Harker students took top spots in the 2021 TEAMS (Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics and Science) competition, in which teams of students collaborate to solve real-world engineering problems. This year, TEAMS dispensed with a national finals event and issued scores based on state-level results.
Harker’s 11/12A team – juniors Harsh Deep, Alex Hu, Sasvath Ramachandran and Kailash Ranganathan – placed third nationally after taking first in California. Meanwhile, team 9/10A – sophomores Brian Chen, Riya Gupta, Stephen Xia and Sally Zhu – placed sixth in the nation overall.
After last year’s heartbreaking cancellation, the annual graduation ceremony returned to the Mountain Winery on Saturday to celebrate the Class of 2021’s accomplishments and formally conclude their high school years. Although strict safety protocols meant that only the seniors and their guests could attend, a livestream was set up so that the rest of the community could view the ceremony from home.
Following a brief welcome address by Butch Keller, upper school division head, co-valedictorians Daniel Wang and Claire Luo offered some parting words to their classmates. Wang expressed how privileged he felt to be a member of a senior class that had persevered through so much. Because of those challenges, he said, “We go forward with an even greater drive to brave new challenges and make precious memories that will last us a lifetime. We have been through a lot together. It is my honor to be your valedictorian.”
Luo voiced her thankfulness to the many people involved in both her journey and that of her classmates, including her parents “for their endless care and sacrifice,” Harker teachers “for going way above and beyond in supporting and inspiring us” and Harker administrators and staff “for making the last four years possible.
“Finally, thank you to my spectacular friends and to all of you, Class of 2021,” she continued, “for the love, laughter and life that made the last four years truly memorable.”
The Senior String Quintet, the first of the ceremony’s musical performers, then offered their rendition of Haydn’s “Adagio, from String Quartet No. 47 in F Minor,” followed by the Senior Graduation Chorus, who sang Dan Forrest’s “Always Something Sings.”
Roberta Wolfson ‘05, a lecturer in writing and rhetoric at Stanford University and this year’s keynote speaker, made boxes the theme of her speech, specifically “metaphorical boxes that we build for ourselves and others on a daily basis. Boxes that tell us what to say, how to act, what goals we should be striving for. Boxes that sometimes can end up boxing us in.” She asked the students to consider what boxes they have been placed into, a question that “motivated me to pursue a career as a scholar and educator of critical race studies and literary studies.” Witnessing the Class of 2021’s accomplishments, she said, made her feel “hopeful, because I know that you have the passion and the power to address these flaws and make the world stronger.”
Head of school Brian Yager, the final speaker for the day, encouraged the Class of 2021 to reflect on the ways humanity has successfully met challenges, one prime example being the increase in life expectancy. “There is no headline that reads 50,000 fewer Americans died from car crashes this year or 100,000 children didn’t die because their food was refrigerated. There’s a great lesson here,” he said. “Our attention and energy are easily captured by tragedy but it is not easily captured by the absence of it.” He concluded by noting the senior class’ resilience and growth in the face of unprecedented obstacles: “Class of 2021, this year has given you and all of us much by which we could have been overwhelmed. Today, though, we can celebrate the much that you have achieved. You have already begun to view your year as seniors as one of trial and challenge, but in a good way. You have been made stronger, wiser and hopefully kinder.”
The ceremony formally ended with the traditional release of a flock of doves, symbolizing the Class of 2021’s next adventure into the wider world.
Harker middle school math students had a series of successes this past spring. Angela Liu, grade 8, placed in the top 20 at the national Mathcounts competition, held May 8-10. Liu competed as one of four representatives from California, considered the most competitive state. California placed second overall in the competition. Liu was one of three Harker middle school students to reach the state finals, along with eighth graders Jacqueline Huang and Jonny Xue. Harker’s Mathcounts students were coached by Vandana Kadam, middle school math department chair, who was California team coach in 2020.
Mathcounts also hosts a video contest, in which Harker was a top four finalist. Eighth graders Jacqueline Huang, Juliana Li, Kashish Priyam and Sophia Zhu’s video, “Banking on Math,” was the first video Harker had ever submitted for the competition.
Earlier in spring, the 20th annual Diana Nichols Harker Math Invitational for grades 6-8, held March 21, was a highly successful event with 17 schools and about 432 contestants taking part in the individual and team contests. There were 79 competing and 15 non-competing teams for the team contest.
In individual competition at the sixth grade level, Haofang Zhu took first place, Claire Tian placed third and Sylvia Chen placed fourth. At the eighth grade level, Julian Li placed third and Aarush Vailaya, Agastya Ravuri and Jeremy Peng tied for fourth.
In team competition, Harker teams took the top three spots at the sixth grade level, with team 6A (Sylvia Chen, Risa Chokhawala, Rohan Goyal, Raeanne Li, Iona Liu, Aaron Luo and Claire Tian) placing first, 6C (Nyssa Kansal, Brandon Labio, Lucas Lum, Lily Peng, Sanjith Senthil, Sri Srinavasan and Graham Zhang) placing second and 6B (Audrey Hu, Shamik Khowala, Ridhan Randheri, Axel Szolusha, Nathan Yee, Haofang Zhu and Ellie Zhou) placing third. At the grade 7 level, Harker team 7A (Jaden Fu, Jessica Hu, Brenna Ren, Caden Ruan, Lily Shi, Kallie Wang and Tiffany Zhu) took third place. At the grade 8 level Harker Team 8A (Audrey Cheng, Neil Krishnan, Juliana Li, Kashish Priyam, Aarush Vailaya, Jessica Wang and Alex Zhong) placed second, while team 8A (Ainslie Chen, Tiffany Gu, Katerina Matta, Jeremy Peng, Agastya Ravuri, Max Zhai and Sophia Zhu) placed third.
Last Friday, middle school faculty were given an opportunity to tour the new middle school campus, which is being built at the former site of the preschool campus. Teachers were greeted by middle school division head Evan Barth and guided by facilities director Mike Bassoni, who led the group around the site and explained the features of the new buildings and helped them envision what the campus would look like when finished. Teachers had the opportunity to explore the new buildings and enjoyed getting an up-close look at their future classrooms.
From April 12 to May 6, Harker DECA members competed virtually in the annual International Career Development Conference (ICDC). With 46 competitors and two first place champions, Harker DECA had the best ICDC results in chapter history. An exceptional 12 finalists placed in the top 20 for the preliminary round. Out of those 12, eight finalists were in the top 10 final round.
“ICDC and just DECA in general are both very exciting. It allowed not just my team but the entire DECA community to come closer together. I am looking forward to another DECA season,” said Armaan Thakker, grade 10.
This year, Harker DECA introduced the DECA alumni coaches program to help students excel in their competitions. The officer team reached out to several competitively successful alumni and former officers including Aditi Ghalsasi ‘20, Mahi Kolla ‘20, Lucas Wang ‘17, Evan Cheng ‘20, Shania Wang ‘19, Riya Gupta ‘19, Rishi Dange ‘20, Radhika Jain ‘20 and Phil Han ‘20. Many of the alumni continued their education at top universities including the University of Southern California, New York University and University of Pennsylvania. Each alumni was assigned to a competitive team and was required to meet with them at least three times to prepare for their competitions. Overall the inaugural program dramatically improved the success of Harker DECA’s competitors this year at ICDC.
“I think one of the biggest factors that contributed to how far we got at ICDC was the fact that we had an alumni, Radhika, as our mentor. It was even more special for us personally because she had mentored us in her junior and senior year, so it was great to be able to work with her again. Even though we only met four times for about an hour each, her feedback was so helpful, and we could actually feel ourselves improving each time. I definitely feel like Emily [Zhou] and I wouldn’t have been able to get as far as we did without the alumni mentorship program,” said junior Emily Tan.
Due to the pandemic, ICDC was held virtually this year. For the preliminary round, competitors were asked to submit their presentations in video form to a portal. However, for the final round of competitions, members joined a Zoom call with a judge to perform their presentations live.
“ICDC was an incredible experience, and we were so excited to represent Harker during the final round of competition. Our previous rounds were recorded videos, so being able to present a live presentation in front of a judge was a thrilling experience, especially since this was our first year competing in DECA,” said sophomore Annmaria Antony.
Despite most of the conference being online, Harker DECA hosted a viewing party of the grand awards session on May 6. Members were invited to the Innovation Center on the upper school campus to watch the livestream of the ceremony and were given an opportunity to socialize with their peers in person. They enjoyed snacks while watching and Chipotle for dinner. This event emulated an in-person conference experience and allowed competitors to celebrate their wins together as a chapter.
Regardless of obstacles that came with competing online, members had a thrilling and enriching experience participating in ICDC. Congratulations to all of our competitors!
“These students put in countless hours and battled out seemingly endless obstacles and levels of competition to get to this point. I am so very proud of our unprecedented year resulting in not just one but two international champion teams. We had the most successful year to date for our chapter and I can’t be more proud of our Harker DECA Eagles, officer team and student mentors for all of the effort, time, grit and passion they demonstrated throughout the year. Go Eagles!” said Juston Glass, Harker DECA chapter advisor.
Winners and finalists are as follows:
First Place:
– Sasvath Ramachandran, grade 11; Virtual Business Challenge – Accounting
– Andrew Sun and Aditya Singhvi, grade 12; Hospitality Services Team Decision Making
Second Place:
– Grace Hoang and Annmaria Antony, grade 10; Marketing Management Team Decision Making
Junior Mark Hu gave an incredible, history-making performance on the mound on Tuesday, pitching Harker baseball’s first-ever perfect game in a 15-0 victory against Priory. Striking out 18 of 21 batters, Hu denied Priory even a single base hit and did not walk any hitters, only twice allowing the ball-count to reach three. In their reporting on the game, the Mercury News noted that Hu’s 18 strikeouts match the Central Coast Section record set by Valley Christian’s Patrick Wicklander in 2018.
The win brought Harker to 9-0 in league play and 11-4 overall. Coach Mike Delfino called Hu “absolutely dominant” and noted that the junior accomplished the feat in just 86 pitches. He also delivered at the plate, contributing three hits and a two-run homerun. The Eagles will face Priory again on Thursday.
On April 16, students from various high schools attended Harker BEcon, Harker’s annual business and entrepreneurship conference. Throughout this two-day event, more than 100 students attended four events: a keynote speaker, two sets of workshops, a mentor panel and sHarker Tank.
The conference kicked off with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, who based his keynote talk around responses to students’ pre-submitted questions about a variety of topics including his journey to creating Nvidia. His valuable insight and inspirational ideas taught students to value failure, learning and the journey rather than success. Afterward, students attended various workshops led by industry professionals on topics ranging from behavioral finance to strategies for creating sales pitches.
On the second day, there was another round of workshops, including financial literacy for teens. Next, students were divided into over a dozen virtual rooms and were given the opportunity to have close discussions with seasoned professionals in various industries, such as gaming, biotechnology, social media and more!
Finally, teams of Harker’s own student entrepreneurs competed to receive $1,000 of funding and the chance to pitch their businesses to real venture capital firms as an opportunity to receive even more funding. The competitors included GetWellSoon, TogaTech, H200t, SlimeeCoffee and Explere. Out of the five competitors, junior Arnav Gupta’s GetWellSoon, an expansive database pairing clinical trials with patients, placed first, and freshman Kabir Ramzan’s TogaTech, a digital privacy company, placed second.
With many students expressing very positive sentiments about their experience, BEcon successfully wrapped up its first-ever virtual conference.
Last week, the Student Diversity Coalition and the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center hosted a special appearance by Leon, a Holocaust survivor who related his incredible story to the Harker community. Included in his presentation were drawings he had made from his the vivid memories of his experience.
Born in the then-Romanian city of Czernowitz in 1931, Leon was interested in soccer as a child, recalling that he had played the sport since he was first able to walk. In the 1930s, Romania had a policy of tolerance toward Jewish people, which changed when Hitler rose to power. Michael I, Romania’s last king, followed his mother in opposing the Hitler-allied Romanian prime minister’s persecution of Romanian Jews, for which Leon said the king’s entire family was threatened.
Leon was eight years old when Hitler began expanding his control across Europe. He remembered refugees crossing into Romania, for whom his mother made “big, big pots of soup.” In December 1941, all Romanian Jews were ordered to be transported to ghettos. “There was no community outcry like today,” he said. “There was no community protest like today. We left in silence.”
He was separated from his parents and placed into a train car with the other children for a long trek to where they would be held. The very limited water supply had to be rationed and watched closely. “People were ready to give up on life,” Leon recalled. “We lost all shame and self-esteem.”
Upon departing the train, Leon’s family and the other Romanian families were marched to concentration camps. Leon’s mother bribed one of the guards watching over the procession, who looked the other way while the family escaped. They spent three weeks begging for food at a nearby farmers market, and eventually were sent to a ghetto to work and live in a one-room hut. Food was scarce and water was collected by melting snow in a small pot.
At one point, both Leon and his mother contracted typhus, and the staff at the nearby hospital believed he had only hours left to live. He was placed in a crib in the hospital’s morgue, where he lay unconscious for five days. When he woke up, he spotted his father on the way to visit his mother and called out to him. He carried Leon home and nursed him back to health, and his mother eventually came home as well.
“In my 90 years, the five days I spent in the morgue was the only time I lost control of my life,” he said.
The ghetto was eventually liberated, and Leon and his family returned to Czernowitz. Upon returning, Leon went over to a garbage can where he had stashed some family photos as they were being moved into the ghettos. All the photos remained intact.
Later in life, Leon immigrated to the United States and joined the U.S. Army, serving in the Korean War. He also met his wife, Eva, to whom he has been married for 60 years.
He advised the students in the assembly to treasure their education (“I was robbed of my education, and life was very hard”) and to reject hate (“It just begets more hate, nothing else”).
Several teams of Harker students received recognition at this year’s Tech Challenge, held by The Tech Interactive in San Jose. Each year, the Tech Challenge invites students in grades 4-12 to use engineering skills to solve a real-life problem. This year’s task was to use recycled cardboard to create a useful appliance that could transform into another useful appliance. Because this year’s Tech Challenge was held virtually, teams showed their work for judges at a virtual showcase.
Nicholas Knauer, Ameera Ramzan, Adrian Roufas and Chelsea Xie, the sixth graders who made up team Yes We CAAN, won the Outstanding Overall award for creating a cat playhouse that could also be repurposed into an organizer for books and writing utensils.
Team RASA – an acronym made with the first initials of fifth graders Riya Chadha, Abby Heinlein, Sofe Jalil and Augusta Chen – went a similar route, creating a school supplies organizer that could be converted into a cat house. Their work won them the Judges’ Choice award for Outstanding Presentation.
Fifth graders Christian Choi, Matthew Lee and Andrew Pangborn – who competed as Team MAC n Cheese – won the Outstanding Engineering Design Process award for their creation of a small desk that could be converted into a trash can. They were also finalists in the video contest.
On Sunday, representatives from the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe visited the upper school campus for the unveiling of a monument recognizing the land Harker’s campuses rest on as the ancestral home of Thámien Ohlone-speaking people, who are the Muwekma Ohlone’s direct ancestors.
The Harker Student Diversity Coalition (SDC) and members of Harker’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee were in attendance to mark the occasion and show their support for building a partnership with the Tribe. The idea to create a plaque for the land acknowledgment was inspired in part by what students learned while attending diversity conferences where land recognition statements were regularly made. “In these statements, they emphasized the importance of recognizing the ancestral heritage of the land and sharing appreciation for the land we reside on,” said senior Natasha Yen, an SDC officer. The monument was one of many initiatives the SDC proposed to administrators last spring. “After we established the Student Diversity Coalition, we decided to make our proposal a reality and began working with the administration to create the plaque,” said Yen.
SDC members researched the history of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe in the Bay Area and reached out to representatives and “shared our idea of the land recognition plaque and our hope to begin building a relationship between the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and the Harker School. The leaders of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe made suggestions to and approved the plaque message and we invited them to the unveiling of the plaque,” said Yen.
The plaque contains Harker’s stated commitment to “uplifting the voices, experiences, histories and heritage of the Indigenous people of this land and beyond.” To this end, Yen said, a curriculum review will be conducted to ensure the accurate teaching of Indigenous people’s histories. The tribal guests, Yen said, were appreciative of the recognition of the Bay Area’s Indigenous people and are looking forward to working with Harker to teach Indigenous history. SDC students were presented with a tribal flag as a show of the Muwekma Ohlone’s appreciation. Additional monuments will be placed at Harker’s other campuses in the fall.