New York Times op-ed writer Thomas L. Friedman mentioned Harker’s Intel Talent Search finalist Namrata Anand, Gr. 12, in his March 20 column after attending the Intel awards dinner. In his column, he listed all of the 40 Intel finalists and spoke specifically on his discussion with Anand:
“Before the dinner started, each contestant stood by a storyboard explaining their specific project. Namrata Anand, a 17-year-old from The Harker School in California, patiently explained to me her research, which used spectral analysis and other data to expose information about the chemical enrichment history of ‘Andromeda Galaxy.’ I did not understand a word she said, but I sure caught the gleam in her eye.” The column also ran in the San Jose Mercury News.
The Winged Post and the online Web site, talonwp.com, have won a Crown Award from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association (CSPA) for its excellence in writing, coverage and content. The Crown Award, the highest recognition given annually by the CSPA, recognizes student print or online media for overall excellence and only 11 schools nationwide received Gold Crown awards for their Web sites. In addition, the Winged Post student newspaper received a Silver Crown for its efforts. Journalism teacher and advisor to the two publications, Chris Daren, traveled to New York with a group of students from the publication staffs to receive the awards at Columbia University.
With guidance and support from Daren, journalism students in both yearbook and newspaper have had opportunities to cover not only schoolwide events, but also interview celebrities and attend performance premieres. In early January, reporters talked to actor Harrison Ford, Senator Diane Feinstein, Mayor Gavin Newsom and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi at the San Francisco premiere of “Extraordinary Measures,” and Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried as they promoted their new movie, “Dear John.” In February, the Winged Post spent an afternoon with the cast of “Ovo,” the new Cirque de Soleil touring show, and reviewed the group’s San Jose premiere the following day.
Both Talon and the Winged Post have received a number of silver and gold medal awards from CSPA’s annual critique. Additionally, the Winged Post received the National Scholastic Press Associations Pacemaker award for excellence in 2008.
The new upper school library recently received $15,000 of additional funding thanks to a generous grant by U.S. Bank, which has been a strong supporter of Harker, making several grants in recent years. The Harker community extends its gratitude to U.S. Bank for supporting this landmark project!
Always enthusiastic about finding out the effects of their successful – $10,000 raised – fall fundraiser, Global Empowerment and Outreach club (GEO) members flocked to advisor Carol Zink’s room in early March to take part in a live video chat with Lane Wood, a charity: water representative. Charity: water is a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing potable water to underdeveloped regions and Harker has developed a relationship with the group.
GEO members were told their contribution will fund the construction of a well in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Conversations with the local people about building the well have already begun, Wood reported. One of the most important steps before starting the project is education. The residents must first learn how to use the well for hygiene and how to maintain it – a process just as vital as the well’s construction.
Questions and answers flew back and forth via Skype, resulting in a very instructive and productive meeting. “It was great getting to know where the well is being built,” said Rashmi Sharma, Gr. 12, GEO’s public relations officer. “I’m excited to hear about a completed well in the future! It was amazing that we could get word much faster and clearer with Skype. Just through e-mails it would have been a pain to relay the same information – we got to ask questions and interact much more easily.” Wood assured GEO members that more updates would soon arrive regarding the development and eventual completion of the well.
On March 10, Erik Andersen, Gr. 9 and Andrew Zhou, Gr. 12, competed in the invitational round of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), held at San Jose State University. They qualified for the Invitational Round after competing at another event on Feb. 4. The March event was just one of many held nationwide to decide who will be on the team representing the United States at the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO) this summer in Sweden. Results of the competition are not yet available.
Anand Natarajan ’09 represented the U.S. at the ILO in 2008 and 2009.
On Sat., Feb. 6, Google’s offices in San Francisco held the annual Teens in Tech Conference and hosted 13 speakers, two of whom were sophomores Daniela Lapidous and Shreya Indukuri. The main focus of the conference was to present and discuss how teenagers have risen from schools and become innovators in online communities.
The meeting boasted an audience filled with prominent entrepreneurs and celebrities of the technology world. Lapidous and Indukuri had their own work to present. They founded SmartPowerEd, a network seeking to connect schools with smart energy-tracking systems to cut carbon emissions and energy costs. Their research revealed a problem: approximately 30 percent of a school’s energy is wasted because appliances, lights and other energy guzzlers are left on even when they are not in use. Their solution involved unique Internet software paired with high tech hardware. The crowd’s response was promising.
“We were getting lots of specific questions on how to get [the program] started at [other] schools. We were sharing with the audience the first steps and what they should do [to get involved],” Indukuri said.
In response to presentations by Lapidous, Indukuri and other now-successful teens, Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple, said he was enthused by the possibilities that teenagers were coming up with. “The experience, the culture, the interaction, the environment – it’s a fascinating, fascinating world. Young people are doing it,” Wozniak said. “What a wonderful thing we have brought to the world. Anyone of any age can build their own startups.”
But the audience was not the only group that gained information from the session. Instead, one of the focuses of the conference was to discover the importance of marketing and the tools that go along with it. Both sophomores took home a list of contacts and valuable lessons in the importance of marketing.
“All the connections we made with people just on Twitter and gmail will be useful,” Lapidous said, after seeing the ways big-time companies like DropBox became successful.
Similarly, her cofounder, Indukuri, praised the power of Twitter and the value of living in the Silicon Valley, calling it “the best place to start a grass roots organization.”
When asked to give advice to teenagers who are battling between schoolwork and developing a product, the consensus in the room of successful million dollar men and women was “Be young. Do stupid,” as was tweeted during the conference and affirmed by both founders of iSocket, a commission-free ad platform.
Lapidous and Indukuri also gave some advice. They learned never to hesitate to take action, to believe that people will support a cause, to be organized from the start, and to recognize that having a strong team is critical for success.
But at the end of the day, as the founders of iSocket put it, “Whatever you want to do, you have to come to terms with the fact that you are going to die, but that you are going to come out of it a better person.”
Click here for a slide show of the event. For this and more news from students in Harker journalism, visit the Winged Post.
Monisha Dilip, Gr. 12, received the 2009 National Young Women of Distinction Award in late February, given every year to the top ten Girl Scouts in the country. A Gold Award Girl Scout, Dilip received the high honor for her extraordinary leadership and commitment to service. For her community action project, she established a free learning center for the visually impaired in Chennai, India.
The center is the first of its kind in India. Dilip discovered that less than five percent of reading materials are in an accessible format and that visually impaired people are the most persecuted in poor countries. At the learning center, visually impaired people can use assistive technologies to browse the Internet, access educational and informational materials and keep in touch with friends and family. Girl Scouts of the USA said that Dilip’s “compassion for children with disabilities was the motivation for the Indian Disability Center.”
Upper school debate teacher and communication studies chair Adam Nelson recently received a first diamond degree of membership from the National Forensic League (NFL). Nelson earned this recognition by acquiring a total of 1,513 points on Feb. 28. Students coached by Nelson have earned more than 15,130 points to date. With this milestone, Nelson has earned the privilege of wearing a diamond-set NFL key or pin. He will be recognized in June at the Lincoln Financial Group/NFL National Speech and Debate Tournament in Kansas City, Mo.
Upper school students attended a special assembly on March 5 for a talk on abuse and abuse prevention by Dr. Tanya Krautter, a Los Gatos-based psychologist and adjunct clinical faculty member of the psychiatry department at the Stanford School of Medicine.
Krautter also talked about the recent trend of “sexting,” or the practice of sending sexually explicit photos or videos via cell phones.
She opened her talk with a brief definition of abuse and its variants. “Abuse is actually when there’s one person in a relationship using a pattern of behavior to control the other person,” she said. “Abuse is an intentional act. It’s not accident. It didn’t happen just because.”
Abuse, she said, can be found in many forms, emotional or verbal abuse being the most common. “This can happen from all kinds of people,” she stressed, including friends, family, teachers and coaches. Emotional abuse can also be more than just insults or belittlement. Someone threatening to injure or kill themselves is also exhibiting abusive behavior. “They’re doing something to get you to do something for them, like not breaking up with them, and that’s a control issue,” she said. Such threats are nonetheless taken “very seriously,” and those who make them are urged to seek counseling.
Other kinds of abuse include physical and sexual. “Really important to remember with physical abuse is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be that there’s an actual incident that occurred. It can be the threat of physically abusing you,” she said.
“Many people who are being abused don’t see themselves as victims,” Krautter noted. “And abusers don’t usually see themselves as abusers.”
Krautter spent a large portion of her appearance talking about sexting, which she believes needs to be discussed with high school students far more often. “I think there’s a huge lack of education in our school systems around what the ramifications of sexting really are, “ she said.
Many students are not aware that creating and sending these sexually explicit photos and videos qualifies as production and distribution of child pornography, which has serious legal implications. Krautter related the story of one student who is currently awaiting sentencing in juvenile hall for sending hundreds of sexually explicit videos of minors.
Toward the end of the talk, Krautter said the biggest reason abuse occurs is because it works. “Unless victims know how to stop the abuse – walk away, assert themselves, let the person know, ‘this is not OK with me’ – then the abuse will continue to occur,” she said.
Following her talk, Krautter took some time to answer questions from students. She answered a question from one student about how laws related to abuse are changing, noting that people are now able to report instances of verbal abuse to Child Protective Services. Responding to a question about how young people should respond to partners threatening to harm or kill themselves, Krautter said the best course of action is to remind the person that they do not want the individual to hurt themselves, and to help them find someone they can talk to.
Seven Harker students are among the 300 semifinalists nationwide still in the running for the U.S. Physics Olympiad Team! Almost half the Harker students participating were chosen and three of the seven are sophomores.
Semifinalists are Adam Perelman, Kevin Zhang and Andrew Zhou, all Gr. 12; sophomores are Lucy Cheng, Michelle Deng, Ramya Rangan and Albert Wu. This is Zhou’s second time around as a semifinalist.
About 3,200 students nationwide took the initial test for the team, titled the Fnet=ma Exam, in January. The International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) is a nine-day competition among pre-university students from more than 80 nations. The 2010 Olympiad will be held in Zagreb, Croatia, from July 17-25.
Harker’s seven semifinalists will take a second exam to try to make the final round of 24 members. In May, those 24 prospective team members will travel to the University of Maryland-College Park to the U.S. Physics Team training camp to enjoy nine days of intense studying, including mystery labs, daily exams and problem solving. At the end of that camp, five students and an alternate will be selected as the “traveling team” to represent the U. S. at the IPhO.
Last year, three Harker students, Anand Natarajan ’09,Vikram Nathan ’09 and Zhou, then Gr. 11, were chosen to be among the 2009 final 24, and Natarajan made the team and earned a gold medal in Mexico at the 2009 IPhO in July, 2009. The five-person U.S. team earned four golds and a silver, tying for second with India and Korea, and coming in behind the Chinese team, which earned five gold medals.
The U.S. Physics Olympiad program is a joint initiative of the American Association of Physics Teachers in partnership with the American Institute for Physics and several other scientific associations.