In the spring, dozens of upper school foreign language students were recognized for their high achievements by being inducted to the national honor societies for the respective languages they studied.
Inductees to the French National Honor Society were: Jennifer Dai ’11; Josh Batra, Rohith Bhethanabotla, Shivani Chandrashekaran, Stephanie Chen, Katie Gu, Angela Ma, Patricia Allison Sun, Claudia Tischler and Justin Young, all grade 10; Drew Goldstein, Cecilia Lang-Ree, Victoria Lin, Rebecca Liu Huang, Dorsa Massihpour and Warren Zhang, all grade 11; and grade 12 students Rohit Sanbhadti and Angela Singh.
Japanese National Honor Society inductees were: Killian Burke, Jeffrey Hanke, Kimberly Ma, Vikram Naidu, Daniel Pak and Brandon Yang, grade 10; Crystal Chen and Shilpa Nataraj, grade 12; and Aileen Wen ’11.
Students inducted to the Spanish National Honor Society were: Kevin Moss and Vikram Sundar, grade 10; Neeraj Baid, Rohan Chandra, Madeleine Dawson, Molly Ellenberg, Amy Gendotti, Neel Jani, Nayeon Kim, Joy Li, Sumit Minocha, Payal Modi, Nikhil Panu, Shelby Rorabaugh, Alison Rugar, Nina Sabharwal, Maya Sathaye, Pooja Shah, Wendy Shwe and Sarina Vij, grade 11; Sanjana Baldwa, Kirsten Herr, Cole Manaster, Maverick McNealy, Max Quertermous, grade 12; and Nikunj Donde ’11.
Inductees to the National Latin Honor Society were: Sarika Bajaj, Nikhil Dilip, Kevin Duraiswamy, Urvi Gupta, Helena Huang, Saachi Jain, Zina Jawadi, Connie Li, Emily Lin, Mary Liu, Sreyas Misra, Suchita Nety, Brian Tuan, Andrew Wang and Sean Youn, grade 10; Erik Anderson, Nisha Bhikha, Jenny Chen, Jonathan Cho, Nik Datuashvili, Rahul Desirazu, Richard Fan, Akarsha Gulukota, Andrew Luo, Ramakrishnan Menon, Daphne Millard, Sean Nierat, Laura Pedrotti, Sahithya Prakash, Anuj Sharma, Pranav Sharma, Shannon Su, Ashvin Swaminathan, Ravi Tadinada and Molly Wolfe, grade 11; Eric Henshall, Alex Hsu, Vivian Li, Jessica Lin and Samantha Walker, grade 12; and Justine Liu ’11.
On Sat., Oct. 22, from 8 a.m.-2 p.m., Harker will host TEDx Harker School, an independently organized TED event on the theme of youth entrepreneurship, at Nichols Hall on the upper school campus, located at 500 Saratoga Ave. in San Jose. The event’s keynote speaker will be Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist, former chief evangelist at Apple and the author of 10 books. His current project is the “online magazine rack” Alltop.com.
Other speakers include Serious Energy CEO Kevin Surace, named one of the top 15 innovators of the decade by CNBC, Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur since 1994, Rahim Fazal, who sold his first online business during his senior year of high school, and Karl Mehta, Ernst & Young’s 2010 Northern California Entrepreneur of the Year.
TEDx Harker School, organized by students Neeraj Baid and Neel Bhoopalam, both grade 11, is open only to high school students. Those who wish to attend can register at the TEDx Harker School website. The registration price includes lunch and refreshments throughout the day.
Student Ramya Rangan, grade 12, will head off to Barcelona on Oct. 12 to present at the DREAM6 (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods) conference. Rangan will present her research project, titled “Splice Site Discovery Using RNA-Seq Data,” which she completed during a summer stint with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computational Biology group. She will be the only high school student presenting at the conference.
“I’m excited to have the opportunity to practice talking at a real research conference!” Rangan exclaimed. “I’m also excited about being able to share my research with a group of people that can discuss their ideas with me.” She is hopeful that the researchers at the conference, who have performed similar research, will be able to offer help with her future research endeavors.
Jeffrey Kwong, grade 12, has been accepted to the National High School Honors Orchestra as a cellist. Kwong will be the first Harker student represented in the orchestra, and in late March, will join nearly 100 other musicians from across the United States for a performance at the National Orchestra Festival in Atlanta.
Kwong has been involved in Harker’s music program since grade 6, and is also a Conservatory Certificate candidate. Orchestra director Chris Florio said, “Jeffrey has been a tremendous player in our orchestra program for the last seven years. He placed first last year in a state competition run by ASTA (America String Teachers Association) and is a member of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra along with five other Harker students.”
In late September, 81 upper school students came together at the Honors and Ethics Conference to discuss difficult situations that can occur on campus. Each advisory sent one student volunteer (and one advisory sent two students). Once they arrived, students were split into groups of eight, with two students from each grade level. The students sat at round tables with a moderator and listened as Evan Barth, the dean of upper school students, told them that the situations they were about to presented with were realistic, but were not real.
The students then heard three different case studies: one about two students talking between periods about a test they’d taken, and having a third student approach who had not yet taken the test; another concerning a plagiarism case with an outside confrontation; and finally, a property issues case.
The tables the students sat at were not unlike the Honor Council, a group of three faculty and 10 students whose mission is to uphold the school’s honor code. All the case studies were designed to create the same gray areas the Honor Council must discuss, and inspire conversations that were, Barth says, “entirely organic. The adults involved in the conference had to keep their agendas out of it.”
The initial inspiration for the conference came from a business ethics conference Barth attended in Arizona. Eventually, he’d like to involve other schools besides Harker in the conference so students can discuss the similarities and differences between what they face on campus, and how they’re dealing with those issues.
After the students finished discussing their three case studies, they had 15 minutes of silent reflection, and then a chance to share those reflections with the group. Barth recalls one student in particular who said that even though some cases started out seeming very black-and-white, there ended up being many gray areas, and all those areas needed to be discussed and analyzed.
“The more people talk about these things,” Barth said, “the more the level of overall integrity, both on campus and in life, has to go up. People get very excited and into that feeling of wanting to make changes while they’re at a conference, but then they leave and go back to the grind or back to their homework and that fades. The goal is to take a couple of those moments when you felt that buzz and implement them in day-to-day life.”
This article originally appeared in the fall 2011 Harker Quarterly
Good morning. I’d like to welcome the Board of Trustees, administration, faculty and staff, and the classes of 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012 to the Matriculation Ceremony. For those of you who are new to the school, and some of you who are not new, my name is Christopher Nikoloff, head of school at Harker. I oversee operations on all three campuses, but my office is located on this campus, where I really enjoy getting to know you. Please say hello when we see each other in the hallways, and feel free to stop by my office for cookies anytime. It is better for me if you eat them – otherwise, I will!
I am honored to have the opportunity to open the new academic year with this Matriculation address. Also, I am sure you will be relieved to hear that I am continuing the tradition of brevity, confining my talk to one page of single-spaced, size-twelve font. So far I have received no complaints about this tradition.
As many of you know, this year The Harker School will be up for re-accreditation by its member organizations, the California Association of Independent Schools and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. For those of you who love acronyms, these organizations are known as CAIS and WASC. Joining these organizations creates a pool of professionals who can share resources and promote standards and growth.
Our full six-year term of accreditation expires this year, which is the reason for the re-accreditation. The entire school community participated in a self-study last year, the results of which are shared with the visiting accreditation committee. Some of your fellow students participated in that self-study. My committee, which focused on the school’s mission and philosophy, enjoyed invaluable contributions from two students, for instance. As you know, our mission and philosophy statements emphasize love of learning, kindness, well-roundedness and community. The Matriculation Ceremony today is about committing ourselves to these values.
The accreditation team will take a good look at our mission statement. Some of you may have noticed that this statement is inside every classroom. Please nudge your teacher if his or her classroom is missing one. Tell them that I sent you. One of the critical areas the visiting committee assesses is whether or not we do what we say we do in our mission and philosophy statements. If they grant a full six-year term they are essentially saying three things: we have a sound mission, we do what we say we do in the mission, and we can monitor our own growth as a community.
Our mission and philosophy statements look very much like other independent schools, so we do not anticipate many surprises there. The essence of any school is how it lives up to its mission. Schools are like thumb prints: each different, each special. I believe that we live up to our mission in unique ways. I also believe that the life of our mission is in the often small, unheralded actions that together create the delicate and unmistakable ecosystem we call Harker.
When a student picks up a piece of trash that is not his or holds a door for a stranger, then we are living up to our mission. When students are inspired to help those who are less fortunate, we are living up to our mission. When students choose not to bully or tease, or stand up against bullying or teasing, then our mission is alive and well. When students choose academic integrity, hard work and good cheer, then we are living up to our mission. When students push themselves to learn and grow, then we are reflecting our mission. When students choose cooperation over competition, then we are living our mission. When students tell me that their favorite class is also their most difficult, then I see a sign of our mission.
Accreditation is a lot like the movie ‘The Wizard of Oz.” If you remember the movie, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Lion and Dorothy all look for the Wizard of Oz to find for themselves, respectively, a brain, a heart, courage and a way home. Well, we learn throughout the movie that the Scarecrow has smarts, the Tin Man has heart, the Lion courage and Dorothy a way home all along. None of them need the Wizard for any of these things. Sure, he can give them a piece of paper, but that paper could not bestow on them what they already have. Similarly, if our mission is alive and well, accreditation cannot give us what we already have.
Visitors to the Harker campus usually say that the students are the most impressive, engaging part of their visit. The faculty and staff say that the students are the best part of their day. I believe that is because of the little things you do every day for their own sake, not for some result, that reflect the spirit of our mission statement. The values of love of learning, kindness, well-roundedness and community are alive and well because of the work you, the faculty and staff do each day.
On behalf of the Board of Trustees and the administration, I wish you a great year living up to the spirit of our mission. Thank you.
Distinguished Yale professors Meg Urry and Mark Saltzman appeared at Harker’s upper school campus on Sept. 25 for a special science symposium arranged for students interested in pursuing science in college. Harker’s impressive science background made Nichols Hall an ideal venue for the event. Both professors spoke to the audience about their areas of research at Yale. Saltzman, chair of the department of biomedical engineering, discussed improving methods of medical drug delivery, and Urry, chair of the department of physics, talked about her research of black holes.
On Sept. 21, the class of 2013 became this year’s dodgeball champions, defeating grades 10 and 12 as well as the faculty team. The juniors first played against the sophomores to resolve a controversy that arose the previous week, in which the result of sophomores versus juniors match was deemed unclear.
After their victory over the sophomores, the juniors beat the seniors and earned the privilege to face the faculty and staff team, who they also beat in two consecutive rounds. Grade 10 defeated the grade 9 team to take third overall in the competition.
Last weekend, The Harker School hosted more than 450 students, coaches and parents from various schools to participate in this year’s Nichols Invitational Debate Tournament at the upper school campus. Nearly every classroom and conference area was used to run the tournament. Because they represented the hosting school, Harker students were only permitted to compete in the policy debate. Harker students were nevertheless highly involved in the tournament, working hard to make sure the event ran smoothly.
Greg Achten, an upper school debate teacher, reported that the tournament “was a great success and we have received effusive praise from our guests about our hospitality and our facilities.” He went on to thank all involved for their participation and support.
The Harker School’s girls varsity tennis team went to Monterey in mid-September to compete with 15 other teams in the Santa Catalina Invitational, and for the first time in Harker history, brought home a first place victory. Senior Aranshi Kumar won first place at number four singles. At number one singles, co-captain Jenny Chen, grade 11, reached the semifinals, co-captain Tanya Piskun, grade 12, as well as Katia Mironova, grade 10, placed second in number one doubles along with number three singles player Daria Karakoulka, grade 11, and the number 3 doubles team of Ariana Shulman, grade 10, and Indica Sur, grade 11. Sahithya Prakash, grade 10, along with the doubles team of Sylvie Dobrota, grade 11, and Arden Hu, grade 9, reached the quarterfinals of number two singles and doubles, respectively.
Volleyball:
Harker girls volleyball defeated Saratoga High, King’s Academy and Fremont at freshmen, JV and varsity levels to sweep the entire week. Varsity is on a five-game win streak with a 5-2 overall record.
Water Polo:
Harker girls water polo went 1-3 at the Wilcox Tournament over the weekend, playing well against strong competition and defeating Lincoln 10-5 in the process. Keri Clifford, grade 11, had 13 goals in the tournament. Others chipping in were: Simy Bhagat, grade 12, Anna Levine, grade 10, Sonia Sidhu, grade 11, Delaney Martin, grade 9, Anushka Das, grade 9, Rachel Yanovsky, grade 11 and Daphne Millard, grade 11.
Harker’s varsity football team lost to Capuchino in mid-September, with a final score of 35-14. They dropped to 2-1 on the season.
The Mercury News Highlight Reel noted senior Daanish Jamal for his early-September performance against Emery, which included making three touchdowns and an interception.
Golf:
Girls golf lost by only four strokes to perennial league power Sacred Heart last week. But they bounced back to defeat Mercy the following day with Kristine Lin, grade 10, shooting a 36.
Alumni:
Crew:
Colby Rapson ’10 was in the Sept. 13 section of Movin’ On Up in the Mercury News for her amazing U.C. Berkeley crew accomplishments, which include being the first female coxswain recruited for a men’s team. Rapson had an incredible summer!
Cole Davis ’10 helped the Stanford swim team win the majority of their 11 events against Centenary in Lousiana in early September. Davis was one on a team of four newcomers to win the 200 Neely relay, en route to the fastest times in all 11 events. Davis also won the 50-free race. Stanford noted him as “one of the underclassmen who shined” at the event.