This past October, Morris Hills Class of 2015 alumnus Nick Fuentes-Zuluaga stepped onto the infamous TED Talk red dot. He shared with his audience a message shaped by his own personal experiences, especially the pitfalls: the importance of difficult conversations. He turned the tough conversations we all dread into a learning experience that is crucial to success.

Nick’s idea for his TED Talk came from recognizing a pattern in his own life. Whenever an uncomfortable conversation or topic came up, he avoided it. While it may have solved the problem for the time being, he quickly realized it didn’t actually help his situation. Hoping to find a better solution, he turned to something he knew well: machine learning. As a data scientist, he realized that the process of training a model was similar to the process of training himself to face these uncomfortable situations. This parallel helped him rethink how he handled conflict and communication, and ultimately became the base of his TED Talk.

Of course, like all hard things, preparing for his TED Talk wasn’t easy. He mentions rehearsing repeatedly, saying, “I saw myself on that stage a thousand times before the big night”. By the time he stepped onto the stage, it all became muscle memory, all thanks to the countless hours of practice he put in earlier.

Ultimately, Nick wanted listeners to leave with the idea that confronting hard conversations leads to growth and opportunity. He emphasized that while these moments can feel uncomfortable at the time, they lead to more clarity, stronger relationships, and long-term success. His goal was to reframe these challenging moments as something worth accepting and embracing instead of avoiding.

Nick credited much of his personal growth to his time at Morris Hills, and particularly, all the teachers who invested in him. He describes how teachers “like Dr. Smock, Mrs. Dalton, Mr. Ellis, and Mrs. Bohmer all took the time to always call me to the side, listen to me and my problems, and plant seeds of encouragement”, which he still remembers and learns from to this day.

Senora Dalton, one of the Spanish teachers here at Morris Hills, was able to attend his TED Talk. She talks about how one of the formative moments of his high school career took place while reading The Alchemist for her AP Spanish class. Nick particularly connected with the main character, Santiago, and the journey of discovery that he went on, and, as Senora Dalton notes, “starting from that point when he graduated, he took this big journey for himself where he was helping people and building houses and kind of went all over the country and wrote to me about it”. She describes how his own journey created the experiences that ultimately led to his discovery and philosophy, and emphasized how it really made her think about all the tough conversations she had been putting off.

For students who may aspire to be like Nick or want to build confidence on stage, Nick offered this advice: get out there and practice. He believed that anyone can find a way to practice, whether it be to “volunteer at a club, ask a teacher for permission to speak or present, volunteer at church, mosque, or your house of worship, make it a point to be in environments where you have to speak in front of others”. He adds that the learning doesn’t stop there. After, it’s important to look over it and think back to what you could have done differently. “Do this 10, 50, 100 times, you are guaranteed to get better at speaking”.