The National Scholastic Press Association recently named upper school journalism teacher Ellen Austin one of this year’s Pioneer Award winners. Considered the NSPA’s highest honor awarded to journalism educators, the Pioneer Award recognizes “individuals who make substantial contributions to high school publications and journalism programs outside of their primary employment,” according to the NSPA website.
Austin, a journalism teacher for more than 15 years, has served on the national board of directors for the Journalism Education Association as well as on the regional board for Northern California. In 2006, she was among the first winners of the JEA’s Rising Star Award, and was named Educator of the Year in 2011 by the California Journalism Education Coalition.
Key among Austin’s accomplishments are diversity initiatives meant to bring more voices to student journalism that have traditionally not been represented. These initiatives have been featured in collegiate research and textbooks covering the topic of diversity in student journalism.
The girls golf team competed at the Helen Lengfeld Memorial Tournament last week and placed seventh out of 18 teams. Katherine Zhu, grade 11, took fifth out of 108 golfers. Later in the week, the Eagles picked up big wins over Palo Alto and Notre Dame Belmont with Katelyn Vo, grade 9, earning her second medalist honors in as many tries. The girls stay busy this week as they take on Menlo on Monday, Mercy Burlingame on Tuesday and Sacred Heart Prep on Wednesday.
Boys Water Polo
The boys water polo team defeated Santa Clara 13-4 and Saratoga 13-5 last week to pick up two big league wins. The Eagles will host Cupertino on Tuesday and then travel to Milpitas on Thursday.
Cross Country
The cross country team competed at the De La Salle Invitational over the weekend, led by some younger runners in their second cross country meet of the year. Anika Rajamani, grade 10, placed 24th out of 150 in the frosh-soph girls race. She was followed closely by classmates Lilia Gonzales and Aneesha Kumar.
Peter Connors, grade 11, had Harker’s fastest time in the varsity division. Freshmen Rishi Dange, Martin Bourdev, Mihir Sharma and Richard Hu finished within 30 seconds of each other in the 224-runner frosh-soph race. Michael Wang and Andy Koonmen were the top sophomore finishers. Next up for the Eagles is the Stanford Invitational on Oct. 1.
Football
The Eagles were dealt another home loss last Friday as visiting Encinal High defeated Harker 49-12. Next up for the football team is a trip to Santa Cruz High this Friday.
Girls Volleyball
Last week, the girls volleyball team lost to Saint Francis in three games. Melissa Kwan, grade 11, led the Eagles with 16 assists, while seniors Rachel Cheng and Lindsey Trinh each had a team-high six kills. The Eagles host Menlo on Tuesday at 5:45 p.m., then travel to Sacred Heart Prep on Thursday.
Girls Water Polo
Last week, the girls water polo team dropped a 10-2 match to Santa Clara and a 9-3 match to Saratoga. The Eagles will host Wilcox on Tuesday and then travel to Milpitas on Thursday.
Girls Tennis
The girls tennis team opens its league season on Tuesday as it hosts Menlo at the Santa Clara Tennis Center at 4 p.m. On Thursday, the girls will travel to Crystal Springs Uplands for another league match.
Students in Allen Lyle’s grade 8 history class have been studying the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, along with the navigation methods they used during the Age of Exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries. One of these navigation methods, known as “the log and line,” helped navigators determine the speed of their vessels by counting the number of knots on a rope that passed through their hands in a set amount of time as measured by a sandglass. Eventually, the term “knot” came to mean 1 nautical mile per hour, a measurement still used today. Like the navigators, students were able to calculate their own speeds in knots for a variety of movements – from walking and running to bear crawling and cart-wheeling! Go Harker history Eagles!
Congratulations to Harker sophomore Rose Guan, who recently won first place in Imagine magazine’s Creative Minds Poetry Contest in the “ages 13 and under” category. Imagine, published by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, acts as a resource for young talents, and publishes work by both students and experts in various fields. Rose’s poem, titled “Requiem,” is available to read on the Imagine website.
Over the summer, senior Alexis Gauba secured an internship with The Hive, a company that “incubates, funds and launches data-driven business,” Gauba said. It was her second time interning for the company, the first being in summer 2015 as a data science intern. She was invited back this past summer for a paid position as a data engineering intern.
Gauba’s primary responsibility at The Hive was to work on Synapse, “the company’s large-scale architecture for data processing applications that all of the startups use,” Gauba said. “A typical day consisted of coding, meeting with my boss, the CTO, lunch with co-workers on University Avenue, and the occasional UX or marketing meeting when I was working on side projects for different teams at the company.” She also had the opportunity to attend Think Tank meetups and hear from industry leaders on a variety of topics.
In addition to providing valuable industry experience, the internship gave Gauba the chance to see how the concepts she learned at school apply to the business world. “Having the opportunity to experience a work environment while still in high school provided truly valuable exposure into how CS processes function in industry, and of the workplace in general,” she said. “Working on my main project, I had to take the strong base of concepts I learned in AP CS and Data Structures and build upon that, learning about new ideas and technologies quickly, and then applying them.”
The internship was also a great networking opportunity, and helped Gauba grow her understanding of the funding process from the perspective of both the venture and the startup. “Working over the summer not only gave me a unique perspective into the world of CS, as I was able to work with cutting-edge technologies, but also insight into the workplace environment, allowing me to understand the career path I might want to pursue in college and beyond,” she said.
A total of 45 Harker seniors, 24 percent of the class of 190, were named semifinalists in the 2017 National Merit Scholarship Program, the National Merit Scholarship Corp. (NMSC) announced on Sept. 14. They are among 16,000 semifinalists out 1.6 million students who entered the program by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) in their junior year. National Merit semifinalists represent less than 1 percent of U.S. high school students.
Additionally, Harker had 65 students who placed in the top 3 percent of test takers nationwide, whom the NMSC has recognized as Commended Students. This number, combined with the number of semifinalists, brings the number of Harker seniors recognized by National Merit to 110, or 58% of the Class of 2017.
This year’s semifinalists are:
Sana Aladin, Kai-Siang Ang, Steven Cao, Cuebeom Choi, Aditya Dhar, Trisha Dwivedi, Ria Gandhi, Rishab Gargeya, Catherine Huang, Zhuoying Huang, Neymika Jain, Preethi Kandappan, Soham Khan, Angela Kim, Winifred Li, Lauren Liu, Rishi Maheshwari, Sanjana Marce, Colt McNealy, Connie Miao, Anuva Mittal, Kshithija Mulam, Sandip Nirmel, Judy Pan, Srivatsav Pyda, Divya Rajasekharan, Elizabeth Rensin, Alayna Richmond, Andrew Rule, Venkat Sankar, Manan Shah, Vedaad Shakib, Amrita Singh, Scott Song, Meilan Steimle, Arjun Subramaniam, Arnav Tandon, Andrew Tierno, Molly Wancewicz, Peter Wu, Albert Xu, Raymond Xu, Austin Zhang, David Zhu and Tiffany Zhu.
To become finalists, semifinalists must submit a scholarship application that details their academic record, community involvement, leadership qualities and another criteria. Winners of National Merit scholarships will be notified in spring 2017.
Cynthia Chen, grade 9, earned the second place prize in the Broadcom MASTERS Competition in the science division! She will receive a $2,500 award for her efforts. Nice article in the Mercury: http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/05/school-scene-students-win-science-honors/. Congratulations Cynthia!
Update: Another great article on Chen’s project! https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/blog/eureka-lab/teen-develops-water-saving-pods-seeds
UPDATE: Oct. 7, 2016
The Los Altos Town Crier recently published a story about the project that earned freshmen Aarzu Gupta and Maya Shukla semifinalist recognition in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition.
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UPDATE: Sept. 23, 2016
Earlier this week, Cynthia Chen, now grade 9, was named one of 30 national finalists in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition. The second finalist in Harker’s history, Chen has received a $500 cash prize and will head to Washington, D.C. in late October for the to compete for $100,000 in awards.
Chen’s project aimed to alleviate the problems caused by California’s ongoing drought by creating a capsule that housed seeds surrounded by water crystals, allowing them to grow with just a third of the water usage.
Good luck to Cynthia this October!
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Last week, the Society for Science & the Public announced that Harker freshmen Cynthia Chen, Aarzu Gupta and Maya Shukla were among 300 students nationwide named semifinalists in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition. Chen, Gupta and Shukla entered the competition last year while in eight grade. A total of 2,434 applicants entered this year’s competition.
The Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering Rising Stars) competition highlights the work of middle school scientists from across the country. The top 10 percent of middle school participants at society-affiliated science fairs are nominated to participate, and must then submit an application to enter the competition. Each application is rigorously reviewed by professionals in science, engineering and education.
Finalists are scheduled to be announced next week. Stay tuned!
In June, Harker students Michael Kwan, Jimmy Lin, Sahana Srinivasan, Justin Xie, Shaya Zarkesh, Randy Zhao and Jerry Chen, now all grade 11, were named the best team in the country at the Test of Engineering, Aptitude, Mathematics and Science (TEAMS) National Conference in Nashville.
TEAMS is a STEM-based competition in which high school students apply their knowledge to solve current and upcoming challenges. Each year, a theme is chosen, and students compete at various regional events before the top-ranking teams meet at the National Conference to vie for the title of Best in Nation. At the state level, teams first submit a thoroughly researched essay. At the competitions, they take a multiple-choice exam and are tasked with completing a design challenge using provided materials.
This year’s theme was space exploration, and at the Nashville event the Harker team gave a presentation on space colonization. Their essay covered the field of optogenetics (controlling cells in living tissue through the use of light), which they studied in preparation for the exam portion of the competition.
“We all researched different topics in our spare time and then gathered once a week over the summer to pool everyone’s research together and discuss our strategy going forward,” Lin told the Winged Post. “Our whole team learned a lot through working together on the group events, and it was definitely exciting to see our hard work pay off when we ultimately came out on top.”
Harker library director Sue Smith recently completed the first major milestone of a two-year grant project with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Working with researchers from the University of Michigan School of Information, Smith acted as the team’s curriculum expert, whose duty was to “develop resources and curricula for various topics within the grant.”
The project, which began in October 2015 and is titled “Data Literacy for High School Librarians,” aims to help school librarians develop greater data and statistical literacy so that they can in turn promote these skills in students. One of the project’s major milestones was a two-day virtual conference on the topics of literacy, data as argument and data visualization. More than 400 teachers and librarians from all over the world viewed the conference.
One of the next major goals of the project is to publish a book on the topics being researched. Smith already has contributed a chapter to the book, a draft of which is scheduled to be published at the end of the grant’s first year. The project is expected to conclude in September 2017.
Three alumni are deferring personal lives to work for this year’s presidential campaigns. Isabella Liu ’02 is in Florida working on the Clinton campaign. Liu, a field organizer, first got involved in January and played a key role in San Francisco during the California primary. She then had the option to organize in the Bay Area, Florida or battleground states like Virginia, and she chose Florida, which is the biggest, most influential swing state, Liu noted.
It was a tough decision to drop everything and commit to the campaign, she said, but added that she and thousands of other organizers across the U.S. are driven by their shared vision of a more equitable, humane and sustainable country and world.
Just this past Monday, Liu introduced Ann Holton, wife of vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, at a Women for Hillary house party in Fort Myers, Fla. “The campaign is scrappy and, though getting involved is not easy or glamorous,” said Liu, “every volunteer that puts in a few minutes to a few weeks will be all the difference we need in November!” Liu noted that if others wish to get involved, they can visit https://www.hillaryclinton.com/events.
Felix Wu ’15 recently decided to take a break from his studies at Emory University to take a full-time position with the Iowa Democratic Party. During an Aug. 10 rally in the Iowa state capitol of Des Moines, Felix gave a speech to the large crowd that had assembled for an appearance by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “Felix has always been very passionate about politics and civil service, and we are glad that he continues to pursue his passion after Harker,” said May Lau, Felix’s mother.
Finally, Shannon Hong ’16, headed off to New York to work on the Clinton campaign. “This summer, I was given the opportunity to represent my personal role model in Philly, and now, I am elated to be able to help again in Brooklyn,” she said. Hong has deferred her education for a semester to follow her passion.
We’ll add details from our alumni on the campaign trail as they come in!