In his recently filmed 2017 TED Talk “The Boost Students Need to Overcome Obstacles,” Anindya Kundu develops a theory based on students who have struggled getting on the right path and what they do to get back on the right path in a seven-minute video. Anindya Kundu is a sociology teacher at New York University Steinhardt and takes the stage confidently with a clear concise purpose to his speech. He thinks grit and perseverance is not enough to overcome devastating obstacles in struggling young lives, but that people need to develop their agency to succeed and overcome. He talks about two examples of people’s lives that had to overcome challenges and obstacles to get their life back on track. Anindya Kundu starts off his speech talking…show more content… One of Anindya’s mentors, Dr. Angela Duckworth, is a psychologist at University of Pennsylvania who developed the word grit and understanding it as a core value. Anindya agree with the ideal of grit but does not think it is enough to have a specific high degree of success. He then starts to describe his two real life examples. Tyrique, twenty-two-year-old, who was arrested for armed robbery, started to work hard and develop his agency in prison. He was introduced to mentoring youth and found the reasons why he failed as a teen. He got into bad crowds and it only spiraled off from there. For his other real-life example, Vanessa was a single mom at age 15 and suffered many kidney problems for over ten years. She found a program called the Vocational Foundation that offered her 20 dollars every other week, a MetroCard and her first experiences with a computer. She made the most out of these little resources and managed to get her associate’s degree and then moved onto a more elite college to better her life and future. Anindya’s point he was trying to get across is that grit did not get these two people where they are today. Mentorship and opportunities led these people to build their agency which led to continued development. Their network of people begins to develop rapidly which led to endless success of getting into law school or obtaining their master’s
