On Feb. 7, the Julia McWilliams Child ’34 Campus Center was full of attendees for Amplify Day, an annual competition focused on public speaking and public writing. Tables outside the Carroll Room were stacked with op-eds and field guides, submissions to the Public Writing and Wildcard categories respectively. Inside the Carroll Room, participants in the Public Speaking category gave short TED-style talks on topics ranging from healthcare literacy to the dangers of flushable wipes.
The Amplify Competition has been run by the Wurtele Center for Collaborative Leadership since its founding six years ago. “Seeing the energy behind that and thinking about it as a form of leadership, we decided… to create a platform where students could take the work they were doing and bring it into a more public space,” said Erin Cohn, Director of the Wurtele Center.
Each student submitting to the competition is allowed to write or speak on a topic of their choosing, and Cohn encourages diversity in topics. “I just love giving students a chance to share their knowledge… and that they can do that in multiple genres,” she said. “Smithies are nerdy in the best way… (Amplify) creates an opportunity to take that and transform it into leadership in a way that’s very Smith.”
The competition features three categories: Public Speaking, Public Writing and a Wildcard. This year, the Wildcard category was Field Guides, which their website describes as “a practical, often portable resource designed to help people identify, understand and navigate unfamiliar environments or subjects.”
For field guides in particular, the Wurtele Center reached out to professors to collaborate with. “We had (a number of) classes assign a field guide and brought one of the Wurtele Center staff in to talk to students,” Cohn said.
The judging panels for the individual categories are made up of past student winners and faculty from a variety of disciplines. At the awards ceremony at the end of the day, each panel awarded three prizes of $500 each to submissions in their category, and an additional $200 prize was awarded to the People’s Choice winner in each category.
This year’s winners discussed a variety of topics. In Public Speaking, Akshita Krishnan ’28 spoke on the experience applying for American citizenship and the responsibilities America has to its immigrants, also winning the People’s Choice award in the category. Brooke Testa ’26 discussed how flushable wipes contribute to significant issues regarding climate change, public health, and infrastructure damage. Suner Chopra ’29 talked about racial representation in media and how it impacts children’s psychological development.
In the Public Writing category, Phia Anderson ’26 won for “The Responsibility of the United States to Countries it has Destabilized: Accepting Those Who Choose to Leave Them,” Hodan Ali ’27 won for “What It Means to Study Medicine When Your Community Is Treated as a Statistic,” also taking home the People’s Choice award in the category, and Liliana Katz-Hollander ’29 won for “A “Good” Politician: A Conversation with Senator Barbara Mikulski about the Past and the Future.”
For the Field Guides, Hannah Carleton ’26 won with “The Physiology of a Hot Air Balloon,”
Kristin Botley ’27 won with “Marching to the Beat of Freedom: A Field Guide to Black Protest Music,” and Úna Gogstetter ’27J won with “Understanding Language-Culture Connections: A Field Guide.” The People’s Choice award went to Nour Alhuda Farha ’29 for “Contributing to Social Justice.”
When it comes to participating in the competition, Cohn emphasizes the support networks in place, especially in terms of public speaking. “We really give folks some training in public speaking, so it’s a good opportunity to try it out,” said Cohn.
The Wurtele Center offers workshops with Susan Daniels, associate professor of Public Speaking at Amherst College, to work with participants on editing their speeches and perfecting their stage presence. Daniels also provides methods to deal with stress and stage fright, conducting a brief anxiety-reducing warmup during the event’s dress rehearsal earlier in the day.
Amplify’s goal is to provide students with help finding their own voices and sharing the causes they care about with a broader audience.
“I want students who hear the word leadership and immediately go, ‘that’s not for me’, to just get curious about what we’re up to,” Cohn said. “What we care about is helping students find their unique way of making an impact.”
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