Members of the Class of 2022 took their final steps as Harker seniors at last night’s graduation ceremony, held at the Mountain Winery. Accompanied by The Harker Chamber Orchestra, this year’s graduating seniors made their way to their seats as the ceremony began. The 2022 Graduation Chorus, directed by Jennifer Sandusky, then performed music teacher Susan Nace’s arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Upper school head Butch Keller introduced 2022 valedictorian Rohan Thakur, who spoke on the resilience displayed by his fellow graduates in the face of the massive changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This resilience, he said, will be important to face the rapidly changing world he and his classmates will be entering after high school. “It is imperative that we use the resilience we have acquired to defend what we know is right in our hearts,” he said. “It is imperative that we take the ethics we have learned during our time at Harker and apply them in the real world.”
Thakur stressed that in addition to meeting oncoming challenges, resilience will be necessary to pursue goals important to them: “It takes courage to not only find what we love, but pursue it wholeheartedly even when other paths seem simpler.”
Last night’s graduation keynote address was delivered by Andy Fang ’10, co-founder and CTO of DoorDash, the popular food delivery platform that he co-founded in 2013 while attending Stanford University. Fang offered the students some insights from his own experience building a company. One lesson was to learn how to identify growth potential, something he learned early on at Stanford. “Our first year at DoorDash, we hired someone from a military background with no prior tech industry experience,” he said. “Today, he runs a multi-billion dollar business at DoorDash.” He also spoke on the importance of being self-aware and self-motivated. “If you can set your mind on something with self-awareness and drive, there’s not much that can get in your way,” he said.
Fang’s final lesson was “believing in yourself,” again using his own experience as an example. Early in DoorDash’s life, there was not much enthusiasm about the company from investors and peers. “In those early months, we knew that there were people who loved our products, customers who appreciated the restaurant selection and convenience, merchants who appreciated increased sales and dashers who appreciated flexible income,” he said. This knowledge helped company leadership through these and more obstacles, and by 2019 DoorDash had become “the largest delivery player in America. Don’t let your confidence be diminished by the opinions of others.”
Following the Graduation Chorus’ performance of “The Harker School Song,” Head of School Brian Yager delivered this year’s farewell speech. He began with the account of the 27-man expedition of the Endurance, a ship that was trapped in an ice pack in 1915 and eventually sank. All of her crew survived and were eventually rescued after a daring series of attempts. Reading this story, Yager said, brought to mind the various ways the Harker community endured over the last two years. This in turn led him to contemplate the effects human achievements have over longer periods of time, quoting Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” an allegory written “with the goal of capturing the impermanence of empires,” he said, a theme in a poem he quoted by Harker rising sophomore Iris Cai.
“These poems paint a doleful picture, I realize, and suggest that those things which we create, those things which we do cannot reasonably endure, and that to believe otherwise is folly,” he said. “Yet behind the somber sentiment, there is a seed of hope implied, which is that while neither we nor our deeds can with the inevitable shifting sand of time, they can change the way those sands will shift.”
Following his address, each of the graduates walked to the stage to receive their diplomas, with the names being announced by the 2022 class dean, upper school English teacher Chris Hurshman. Per tradition, the graduates then shifted the tassels on their caps and tossed them in the air. A flock of doves was then released into the air to put the finishing touch on the occasion. Congratulations to the Class of 2022!
The Class of 2022 gathered at Davis Field yesterday for this year’s baccalaureate ceremony, during which it offered a heartfelt farewell to Harker and welcomed the junior class into its new role as next year’s campus leader.
The ceremony kicked off with a performance by a special trio made up of seniors Yejin Song and Lucas Chen on piano and cello, respectively, and junior Cassie May on violin, who performed the first movement of Paul Schoenfeld’s “Café Music.”
Following some welcoming words from Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs, Cantilena marched onto the stage to perform its rendition of Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend.” Junior Gwen Yang then took the stage with fellow upper school Honor Council member Alexa Lowe, grade 12, to accept the responsibility for continuing the school’s honor code on behalf of the junior class.
Upper school head Butch Keller, who will retire at the end of the school year, introduced this year’s baccalaureate faculty speaker, English teacher Christopher Hurshman, whom he called “the world’s most interesting man,” owing to his wide range of interests and international upbringing. Hurshman spoke on the sense of loss that accompanies major life changes such as the ones the Class of 2022 is experiencing. “Over every new beginning there hovers a shadow of melancholy and loss and grief,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s right to be excited about the future that’s opening up ahead of you, but you’re also about to experience a great loss, and perhaps you’ve been anticipating it.”
Using examples from his own life experience, Hurshman pointed out how both they and the world they have become familiar with will change drastically as they move into the wider world beyond high school. He also advised students to recognize and treasure the “ordinary moments” that will shape who they are, despite the feelings of immense pressure young people often feel to have an impact on the world. “It’s possible to come to the realization that the nitty-gritty particulars of your life, the specific circumstances and relationships and responsibilities in it, are precisely where you will build meaning, and you’ll build that meaning by making conscious choices about what’s important to you.”
Keller then reappeared to welcome this year’s student speaker, senior Ayan Nath, who he introduced by playing a sound clip of Nath’s cover of Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” at the 2019 Hoscars. “We all knew from that moment on he was someone that was going to make an impact on our lives,” Keller said, saying later in his introduction that as much as he could entertain his classmates, “you picked him as your student speaker tonight because you respect him for being such a wonderful person.”
Nath commended the seniors on reaching this key moment in their lives. “We made it through four years … of getting cut off every morning at the Saratoga [Ave.] intersection by yet another red Tesla. Four years of using Schoology grade display — developed by our own [fellow graduating senior] Arjun Dixit — a couple hundred times a day. Four years of the highs and lows that are high school,” he said, summarizing the difficulties faced by the students during the COVID-19 pandemic, which included challenges posed by remote learning and the cancellation of many yearly events.
While graduating high school is often seen as the first step into students’ adult lives, followed by the addition of new responsibilities, “I believe that becoming an adult does not necessarily mean we have to give up on youthful or fun hobbies or activities,” he said. “Even if you love painting, playing Foursquare or have a strong affinity for creating nonprofit organizations, I encourage you to keep doing these things, even though they might not necessarily fall under your realm of responsibilities. Stay true to who you are and remember not to grow up too fast.”
To the juniors, Nath stated that he was proud to call many of them friends. “It is with this mindset that I urge you to be nice to the Class of 2024 and to love them as much as we have loved you,” he said. “Also, congratulations on beating us in Spirit Week.” He also advised them to treat their upcoming senior year “as an opportunity to mend broken relationships or get to know someone new. Go to prom. Go to homecoming. Watch or perform at Quadchella or Hoscars.” Academically, he urged the juniors to treasure the unique opportunity to be a Harker student for one final year. “Your teachers love you, and interacting with teachers and classmates in small environments is something that’s not guaranteed at the university that you end up attending,” he said. Concluding, Nath restated his hope that his classmates won’t lose all of their youthfulness with the onset of adulthood: “I hope that we will continue to bring our youth with us wherever we go and never lose touch with who we are.”
Senior Rishab Parthasarathy was recently invited to participate in the 2022 International Linguistics Olympiad, set to take place July 25-29 on the Isle of Man, an island nation in the Irish Sea. Having placed fourth overall in the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition, Parthasarathy will be a member of Team USA Red. The IOL is held in a different country each year and consists of both team and individual competitions, in which participants solve problems in various linguistic fields. Earlier this year, Parthasarathy was named a finalist in the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search.
At Friday night’s Senior Showcase, 17 seniors became graduates of the Harker Conservatory’s certificate program, each having spent four years studying one of the conservatory’s six disciplines: vocal music, instrumental music, dance, theater, musical theater and technical theater. The evening also included performances from the graduates and the presentation of the Life in the Arts award to Steve Boyle ’06.
The slide show included in this story features each of this year’s Conservatory graduates, in the order they are listed below:
Sophomore Varun Fuloria’s essay was chosen as one of the top eight winners in The New York Times Learning Network’s Student STEM Writing Contest. This year’s contest (the third since it was established) received 3,564 entries, each on a STEM topic that, per the rules of the contest, had to be explained in under 500 words. The subject of Fuloria’s essay was a species of jellyfish that is seemingly able to reverse its aging process and how examining it may help people develop treatments for degenerative disease.
On April 22, junior Nicholas Wei was awarded the 2022 California Science & Engineering Fair Project of the Year, which is given to the top high school researcher each year among thousands of science fair participants. With a prize of $5,000, this is the top honor from the CSEF. His research project, “Investigating Epigenetic Modifications in Chromosome Structure in Cardiomyocyte Differentiation Mechanisms for Heart Disease Treatment,” was sponsored by upper school biology teacher Matthew Harley.
Nicholas also received the Grand Prize, Best of Championship in Biological Sciences at the Synopsys Championship and was named an Intel Science and Engineering Fair finalist.
“I’ve been at Harker since kindergarten, and I can truly say that it is the Harker community and learning environment such as the Harker Research Symposium that has helped define who I am now,” Wei said, “a scholar greatly interested in pursuing both the life sciences and classical studies.”
At the Cupertino Earth Day and Arbor Day Festival on Apr. 23, junior Gwen-Zoe Yang presented a performance of a skit she directed, titled “The Tale of Three Trees.” Yang has been involved with the festival since 2014, performing in skits and reading poetry. In addition to the skit, she also read an original poem, titled “Raindrops,” together with 50 other students from area schools, including Harker fifth graders Sanyi Yao and Olivia Zhu.
Harker students had another outstanding year taking the National Latin Exam, with 40 students earning awards and two perfect scores (Trisha Iyer, grade 10, and Jonathan Xue, grade 9). In addition, three students (Iyer, Alec Zhang, grade 10, and Nicholas Wei, grade 11) received special book awards in recognition of earning gold medals on the previous four exams. Iyer received an additional special book award for scoring perfectly on the last three exams, a feat achieved by just 26 of 100,000 test takers worldwide.
The full list of awards won by Harker is below.
Intermediate Latin:
Summa Cum Laude/Gold Medal – Kai Hong and Jeremy Peng, both grade 9
Intermediate Latin, Reading Comprehension:
Perfect Exam: Jonathan Xue, grade 9
Summa Cum Laude/Gold Medal: Omkar Govil-Nail, grade 10; Daniel Chen, Felix Chen, Andy Chung, Hima Thota, Lindsey Tuckey and Ethan Wang, all grade 9
Maxima Cum Laude/Silver Medal: Ford Johnson, grade 10; Audrey Cheng, Jason Li, Varun Thvar, grade 9
Magna Cum Laude: Hannah Levanon, grade 9
Cum Laude: Chase White, grade 10
Advanced Latin, Prose:
Summa Cum Laude/Gold Medal: Ainslie Chen, Isabella Lo, Harriss Miller, Rohan Ramkumar, Agastya Ravuri, Jason Shim, Grant Yang, all grade 9
Maxima Cum Laude/Silver Medal: Eric Zhang, Nelson Gou, both grade 9
Magna Cum Laude: Natalie Chen, grade 10; Caleb Tang, grade 9
Cum Laude: Chloe Lee, grade 10
Advanced Latin, Poetry:
Perfect Exam: Trisha Iyer, grade 10
Summa Cum Laude/Gold Medal: Catherine Li, Michelle Wei, Alec Zhang and all grade 10; Alan Jiang, grade 11
Maxima Cum Laude/Silver Medal: Kabir Ramzan and Edward Huang, both grade 10
The American High School Theatre Festival has invited the Harker Conservatory’s musical theater program to perform their production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest international arts festival. More than 450 schools applied to be one of the 25 selected, making this one of the most competitive seasons in AHSTF’s history. Harker has performed at Fringe every four years since first being invited in 2007.
“Director [Laura] Lang-Ree’s program at The Harker School once again shines as one of the best applications we have seen this year,” said a spokesperson for AHSTF. “Hundreds of schools around the world have applied this year and while we have an extensive waiting list, this theater program is one of 25 that immediately got through as a finalist for AHSTF once again.”
Last week, senior Ishaan Mantripragada was named the Central Coast Section Male Scholar-Athlete of the Year. The four-year soccer player was named WBAL All-League and WBAL Forward of the Year and was a valued member of the 2020 CCS championship team. He was also recognized for volunteering for Kicks Against Cancer, participating in the Synopsys Science & Technology Championship and receiving a 2020 President’s Gold Volunteer Service Award, all while maintaining strong academic performance. Mantripragada was one of several athletes honored at a special luncheon on Tuesday.
In other CCS news, six Harker athletics teams were named winners of 2021-22 Spring Season Scholastic Championship Team Awards last week. These awards recognize the top five varsity teams from each sport that have maintained the highest collective GPA in their respect sports during the spring athletic season. The boys baseball, boys volleyball, girls swimming, boys tennis, boys track and field and girls track and field teams were all selected to receive this award.
The American Volleyball Coaches Association named Jarrett Anderson ’19, who currently plays for Springfield College, their NCAA Division III Men’s National Player of the Year last week. A first-team NVA/AVCA All-American for three straight seasons, Anderson was a major factor in Springfield’s appearance in the NCAA Division III National Championship semifinals this year. This season he recorded 264 kills, 107 digs, 78 aces and 46 blocks.