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”).
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.
Valliani told Geekwire that she co-founded Glow because of her belief in a “well-funded, thriving media.” Her idea was not initially well-received. “Most people looked at me like I was crazy when I said that I was making it easy for podcasters to charge for content. No one thought that people would actually pay for podcasts on a large scale,” she said. “I’m proud of this acquisition because it’s a demonstration that things have changed.”
Last weekend, upper school economics teacher Sam Lepler caught up with several Harker alumni during a trip to Philadelphia. While visiting family in Pennsylvania, Lepler put out a call to alumni in the area to see if they would like to meet. Within hours, he was sitting down to dinner with Megan Cardosi ’18, David Feng ’20, Ria Ghandi ’17, Rashmi Iyer ’20, Kelly Shen ’19, Kevin Xu ’18 and Shaya Zarkesh ’18. “I just stepped out for a bit and they all came to meet,” said Lepler. “It was super fun seeing them all.”
The group chatted about life at the University of Pennsylvania and how it has changed a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. “They told me that it’s awesome to be on campus from January – last semester was fully remote – and that even though the classes remain virtual, they are enjoying life in the dorms or off-campus housing, joining the ski club, and diving into life at Penn,” said Lepler. “It was truly awesome to see alums from all of the last four years, and I was genuinely honored that so many came out on such short notice.”
Last week, senior Utkarsh Priyam was named one of 625 semifinalists in the 2021 Presidential Scholars competition. These semifinalists were selected from 6,500 candidates in the competition, who were selected from 3.6 million graduating seniors. Priyam is one of 12 seniors who were selected as candidates in this year’s competition, which each year identifies students who have excelled in academics, the arts, and career and technical education. As part of their application, candidates submit materials including essays, transcripts and self-assessments. The Presidential Scholars program was created by the U.S. Department of Education in 1964 and is recognized as one of the highest honors U.S. high school students can receive.
From April 9-10, Harker hosted the 15th annual Research Symposium, inviting the Harker community to experience the breadth of its research opportunities by viewing student presentations and hearing keynote speakers deliver fascinating talks on the theme of this year’s event: artificial intelligence, robotics and automation. The 2020 symposium was canceled due to safety concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year’s symposium was held virtually with all presentations, keynote talks and exhibitions delivered via Zoom, requiring impressive coordination between event organizers, presenters and technology staff.
Throughout the two-day event, middle and upper school students delivered poster presentations on research they had conducted on topics such as environmental science, physics, astronomy and medicine. The presentations were held in special breakout rooms, with plenty of time scheduled for each speaker. Corporate exhibitors – which included Microsoft, NVidia, Oculus and ZeroUI – each received their own room that visitors could drop into at their leisure, mimicking the atmosphere of the exhibition area in previous years.
The event kicked off on Friday with Wayne Liu of Perfect Corp, whose app YouCam Makeup allows users to demo beauty products using artificial intelligence and augmented reality technology, and was named one of Time Magazine’s best innovations of 2020. Liu provided an overview of the history of artificial intelligence and how it developed into the technology used by YouCam Makeup. “Facial recognition is not new,” he said, “However, to get to the point where you can [try on makeup virtually] … the technology needs to be very precise.” To achieve this precision, Perfect Corp gathered and analyzed millions of hair color and skin tone samples, and their app uses 3,900 polygon meshes to achieve accurate results.
Dr. Ben Chung, associate professor of urology at Stanford’s School of Medicine, provided an overview of robotics-enabled surgery and how it has been used to make certain very difficult procedures much easier and safer, such as the removal of prostate cancer. He also showed footage of his own procedures using surgical robots in which he removed a tumor from a kidney. “Where the robotic platform really helps us is the ease of the suture,” he said. “Making sure that your suturing is exact is really important because you need to make sure that the patient doesn’t bleed afterwards.” As the technology of robotic surgery evolves, Dr. Chung said, it will be applicable to more situations, such as conducting surgery over long distances in situations such as on a battlefield or in a space station.
Any discussion of artificial intelligence and robotics invariably touches on the legal and ethical aspects of these fields, and Ryan Calo’s presentation on legal rulings on the use of robots was a great forum for the topic. Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, explained that “robots have been with us for a very long and so we shouldn’t really be surprised that occasionally they have led to legal disputes.” These disputes extend as far back as the 1880s, when it was questioned whether using artificial wooden coins in vending machines constituted fraud. In the 1950s, courts found that robots could not be defined as dolls because they were not representations of human beings and thus could not be subjected to the same tariffs. Present day debates have centered on the ownership of artifacts retrieved by robots from shipwrecks and how to prosecute crimes in which machines are used to steal from homes.
Fitting for the symposium’s 15th anniversary, this year’s alumni keynote was delivered by Yi Sun ‘06, who 15 years ago was Harker’s first Science Talent Search finalist and a member of Harker’s first US Math Olympiad team, winning a silver medal. In his talk Sun, who now works as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s department of statistics, explained the process of how machine learning tasks often involve discerning signals from “noisy observations.” Using detailed diagrams, Sun discussed the mathematical concepts underlying the problem and how they are used to process data for electron microscopy.
The final keynote speaker for this year was Chelsea Finn, assistant professor in computer science at Stanford University, who presented on the process of teaching robots how to learn and solve problems the way humans do. Finn noted that while it was possible to teach robots to do certain tasks – such as piecing together a toy airplane or place shapes into a cube – through trial and error, these robots became highly specialized due to gathering data from very controlled environments using specific tools. Teaching robots how to perform “simpler, but broader” tasks with a greater range of applications is much more difficult, and Finn explained the methods she and her team have used to create robot “generalists.”
Late last week, senior Anna Vazhaeparambil was named a runner-up in the JEA Journalist of the Year contest. JEA recognized Vazhaeparambil for her dedication to improving coverage of junior varsity and girls sports. “While we would cover every single football game, for example, there would only be one or two articles written about softball or girls water polo,” she told JEA. Her mission to increase diversity in reporting informed her later work covering political events such as elections and protests. Jurors praised Vazhaeparambil for her perseverance and ability to cover a wide range of topics as well as her leadership qualities.
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March 5, 2021:
Senior Anna Vazhaeparambil, who serves as editor-in-chief of the student news website Harker Aquila, was selected as California Journalist of the Year by the Journalism Education Association. As the California representative in JEA’s Journalist of the Year competition, her portfolio will be evaluated during the spring JEA/NSPA National High School Journalism Convention. The top winner will receive a $3,000 scholarship and up to three runners up each will receive an $850 scholarship. Vazhaeparambil also was awarded the top $500 prize in the Arnetta Garcin Memorial Scholarship, which she was eligible for because Harker journalism advisor Ellen Austin is a JEA of Northern California member.
This story was submitted by speech and debate department chair Jenny Achten.
Harker closed out the national championship final round in Lincoln-Douglas debate. Seniors Andy Lee and Akshay Manglik met in the final round and were declared co-champions, along with junior Deven Shah, who was walked over in semifinals by Lee.
After six tough preliminary rounds, the tournament created a single elimination bracket of the top 32 debaters, meaning that the students had to win debate after debate to close out finals. Lee, Manglik and Shah were also joined by junior Anshul Reddy and sophomore Rahul Mulpuri in winning top 20 speaker awards. Reddy and Mulpuri, along with sophomore Deeya Viradia and freshman Ansh Sheth, were also in elimination rounds, giving Harker the best overall representation in elimination rounds.
The online tournament was hosted by the National Debate Coaches Association. In all, 104 schools, representing 28 states, competed at the tournament. Coach Greg Achten was named one of three finalists for Educator of the Year by the organization. Lee summed up the weekend well, saying, “It was a team effort. We could not have done it without our amazing coaches and teammates who continued helping, even when they were no longer in the tournament.”
This year’s Alumni Day of Giving campaign is set to take place on April 8. This is a one-day effort that will take place online in partnership with GiveCampus.
Once again, this year’s goal is based on participation. We are aiming for 250 alumni donors, and no gift is too small or too big! In addition of the use of #loveharker to help spread the word, the beloved slogan “Put Your Eagles Up!”, used traditionally during school meeting athletic announcements, has been added to this year’s campaign in the spirit of our alumni community helping to lift up all future Eagles and showing their love for their first alma mater.
A link to make a gift will be emailed to all alumni beforehand and will be posted on all of our social media beginning April 7. This notification also will include ways to share the news about a donor’s gift as well as help with spreading the word to fellow alumni. All donors will be encouraged to post their donation status on social media using the hashtag #loveharker.
We are excited to announce that both Venmo and PayPal have been added to the platform to make it even easier to give.
The alumni office will have its virtual zoom room open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. for alumni and friends to stop by and check in to help celebrate the big day’s milestones!
Those interested in becoming advocates for this campaign should contact Kristina Alaniz, director of alumni relations, at kristinaa@harker.org.
From Feb. 22-25, 139 students from The Harker School DECA Chapter attended the 2021 State Career Development Conference (SCDC). This conference was held virtually due to COVID-19, and students competed by submitting recordings of their events. To simulate the in-person conference feel, SCDC also featured Career Prep Academy Workshops and a Harker DECA chapter social. Overall, Harker performed admirably, with 59 overall finalists and 28 top four written event and top five role-play winners.
“SCDC was the culmination of Harker DECA’s efforts this past year, and I am extremely proud of how far our students have come,” said senior Anvitha Tummala, Harker DECA co-CEO. “Everyone has demonstrated such commendable adaptability with a virtual DECA experience, and due to a competitively successful SCDC, I’m excited to see our chapter compete at ICDC next month!”
The conference started off with the opening ceremony, which our chapter watched through a livestream on Zoom. Students were motivated to find their purpose by keynote speaker Quinn Tempest, a successful entrepreneur who has dedicated herself to helping people reach their life goals. Tempest said, “never stop asking yourself big important questions” and “purpose is the ‘why’ that drives what you do.”
“She discussed her personal motivators and what led her to be a successful entrepreneur, inspiring me to search for my own purpose in the work I do,” said Clarice Wang, grade 11, Harker DECA VP of operations. Since this competition was held online, submissions worked similarly to SVCDC, and members were given two days to record their written presentations and roleplays, put the documents in a Google Drive folder, and turn in the link to the DECA submissions portal.
“Though I’d much rather be presenting in person, it isn’t all bad! I liked that we could re-record if we made a small mistake, and the conference went very smoothly,” said Shreeya Merchia, grade 9.
SCDC activities continued with a Harker DECA Chapter social which took place on March 5. The Harker DECA Officer team prepared a variety of fun and engaging breakout-room activities such as baking cookies, playing Among Us, watching “Wandavision,” participating in sports trivia and more. Members were allowed to hop between as many of the bonding activities as they liked, the most popular being “Wandavision.”
“Although this is our second time competing in an online format, the Harker DECA chapter has been preparing for a virtual competition the entire year through Zoom study sessions. Students submitted videos of their presentations and PDFs of their business plans that were judged asynchronously,” said senior Bryan Zhang, Harker DECA VP of competitions. “Despite not being able to have live competition, we were still able to simulate business case studies and develop ourselves professionally. The virtual format also demanded higher levels of creativity and teamwork to stay ahead of the curve of other teams, which I am sure will benefit all competitors in the long term.”
The competition concluded with an awards ceremony hosted by California DECA on Thursday, March 11. Members joined a livestream as the California DECA officer team recognized advisors and announced ICDC (International Career Development Conference) qualifiers. To simulate stage recognition at an in-person conference, winners were spotlighted when their names were announced. Along with our chapter members’ achievements, Harker DECA was recognized for achieving Gold Level Certification for the Chapter Awards Program, as well as Thrive Level for the Chapter Campaigns and Membership Campaign.
“From kicking off the conference with a motivational message about purpose, our competitors no doubt found their purpose while competing at SCDC. I’m incredibly proud of the officer team for helping run this conference smoothly, and I am looking forward to making more conference memories at ICDC!” said chapter advisor Juston Glass. “Congratulations to all of our ICDC qualifiers. Go Harker Eagles!”
Members qualifying for ICDC are as follows:
1st Place
• Shreeya Merchia, grade 9; Principles of Marketing
• Vienna Parnell, grade 11; Hotel and Lodging Management Series
• Vedant Kenkare, grade 11; Marketing Communications Series
• Bodhi Saha, grade 11, Kaden Kapadia, grade 11; Sports Entertainment Marketing Team Decision Making
Plan
• Ananya Bammi, grade 10, Saavi Kumar, grade 10; Finance Operations Research
• Miki Mitarai, grade 9, Medha Yarlagadda, grade 9, Meishin Yen, grade 9; Hospitality and Tourism Operations
Research
• Margaret Cartee, grade 9; Principles of Business Management and Administration
• Bryan Zhang, grade 12; Sports and Entertainment Marketing Series
• Emily Zhou, grade 11, Emily Tan, grade 11; Entrepreneurship Team Decision Making
• Aditya Singhvi, grade 12, Andrew Sun, grade 12; Hospitality Services Team Decision Making
• Annmaria Antony, grade 10, Grace Hoang, grade 10; Marketing Management Team Decision Making
3rd Place
• Emily Tan, grade 11, Emily Zhou, grade 11; Business Services Operations Research
• Leisha Devisetti, grade 10; Sports and Entertainment Marketing Operations Research
• Cynthia Wang, grade 9; Principles of Marketing
• Rohan Varma, grade 12; Automotive Services Marketing Series
4th Place
• Max Xing, grade 9, Carey Chang, grade 9, Kevin Zhang, grade 9; Hospitality and Tourism Operations Research
• Ananya Bammi, grade 10, Saavi Kumar, grade 10; Financial Services Team Decision Making
• April Sun, grade 11; Restaurant and Food Services Management
• April Sun, grade 11; Hospitality and Tourism Professional Selling
• Camilla Lindh, grade 11; Quick Serve Restaurant Management Series
5th Place
• Simren Kochhar, grade 11; Entrepreneurship Individual Series
• Sara Wan, grade 10; Human Resources Management Series
• Sujith Pakala, grade 11; Quick Serve Restaurant Management
• Victoria Han, grade 11, Catherine He, grade 11; Travel and Tourism Team Decision Making
• Elvis Han, grade 11, Melody Luo, grade 11; Marketing Management Team Decision Making