kids how they're feeling a lot of people a lot of kids in that age like are so
quick to um compare themselves to what they're seeing online so if they're watching someone my niece likes to watch YouTube videos of people eating or something like that I have no idea but um they have asked their kids like hey how are you feeling or noticing behavioral changes are you are they a bit more uh self uh judgmental or are they acting out more that could be coming from the content that they're watching um and I think just as I talked about earlier having uh watching content that is
inspiring encouraging kind of like you would watch on TV making sure that encouraging them to have similar practices on YouTube or social media thank you hello panelists um I first just wanted to say thank you all so much for dedicating your time here you all articulated your story so incredibly beautifully and I think everybody here is going to leave so much more inspired and knowledgeable about this topic um but something that I wanted to ask was I think it's fair to say that like on this camp
us or any campus most if not all people have something that they're passionate about have something that they're like yes I want to advocate for this but very few people kind of translate that into okay let me contact lawmakers let me show up at the Capitol building that kind of thing so I guess I wanted to ask um either in terms of your personal experiences or maybe advice you would have for change makers like us how do we bridge that gap between a belief and like actual tangible action that we
take and like I guess just how an individual like us would be able to make that big step I think it's an amazing question um and it's something like I think about a lot because when I first came into this space and like talking about Health Equity I was lost I was like I know I'm passionate about this I want to talk about I want to put these issues out there for everyone to hear about but how do I actually take it to the next level and make systemic change to make change to the entire systems t
hat are actually causing these things to happen um and some of the ways I started going about it was one finding people who had organizations that were working on policies and joining those so one of the first I joined was the institute for healing and Justice it was a group of medical students and residents and Physicians that were kind of further practice they were looking at all these different places and we started putting together white papers policy briefs that we could actually send over
to congressmen and women or to the American Medical Association I joined the American Medical Association was able to draft a legislation about things like let's make racism a Public Health crisis or how do we talk about the crown act to make sure we protect black women's hair so that's not discriminatory in hospital settings or just in in general anywhere and those were kind of the first steps I took was just figuring out how do I create policy write things down join organizations and meet othe
r people who've been doing this at work already but bringing my kind of unique lens to it using social media to it so that's why I suggest for everyone here is when you start getting plugged into whatever your passion is start finding those organizations that are doing the work because there's probably someone out there right and if they're not out there bring together other people that are sharing a similar ideal to you put that group together and start finding out who were the the stakeholders
in this area that can start to put pressure on or create or talk about and that's really the power of social media I think is being able to kind of have this like outside perspective of coming in and being able to pressure things from the outside and so I talked about a little bit about the GFR equation but another one really quickly is the pulse oximeter how many people have heard about kind of the pulse oximeter disparity okay so not many people um but essentially post-op similarities these d
evices that go on your finger they measure how much blood oxygen saturation there is in your body but unfortunately darker skin tones because the melanin can overestimate the reading on this device meaning that if you have darker skin and you come in you're short of breath and you actually don't have much oxygen you have a higher likelihood of Three Times Higher likelihood than someone with lighter skin of incorrectly having it read on your on on your body that had clinical significance for covi
d people were not given supplemental oxygen because of it they were sent home when they actually had difficulty breathing and Studies have shown that more people died that were black and brown because this pulse oximeter didn't work well I heard about that story in December 2020 posted a video on it I got half a million views within 24 hours but then I was like how do I take this next step so I ended up speaking at the FDA to talk about why is it significant as a medical student I started writin
g articles about it for like NPR um and for like different or different op-ed pieces and then people started coming to me kind of and saying how can we jump get you on board with joining the White House Council for social media leaders um or joining a World Health Organization things like that and so it really stems from kind of that interplay of reaching out putting your story out there letting people know what you're doing and people will start coming to you afterwards as well I think people a
re asking that same question at all scales we're talking Google's asking that question we're asking that question here I think that not everyone is meant to be a social media content creator and that's just the reality of it some people are made to be a graphic designer or marketer or strategist and I think that you can develop a team where people can play to their strengths to help you communicate your story and your message a lot stronger you don't have to show up and be a medical educator or
show up shirtless to show your journey to make an impact and I think that remembering that okay I don't need to be a tick tock star in order to make the big change that you're asking is a super important thing to remember I think we have time for one more quick question my name is uh Rachel George I'm a junior at UAB University of Alabama at Birmingham um my cgiu partner and I we serve as research assistants in a lab focused on Transportation safety in the Southeast and that helped to inspire ou
r CTA project which is about micro Mobility safety um so we utilize Tech talk and Instagram to sort of help spread the word about Transportation safety UAB triple up if anyone's interested um in our work and it can get a little overwhelming sometimes just trying to figure out how to plan content and put it into non-technical language what are some specific tools that y'all use to help organize plan and schedule your content go ahead so I'm very like I'm weird when I'm off the cuff with my conten
t because I feel like my problem is I have so much I want to talk about and not enough time um and so it's it's a lot about like how do I plan it out but the first thing I do write down every single idea I have a OneNote notebook with probably like 500 ideas in there right now um I've also gotten very much into using chat GPT do people use that oh yes brilliant for video amazing and I've realized you could actually write into it take this like I literally will take my idea and say take those ATM
and create I literate create a 30 second script about this idea whatever it is and I write it and it writes it for you or I can say take this script and make sure it's written at a second grade reading level and it'll do it for me so that's been huge for me and I've only done this in like the past few weeks but it saved so much time it's helped with translating technical language it's gvt yeah chat GPT um we just uh constructed an offer letter based on draft gbt yeah it's so people don't have p
eople haven't used it definitely use it it's really helpful I mean obviously second check and everything but I think writing out all your ideas I use my calendar so I write it out there I use chat GPT now to like make the scripts um I write my scripts beforehand and read them out that way I can stay on language that is accurate um is there anything what else I use I use canva for like graphics and things um yeah in terms of scheduling they're great platforms like planoly as well as HootSuite I'm
not sure if you've tinkered with any of those before but I I do think the idea of pre-batching your content as a thought leader is critical as a CEO I mean luckily my research team who's always feeding me things Rachel over here and it's it's critical because I can't be spending three hours a day making a video when I have to raise money and actually run a business so I would batch your content find a platform that works and budget for a significant amount of time each week so that you can crea
te content that's relevant and timely and speaks to what's happening in the here and now and also not all your content needs to be long form some viral content are 10 seconds yeah and the other thing you can um look at like just trends that are going on so I made a video yesterday that was like the Rihanna dance because everyone was trending on that right now from the Super Bowl but little things like make it fun too you know it doesn't always have to be on like your brand um there's things call
ed Evergreen content those are things that can be posted anytime there's posts that are more like okay and this is a moment to take it um and I just like playing around too you can play around with content which is great foreign thank you all for being here with us today and for having such great questions for our speakers and listening so intently um that does conclude our speaker session but I hope you have a great rest of your time at cgiu and thank you so much for joining us I guess one one
last thing can we just really go quickly and find where we can where they can find us yes half the story at Living Like Lars mine's at Joelle Breville so just my name at Abe Lopez like my name thank you thank you all [Applause]
Comments
'Promosm'