An estimated 2,500 people visited the upper school campus on Oct. 9 for the inaugural Harker Day, which combined two Harker traditions – the Family & Alumni Picnic and Homecoming – into a full day of games, food, sports and more.
Attendees traversed the campus, playing a variety of games, including Dance Dance Revolution, air hockey and Skee-Ball. Ms. Carly’s Café, Yoshi and ABVE the Basics served many different kinds of food throughout the day and people packed the Patil Theater to watch performances from lower, middle and upper school performing arts groups. Mini Cat Town, a San Jose-based cat rescue organization, had one of the more popular attractions at the event, as guests flocked there to play with adorable kittens.
Students in attendance were glad to see the community reunite in person after so many months away. “I think the community bonding here is a really nice thing,” said Harshini Chaturdevala, grade 10. “Everyone from all the campuses getting together, it’s a really fun experience.”
Loren Due MS ’85, who lounged at the special alumni meetup area, enjoyed returning to Harker to see “all the teachers and students and staff. It’s great seeing all the activities here.” Due noted that he had seen how the original Family & Alumni Picnic evolved and looked forward to seeing what was in store for Harker Day. “It’s a good carryover from Howard Nichols’ original idea of bringing a community together,” he said.
In the afternoon, the Harker Athletic Hall of Fame induction ceremony took place, honoring Cole Davis ’10, Drew Goldstein ’13 and Jessica Khojasteh ’11 for their athletic achievements as well as the example they set in becoming global citizens.
In addition to the Homecoming football game, the JV and varsity boys water polo, JV and varsity girls volleyball and varsity girls water polo teams were also in competition, with fans showing their support. Varsity boys and girls water polo, JV boys water polo and JV girls volleyball all picked up wins, while varsity girls volleyball fell to Castilleja.
Toward the evening, guests moved to Davis Field for the start of the 2021 Homecoming festivities, including the tug-of-war contest between the freshman and the sophomores, which was won by the Class of 2024. After two intense quarters of football between the Eagles and visitors Marina High School, audiences enjoyed performances by the Harker cheer squad and the Harker Dance Company and watched the tug-of-war finals between the classes of 2022 and 2025, in which the seniors emerged victorious. The Homecoming game ended with the Eagles falling to Marina with a final score of 26-42.
Today, Harker celebrated the birthday of Howard Nichols (1940-2008), the former Harker president who with his wife, Diana, was instrumental in developing Harker into the school it is today. Every year, the community celebrates Howard’s birthday, which falls on Oct. 10, by enjoying chocolate chip cookies, a reference to his practice of keeping a jar of cookies in his office to let passersby know that he was always available for a chat. During the day, students also learned about Howard’s life and accomplishments. At the morning middle school meeting, the student leadership council gave a special presentation on Howard, and lower school teachers used their homeroom periods to teach students about his vision and leadership.
Young theater enthusiasts returned to upper school campus this summer for another run of Summer @ The Conservatory, during which students in a variety of grade and experience levels learned the fundamentals and finer points of performing for stage and screen.
The first session was a three-day course on screen acting, in which attendees underwent training in various film acting techniques and principles. “Students spent the first two days learning the art of how to act on camera and how it’s different from acting in on stage,” said performing arts chair and Summer @ the Conservatory artistic director Laura Lang-Ree. “They are on camera from day one, learning the nuances of being a film actor in real time.”
Students also did screen tests and created a short film on day three of the workshop. “They have a whole full shoot day on the third day, where they are filmed on-set,” said Lang-Ree.
In July, Summer @ The Conservatory featured a three-week session that included Conservatory Presents for grades 5-9 and Conservatory Intensive for grades 9-12. Students from each group auditioned for roles in productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “In the Village of the Brothers Grimm” and “Star-Cross Lovers,” which were all performed on the final day of the program.
The plays performed by the students were chosen by directors, who looked for works that would be both fun and appropriately challenging. “We love to pick things that will excite our students and challenge them in their acting world,” said Ellie Lang-Ree ’19, who directed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the Conservatory Presents program. Directors also teach theater classes in the mornings and offer support to students in their learning. Students also dove into the study of musical theater, including dances from musicals such as “Hamilton.” “They got a taste of a bunch of different musical theater styles,” said Brandi Reinhard, a director who graduated from Chapman University with a BFA in theater performance.
The Conservatory Intensive program was open by audition only to students entering grades 9-12 who wished to deepen their knowledge of theater and expand their acting skills into new territory. This year’s students explored concepts including comedia – a style of three-act play from the Spanish Golden Age that incorporated comedic elements – and abstract forms of theater. “This particular group is really close,” said Laura Lang-Ree, “and they get into skills that are appropriate for their age level. Summer @ the Conservatory grows with our students and our performers love to return year after year, growing as theater artists.”
The program also received visits from industry professionals, who delivered special workshops. Improv performer Justin Smith, who has worked with the Upright Citizens Brigade and Second City, returned to deliver another improv workshop, and actor Fred Cross, whose credits include “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “The Office,” gave a workshop on film acting.
Live music is returning to Harker, as the 2021-22 season of the Harker Concert Series kicks off Nov. 5 with an appearance by Grammy-award winning drummer Jared Schonig, who has recorded and performed with instrumentalists including Nicholas Payton, Lonnie Smith, Donny McCaslin, Miho Hazama and Ernie Watts, as well as vocalists including Broadway legend Kristen Chenoweth, Emmy and Tony award winner Cynthia Erivo and Welsh singer-songwriter Donna Lewis. He has also released five albums as co-leader of The Wee Trio, garnering praise from respected publications such as Downbeat and All About Jazz.
The Emerald Brass Quintet, made up of graduates of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., will perform Feb. 4. Since forming in 2006, EBQ has performed with highly respected ensembles including Canadian Brass and the Eastman Wind Ensemble. They also have been featured guests at the Gualala Arts Center Concert Series and have appeared on WXXI 91.5’s “Backstage Pass,” as well as the 2009 Brass in Frankenwald festival in Hof, Germany. Their first album, “Danzón,” was released in November 2020. Individually, EBQ members have performed at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room and with orchestras all over the country.
The final act of the season will be the Daedalus Quartet, which has been collecting accolades around the world for 20 years. Winners of the 2001 Banff International String Quartet Competition, the Daedalus Quartet have performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Vienna’s Musikverein, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and many more prestigious venues throughout the world. The New Yorker called them “a fresh and vital young participant in what is a golden age of American string quartets,” and The New York Times has praised their interpretations of Haydn, Beethoven, Berg and Dutilleux.
Admission to each Harker Concert Series event will be $25, and concerts will be held at the Rothschild Performing Arts Center at the upper school campus. A 6 p.m. reception with hors d’oeuvres and beverages will be held before every concert, which will start at 7 p.m. in the Patil Theater.
For the safety of Harker’s guests, ticket sales and seating will be adjusted to comply with any event capacity and/or social distancing protocols in place at the time of ticket sales. Receptions at each event will be held outdoors. Face coverings are expected to be required while attendees are indoors. Attendees will be informed of any updates to face covering requirements.
Every year, Harker employees who have been with the school for five years receive a special pin as thanks for their years of service to the community. A new diamond is set into these pins every five years to signify the employees’ continued dedication. This year, 70 employees were honored by receiving new pins or having new diamonds placed.
They are:
45 Years
Carol Parris, Modern and Classical Languages Department Chair, Grades 1-8
40 Years
Mike Bassoni, Facilities Director
30 Years
Pete Anderson, Physical Education Department, Grades 6-8
Pam Dickinson, Director, Office of Communication
Georgie Maddams, Corporate Receptionist and Administrative Associate
Steve Martin, Executive Director of Food Service
25 Years
Heather Armada, Director of Transportation
Joe Chung, Director of ELI and LS Summer Activity Program
Brian Larsen, K-12 Production Manager and Upper School Technical Theater Teacher
Diana Moss, Spanish Teacher, Upper School,
Dan Rohrer, Facilities Manager, Lower School
Karriem Stinson, Assistant Athletic Director, Lower and Middle School
Larry Washington, Security Officer
20 Years
Anita Chetty, Science Department Chair, Grades 9-12
Beverley Manning, English Teacher, Upper School
Lisa Masoni, Latin Teacher, Middle School
Brigid Miller, English Teacher, Upper School
Raul Rios, Shipping and Receiving Associate, Upper School
15 Years
Victor Adler, Mathematics Teacher, Upper School
Melinda Gonzales, Academic Counselor
Patricia Andrews, Admission Associate, Middle School
Gayle Calkins, Assistant to Academic Counselors and MS Director of Global Education
Jeannette Fernandez, Mathematics Teacher, Upper School
Colin Goodwin, Grade 4 Teacher
Shelby Guarino, Grade 5 English Teacher
Matthew Harley, Biology Teacher, Upper School
Louis Hoffman, Instrumental Music Teacher, Lower School
Sandra Ignacio, Accounts Payable Specialist
Beatriz Justo, Kitchen Aide ll
Desiree Mitchell, Marketing Manager, Office of Communication
Jaron Olson, Director of Sports Medicine and Sports Performance
Alejandro Osorio, Tech Services Manager
Gustavo Parra Rivera, Catering Manager, Food Service
Pauline Paskali, English Department Chair
Jared Ramsey, Grade 5 U.S. History Teacher
Kate Schafer, Biology Teacher, Upper School
Troy Thiele, Director, Standardized Testing and Scheduling
Lauri Vaughan, Campus Librarian, Upper School
10 Years
Kellie Binney, Vocal Music Teacher Lower School
Imelda Cantu, Grade 1 Teacher
Katherine Chi, Kindergarten Teacher
Arabelle Chow, English Department Chair, Middle School
Chrissy Drummer, HR Generalist and Recruiting Specialist
Jennifer Hargreaves, Admission Director, Upper School
Marjorie Hazeltine, English Teacher, Middle School
Lorena Martinez, Director Enrichment and Supervision, Middle School
Rebecca McCartney, Senior Graphic Designer
Sejal Mehta, Grade 2 Teacher
Kristin Morgensen, Biology Teacher, Middle School
Lola Muldrew, Mathematics Teacher, Upper School
Charlie Ward, Cook ll, Food Service
Tor Warmdahl, Director of Security
Larissa Weaver, Grade 1 Teacher
Five Years
Michael Acheatel, Business and Entrepreneurship Teacher, Upper School
Rupa Banerjee, Kitchen Aide, Food Service
Andrea Bo, Grade 3 English Teacher
Peter Vaqueros, Custodian, Facilities Department
Paul Duran, Dishwasher, Food Service
Fred Nae, Bus Driver, Transportation Department
Isaiah Ornelas, Kitchen Aide, Food Service
Pamela Paredes, Teacher Aide, Lower School
Sara Pawloski, History and Social Science Teacher, Middle School
Kevin Reduta, Assistant Director Enrichment and Supervision, Middle School
On Tuesday, Zoom CEO and Harker parent Eric Yuan made a special Q&A appearance for the Harker community. In a conversation with Brian Yager, Harker’s head of school, Yuan covered a range of topics, including how Zoom handled the sudden massive increase of users last year, the importance of a healthy company culture and lessons he has found helpful in his career.
Zoom, founded in 2011, was envisioned as a company primarily for enterprise and government customers. When the COVID-19 pandemic made working at home the new normal, Zoom was faced with a mass influx of new “consumer use” cases, Yuan said. The company suddenly faced an increase of 30 times the normal number of users, and employees worked tirelessly to prevent outages and improve the user experience.
“The usage is coming from all over the world, so that’s why our team, we were working extremely hard,” Yuan said. He recalled having as many as 19 Zoom meetings a day, and enduring “more sleepless nights than at any time in my career.”
Adapting Zoom to non-enterprise and non-government use also meant dealing with new security challenges. Inexperienced Zoom users, for instance, would sometimes mistakenly post Zoom meeting IDs to their social media accounts, inadvertently bringing in malicious users. “But we learned from that,” Yuan said. We doubled down, tripled down on privacy and security.”
He credited Zoom’s ability to weather these storms to the company’s culture. “As the CEO of the company, my number one priority is to think about everyday how to make sure our employees are happy,” he said. To this end, employees volunteer to organize events and initiatives, including reimbursements for employees who purchase books for themselves and their families. Investing in company culture, Yuan said, helped Zoom greatly when the company was at its busiest during the pandemic. “I did not receive any complaints,” he said. “All of our employees worked so hard around the clock, every day.”
In considering lessons that proved important over the course of his career, Yuan remembered his father’s advice to work hard and remain humble. He also recalled how important gratitude was to his grandmother. “That’s probably the number one thing that really matters from my perspective,” he said, adding that a lack of gratitude can lead to arrogance, which inhibits progress. “We’re all working very hard, and whenever we make progress, first of all we are so grateful for our customers’ support. I’m so grateful for our employees’ hard work. I think gratitude is extremely important for any leader, for any company, to make progress.”
From April 9-10, Harker hosted the 15th annual Research Symposium, inviting the Harker community to experience the breadth of its research opportunities by viewing student presentations and hearing keynote speakers deliver fascinating talks on the theme of this year’s event: artificial intelligence, robotics and automation. The 2020 symposium was canceled due to safety concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year’s symposium was held virtually with all presentations, keynote talks and exhibitions delivered via Zoom, requiring impressive coordination between event organizers, presenters and technology staff.
Throughout the two-day event, middle and upper school students delivered poster presentations on research they had conducted on topics such as environmental science, physics, astronomy and medicine. The presentations were held in special breakout rooms, with plenty of time scheduled for each speaker. Corporate exhibitors – which included Microsoft, NVidia, Oculus and ZeroUI – each received their own room that visitors could drop into at their leisure, mimicking the atmosphere of the exhibition area in previous years.
The event kicked off on Friday with Wayne Liu of Perfect Corp, whose app YouCam Makeup allows users to demo beauty products using artificial intelligence and augmented reality technology, and was named one of Time Magazine’s best innovations of 2020. Liu provided an overview of the history of artificial intelligence and how it developed into the technology used by YouCam Makeup. “Facial recognition is not new,” he said, “However, to get to the point where you can [try on makeup virtually] … the technology needs to be very precise.” To achieve this precision, Perfect Corp gathered and analyzed millions of hair color and skin tone samples, and their app uses 3,900 polygon meshes to achieve accurate results.
Dr. Ben Chung, associate professor of urology at Stanford’s School of Medicine, provided an overview of robotics-enabled surgery and how it has been used to make certain very difficult procedures much easier and safer, such as the removal of prostate cancer. He also showed footage of his own procedures using surgical robots in which he removed a tumor from a kidney. “Where the robotic platform really helps us is the ease of the suture,” he said. “Making sure that your suturing is exact is really important because you need to make sure that the patient doesn’t bleed afterwards.” As the technology of robotic surgery evolves, Dr. Chung said, it will be applicable to more situations, such as conducting surgery over long distances in situations such as on a battlefield or in a space station.
Any discussion of artificial intelligence and robotics invariably touches on the legal and ethical aspects of these fields, and Ryan Calo’s presentation on legal rulings on the use of robots was a great forum for the topic. Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, explained that “robots have been with us for a very long and so we shouldn’t really be surprised that occasionally they have led to legal disputes.” These disputes extend as far back as the 1880s, when it was questioned whether using artificial wooden coins in vending machines constituted fraud. In the 1950s, courts found that robots could not be defined as dolls because they were not representations of human beings and thus could not be subjected to the same tariffs. Present day debates have centered on the ownership of artifacts retrieved by robots from shipwrecks and how to prosecute crimes in which machines are used to steal from homes.
Fitting for the symposium’s 15th anniversary, this year’s alumni keynote was delivered by Yi Sun ‘06, who 15 years ago was Harker’s first Science Talent Search finalist and a member of Harker’s first US Math Olympiad team, winning a silver medal. In his talk Sun, who now works as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s department of statistics, explained the process of how machine learning tasks often involve discerning signals from “noisy observations.” Using detailed diagrams, Sun discussed the mathematical concepts underlying the problem and how they are used to process data for electron microscopy.
The final keynote speaker for this year was Chelsea Finn, assistant professor in computer science at Stanford University, who presented on the process of teaching robots how to learn and solve problems the way humans do. Finn noted that while it was possible to teach robots to do certain tasks – such as piecing together a toy airplane or place shapes into a cube – through trial and error, these robots became highly specialized due to gathering data from very controlled environments using specific tools. Teaching robots how to perform “simpler, but broader” tasks with a greater range of applications is much more difficult, and Finn explained the methods she and her team have used to create robot “generalists.”
DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang today gifted $10 million to The Harker School to establish The Alumni Scholarship Endowment Fund. Fang is a 2010 graduate of the private K-12 school, located in the heart of Silicon Valley.
The fund will create a permanent legacy at The Harker School to provide need-based financial aid to students who qualify for admission, but otherwise could not afford tuition and fees. It will support Harker’s commitment to diversity at the school.
“A great education is one of the best ways to even the playing field for underprivileged kids,” Fang said. “I hope this endowment can help families from underserved communities achieve the American dream.”
Harker’s Head of School, Brian Yager, expressed pride in Fang’s efforts to improve access to education at Harker. “Andy is doing something of profound impact for the school, and his vision, forethought and overwhelming generosity will have a significant effect on Harker and the community for generations to come.”
Board of Trustee Chair and ’79 alumnus, Albert Zecher, Jr. added, “Andy’s commitment to creating this historic endowment for scholarships at Harker is inspiring. As a young alumnus, his philanthropy is especially laudable.”
Fang cited his experience at Harker as a motivating force. “With my philanthropy, I was looking to focus first on an institution that I knew could help the community, based on my personal experiences,” he said. “I’m thankful for the education I received at Harker, and I want to provide a way for more students to get access to Harker’s world-class education.”
Kim Lobe, Harker’s Director of Advancement, added, “Increasing our endowment is an important goal of our strategic plan. We couldn’t be more grateful that Andy has established this new Alumni Scholarship Endowment fund to inspire others to join him in giving to this very worthy cause.”
Fang co-founded DoorDash in 2013 with Stanford University classmates Evan Moore, Stanley Tang and Tony Xu. The company went public in December 2020.
On March 13, students and faculty from Bay Area schools attended the Student Diversity Leadership Gathering, hosted by Harker and led by Rodney Glasgow, head of school at Sandy Spring Friends School in, Sandy Spring, Md. A well-regarded speaker and facilitator in the areas of diversity and social justice, Glasgow delivered a keynote at the start of the event, detailing the ways in which his identity as a Black man changes both how the world sees him and how he sees and acts in the world.
He spoke on how the mask he wears as a precaution during the pandemic has hidden what he feels is his best feature, his smile, which he said puts others at ease. When wearing his mask, he said, “No one can really tell who I am. I’m suddenly every Black man at once. They can’t see that I’m a head of school. They can’t see that I’m an Ivy League graduate. They can’t see that I’m smiling. They can’t see that I’m kind. They can only see that I’m Black.”
Glasgow recalled instances in which he found himself centering his identity, such as when he was interviewing for a job and received half-hearted greetings or was grilled with questions in private to verify that he had graduated from Harvard. “This is an identity moment,” he said. This is not actually a Harvard moment. I’m sitting in a Black moment. I’m sitting in a poor moment. I’m sitting in a you’re-too-close moment. I’m sitting in a is-that-a-mask-you’re-wearing moment.”
In one powerful moment, Glasgow told the story of a Black parent who was detained while waiting with his daughter for the bus to arrive outside the school. After seeing the officer pass by once in his vehicle, he told his daughter to be ready, because he sensed the officer would return. “Could you imagine living a life where the police slowly creep by you and you don’t think, ‘thank goodness they’re going on to solve a crime, thank goodness they’re going on to keep the neighborhood safe,’ you’re thinking, ‘let’s just get ready because I think they’re coming back?’” Glasgow said.
Although the situation was resolved, the parent was upset that none of the other parents present during the encounter checked on him or his daughter. “When we unmask identity, all that’s really sitting there in the center is this deep, deep humanity,” Glasgow continued. “It’s this sense of, they didn’t treat me like a person; they didn’t take care of my daughter like she was human. She had to get on the bus and wonder, do they still see me as the person they saw yesterday?”
Following the keynote, adults and student attendees were put into groups to discuss identity and conduct group activities around their feelings on their own identities and how they affect their perceptions of the world. The attendees later met as a group to talk about what they had learned and what elements of the attitudes displayed during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that they saw in their school communities.
Jazz pianist Taylor Eigsti appeared via Zoom Friday night for the third event of the 2021 Virtual Harker Concert Series. Speaking with longtime friend Dave Hart, Harker’s upper school instrumental music chair and artistic director of the Harker concert series, Eigsti got attendees caught up on his recent activities, showing off the setup he had put together for online lessons. “I spent my entire life not doing online lessons,” he said. “It was something that I was pretty staunch about.”
With in-person lessons now infeasible due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Eigsti spent considerable time preparing for online lessons, and expressed amusement at his newfound obsession with cameras and live sound. During one of the very few live gigs he played in the past year, he found himself chatting with the sound crew. “I’m picking the brains of the sound engineers,” he said. “It really is a deep dive into all of the other things since we have to do all of this stuff ourselves now.”
Discussing life as a member pf legendary trumpeter Chris Botti’s band, Eigsti stressed the importance of making time for oneself. “If you’re doing 270 gigs a year in one band, it’s hard to do anything else. You’ve got to balance it out with some white space,” he said.
As a bandleader himself, Eigsti learned a great deal from how Botti led his ensembles. “He just has a real structure to the show. It’s like a well-oiled machine,” he said, drawing a distinction between Botti and the way he had been accustomed to performing different music every night.
Eigsti’s next album, titled “Tree Falls,” is scheduled for release on May 21 through GSI Records. The first single, a cover of Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark,” features former “American Idol” contestant Casey Abrams. “This is the project I’m the most proud of in my whole life,” Eigsti said. “I haven’t released an album in 11 years, so it’s wild to release an album now.”
His other major project is a collaboration with the Community School of Music and Arts called “Imagine Our Future,” in which he has been commissioned to write a piece based on ideas sent to him by Bay Area students. “When I’m composing I really like to take a lot of ideas that could really come from anywhere,” he said. “This is definitely a little bit more of a challenge than I thought it would be. It’s really interesting to see how it’s naturally coming together.”
Answering a question about compositions played by his band, Eigsti noted “it’s different every time. Sometimes we’ll do a show and everyone in the band might have some tune that’s written by them.
“I tend to like to play the music of my friends and also my own music and different songs that people know that could be covers or jazz standards,” he added.
On the process of composing, Eigsti said he believes “only 10 percent of what we write is actually good, so you might as well just keep writing.” He also encouraged exploring many sources for inspiration and experimenting with ideas. “Try things out in different keys,” he said. “Sometimes we think of ideas where their home is somewhere else.”