The speech and debate team wrapped up its season with some nice results! Haris Hosseini, rising senior, made it to the final round of original oratory at the National Speech & Debate Association championship and ended up taking a righteous third place. Jennifer Achten, Harker debate chair, noted Hosseini’s “nine-minute speech is a powerful critique of toxic masculinity.”
Rising junior Avi Gulati made the semifinals of original oratory with a speech about the pitfalls of mimicry and the value of being your own person, Achten noted. Gulati finished in seventh place, giving Harker two of the top 10 spots in the nation! These results put Harker in the top 10 overall in speech event sweepstakes. “Coach Scott Odekirk has done a wonderful job guiding their speeches and we are all very proud of the whole crew,” said Achten.
It was an amazing 2017-18 season for Harker athletics, and it recently got even better. Boys cross country, boys golf and baseball were named California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) State Academic Team Champions. The three teams had the highest collective GPAs in their respective sports, from throughout the entire state of California. Boys cross country was tops with a 3.94 GPA, boys golf with a 3.87 and baseball with a 3.87. Congratulations to our awesome student athletes. Go Eagles!
Amy Jin ’18 drew a fine accolade from the City of San Jose via Councilmember Chappie Jones, who, along with Mayor Sam Liccardo, presented her with a commendation yesterday.
The midday meeting, held in council chambers, celebrated Jin for being named one of five students nationwide to receive the Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing from the Computer Science Teachers Association in March.
Jones, who represents the city council district in which Harker resides, noted, “Amy Jin just graduated from high school and she is already proving to be such an accomplished young person. I was honored to present Amy with a commendation at City Council for being 1 of 5 students in the nation to win the Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing.”
In describing her work, Jin said, “Every year, 7 million patients suffer surgical complications, many of which are caused by poor operative skill due to lack of individualized training and feedback. Improving these surgical outcomes means evaluating surgeon performance, a time-consuming process requiring expert supervision. Thus, I developed a deep-learning approach to automatically assess operative technique, functioning as a ‘coach’ for surgeons.
“I leveraged a convolutional neural network to teach computers to classify and localize surgical instruments in videos in real time. Increasing accuracy for tool presence detection by 28 percent and tracking instrument locations, my approach enabled rich analysis of surgical performance. It expedites surgical skill assessment through automated extraction of visual and quantitative metrics, such as tool usage patterns and trajectories, movement range and motion economy. My results have been validated by surgeons, setting the stage for building a context-aware system that can assist surgeons during procedures and provide targeted feedback.”
Jin’s other recognition includes a best paper award at the 2017 Machine Learning for Health Workshop at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, and being named a Regeneron Science Talent Search Scholar. Jin is also a John Near Endowment recipient and a National Merit Scholarship awardee. She plays classical violin and has performed at Carnegie Hall. Read more in this Harker News story. https://staging.news.harker.org/senior-amy-jin-one-of-five-in-the-country-to-win-cutler-bell-prize-in-high-school-computing/
The next round of winners in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Competition was announced today, this time for college-sponsored merit scholarships. Recent graduates Akhil Arun, Matthew Lee, Jacob Ohana and Patrick Zhong were among those listed as winners, bringing Harker’s total of National Merit scholarship winners for the year up to 17.
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Eight more Harker seniors were named winners in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Competition last week. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation identified Megan Tjandrasuwita, Jerry Chen, Gwyneth Chen, Morgan Douglas, Anooshree Sengupta, Andrew Semenza, Kaitlin Hsu and Swapnil Garg as $2,500 scholarship winners.
These students and other Bay Area National Merit winners were mentioned in a story by the San Jose Mercury News, published Friday.
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Last week, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced that Divija Bhimaraju, David Wen, Adrian Chu, Megan Huynh and Amy Jin, all grade 12, were recipients of corporate-sponsored scholarships in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Competition. This is the first round of awardees in this year’s program, and more winners will be announced over the next three months.
In September, 46 seniors – roughly 25 percent of the Class of 2018 – were named National Merit semifinalists, placing them in the top 1 percent nationwide among students who took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test in their junior year.
Last month, the American Association of Physics Teachers named Swapnil Garg ’18 one of 20 high school students nationwide who will contend for a spot on the United States Physics Team. Garg and the other candidates are currently completing a boot camp held at the University of Maryland, after which five students will be selected to represent the United States at the International Physics Olympiad, held in Lisbon, Portugal, from July 21-29.
Garg was one of 11 Harker students who qualified to take the United States Physics Olympiad (USAPhO) exam after scoring in the top 10 percent on a screening exam in January. The others were then-seniors (now graduates) Jimmy Lin, Neelesh Ramachandran and Shaya Zarkesh; juniors Timothy Chang, Kaushik Shivakumar and Katherine Zhang; sophomore Jeffrey Kwan; freshman Daniel Wang; and eighth graders David Dai and Rishab Parthasarathy. Of those, Kwan, Parthasarathy and Zarkesh each won a bronze medal, and Dai and Shivakumar received an honorable mention.
At this year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), held May 14-18 in Pittsburgh, juniors Anjay Saklecha and Krish Kapadia were grand award winners, receiving a fourth place award of $500 for their project, “UCH-L1 and s100B in Saliva as Novel Biomarkers for Severe Traumatic Brain Injury,” in the translational medical science category. The pair also won first place and $750 from the Air Force Research Laboratory. Also successful was junior Cameron Jones, who received a fourth place award in the physics and astronomy category for his project, titled “Automated Identification and Inference of Organic Molecular Structure and Relative Concentrations from Infrared Spectral Data.”
The students qualified for Intel ISEF after receiving grand prizes at the 2018 Synopsys Science & Technology Championship in March. About 1,800 high school students from around the world showcase their research each year at the event, which is the world’s largest science fair for pre-college students, millions of whom participate in local science fairs to earn a chance to appear at Intel ISEF.
In late May, CareerConnect hosted an Excel workshop led by Juston Glass, business and entrepreneurship teacher. He spoke to about 15 students on how to properly use Excel for organizational purposes, finding the averages of data with specific conditions and formulating equations for financial-based projects. At the workshop, students also were given a list of 20 easy tips and tricks to help them maneuver around the spreadsheet software.
Students learned about the importance of Excel in the business field and received tips on how to use the software. Glass noted he uses Excel nearly daily, and gave multiple scenarios in which the program is necessary, such as in real-estate or in owning any type of business. Elaine Zhai, grade 9, who had never used Excel, noted “we learned about sorting data and a lot of tricks that would make using Excel easier in the future” Overall, the event was a big success and many students enjoyed the opportunity to learn how to use Excel.
Two Harker students earned high marks in this year’s Chemistry Olympiad, organized by the American Chemical Society. Swapnil Garg, grade 12, was named a high honors student, having placed among the top 50 students in the country. Annie Ma, grade 10, placed in the top 150 and was named an honors student. The Chemistry Olympiad begins with local competitions, which attract nearly 16,000 high school students each year. The highest-scoring students from each school are eligible to take the national exam. More than 1,000 students took this year’s national exam.
The boys volleyball season came to an end over the weekend as the team came up short at the NorCal finals. The week started with a 3-0 win over St. Patrick/St. Vincent of Vallejo, followed by a spirited 3-2 win over CCS champs Carmel. However, the Eagles lost to Amador Valley in five games in the finals. Still, the year was a huge success as the Eagles made the CCS finals and NorCal finals for the first time in Harker history. Congrats on a great year!
Lacrosse
A big congrats to Elise Mayer, grade 11, for her NorCal team’s division championship competing at the US Nationals Lacrosse tournament in Stony Brook, N.Y. Elise scored twice in the championship game as the team of elite NorCal players competed against 60 other regional teams from throughout the country.
All-League Honors
It was one of the best spring seasons in Harker history and it showed, as many Eagle student athletes were honored with All-League recognition.
Lacrosse: Nellie Tonev, grade 10, was named goalkeeper of the year; first team honors went to Elise Mayer, grade 11, Lauren Russell, grade 12, Heidi Zhang, grade 11, and Tonev; Lisa Barooah, grade 9, and Grace Hajjar, grade 10, were named to the second team; and Sara Yen, grade 9, was an honorable mention.
Swimming: Vivian Wang, grade 12, and Ethan Hu, grade 10, were the girls and boys league MVPs; Jason Kwok, grade 9, Matthew Chung, grade 9, and Yannick Bohbot-Dridi, grade 12, were named to the first team; and Rhys Edwards, grade 9, was named to the second team.
Boys Volleyball: Jarrett Anderson, grade 11, was named the co-junior of the year, with Billy Fan, grade 9, named the freshman of the year; Anderson and Fan were also each named to the first team; and Charlie Molin, grade 11, and Jeffrey Kwan, grade 10, were named to the second team.
Boys Golf: Daulet Tuleubayev, grade 12, was the league co-MVP; Jaimin Bhagat, grade 10, and Jin Kim, grade 12, were named to the first team; and Bradley Lu, grade 9, and Victor Shin, grade 12, earned second team honors.
Softball: Kristin LeBlanc, grade 12, was named to the first team; Anika Rajamani, grade 11, and Taylor Lam, grade 11, both earned second team honors; and Cameron Zell, grade 11, was an honorable mention.
Baseball: Dominic Cea, grade 12, earned first team catcher honors, with Matthew Kennedy, grade 12, and Max Lee, grade 10, named to the first team outfield; Nicholas Coulter, grade 9, was a second team Infielder; and Luke Wancewicz, grade 9, earned an honorable mention.
Track and Field: Ayush Vyas, grade 11, was a first team recipient; honorable mentions went to Anna Weirich, grade 9, Grace Koonmen, grade 12, Anthony Contreras, grade 12, Mitchell Granados, grade 11, Marcus Tymous, grade 11, Angel Cervantes, grade 12, and Ryan Adolf, grade 11.
Boys Tennis: David Wen, grade 12, Mihir Sharma, grade 10, and Richard Hu, grade 10, were named to the first team; Randy Zhao, grade 12, and Neil Bai, grade 12, earned second team honors; and Ramanand Vegesna, grade 10, was an honorable mention.
The 2018 senior class officially became graduates on May 24 at this year’s graduation ceremony. Despite unseasonably cold and windy weather, attendees flocked to the Mountain Winery in Saratoga to see the Class of 2018 take this pivotal step in their young lives.
Accompanied by the Harker Chamber Orchestra’s performance of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the seniors made their way to their seats, cheered on by their families and friends. Andrew Semenza’s evocative valedictorian address – which referenced everything from experimental neurosurgery to structuralist literature to Russian master pianist Sviatoslav Richter – was a paean to imperfection, in which he opined, “When we think of irregularity as dirty, we endanger everything.”
Keynote speaker Tanya Schmidt ’08, the first upper school graduate to give a keynote speech at graduation, advised the graduates not to be afraid of unexpected changes. “Have the courage to be curious, and make space to listen to yourself,” she said.
Giving his first graduation address as head of school, Brian Yager imparted upon the graduates his hope that they would work to better the world “not because of the compensation for doing so, but in spite of it” as well as “continually experience and contribute to the power of love.” After receiving their diplomas (to wild cheers from friends and family), the students moved their tassels leftward and flung their caps into the air. Congratulations!