Last Friday, middle school students made special pouches for Australian wildlife orphaned in the bushfires that have been ravaging the country. Students used cut-out patterns to sew the pouches, which were sent to the Oakland Zoo to be delivered to Australia. “The middle school’s Student Leadership Council did a presentation on the Australian fires at a school meeting, and [Assistant Head of School] Patricia Lai Burrows asked me to talk as I had just returned from Australia,” said math teacher Margaret Huntley, who is originally from Australia. “We were brainstorming about what we could do in response and I had seen this in the news.”
Fabric for the pouches was donated by the faculty, and some students have continued cutting fabric for more pouches, which Huntley hopes to send very soon.
On Friday, 10 lower school students were featured at the California Kindergarten Association’s Young Children’s Art Exhibit, held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara. First graders Brayden Ching, Violet Santana, Jane Tang, Ethan Wang, Angela Zhang and Emily Zhao, and kindergartners Serena Du, Caroline Liu, Khushi Monga and Katy Wang had artwork on display at the event, which has showcased the works of Pre-K, kindergarten and grade 1 students since 1989.
The boys soccer team started last week with a 2-2 draw against Leland before dominating Woodside Priory 6-1 on Kicks Against Cancer night. This week, the 6-1-1 Eagles travel to Crystal Springs Uplands on Wednesday and host Eastside College Prep on Saturday.
Girls Soccer
Last week, the girls soccer team defeated Eastside College Prep 8-0 before a 2-2 draw against Notre Dame San Jose for the Kicks Against Cancer game on Friday night. This week, the Eagles hope to improve their 4-0-3 record as they travel to Crystal Springs Uplands on Tuesday and Pinewood on Thursday before hosting Mercy San Francisco on Friday.
Girls Basketball
The girls basketball team went 2-1 last week to improve its season record to 6-7. The Eagles defeated Mercy Burlingame 58-46 and Crystal Springs Uplands 67-38 before falling to The King’s Academy 38-49. This week, the girls travel to Mercy San Francisco on Tuesday and host Notre Dame San Jose on Thursday.
Boys Basketball
The boys basketball team dropped all three of its games last week, falling to 6-7 on the year. In a 41-52 loss to Pinewood, Jack Connors, grade 12, led the team with 13 points and six steals. Then in a 45-79 loss to Sacred Heart Prep, Arjun Virmani, grade 11, led the scoring with 13 points. Finally, the Eagles finished the week with a 37-47 loss to Crystal Springs Uplands with Giovanni Rofa, grade 12, leading the offense with 10 points. This week, the boys travel to Woodside Priory on Tuesday before hosting Eastside College Prep on Thursday.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2019 issue of Harker Magazine.
Harker’s incubator program, after one full year, has turned out some solid successes, awarding cash grants to students who developed business plans and successfully pitched to a panel. Now, starting year two, the benefits to students – far beyond money – are becoming apparent.
The program launched with a single class in summer 2017. That first class, a no-credit offering, brought students three of the critical ingredients for entrepreneurial success: strategic advice and mentorship, a dedicated support team and seed funding. A couple of pretty interesting ventures arose from that class, which was so well-received that the department developed the curriculum for a regular school-year program of two for credit classes to start a year later, in fall 2018. (See links in box on page 49 for more.)
The for-credit classes, Honors 2, ran all year. By May 2019, about $20,000 in venture funds were handed out to eight companies developed by 11 students. In Incubator 1, students created and commercialized their own product or service.“Teams are led through the lean startup processes of developing hypotheses about a business concept, testing those hypotheses, adapting and continually iterating,” said Michael Acheatel, business & entrepreneurship teacher.
Incubator 2 is geared toward students who have already launched a company and are focused on growing their business. “Students are led through three-week long ‘sprints’ where students identify their individual goals and tasks at the beginning of the sprint and present a demo of their accomplishments at the end of the sprint,” said Acheatel.
Students in each of the courses receive coaching and mentorship from entrepreneurs, investors and business experts, and a key element in the 2018-19 classes was provided by Next47, a venture capital firm, which donated $10,000 in venture funds.
Now, year two of the for-credit incubator classes has started and the Incubator 1 students are in the midst of the vetting processes, while the new Incubator 2 students are using their funding to develop their ventures to bring them to the next level – a functional organization with a product.
The goal, however, is not to create million dollar companies in high school, though in Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial atmosphere, that is not beyond reach. The real goal is to teach students to think critically when developing ideas, to use resources, like mentors, to advance their knowledge and network, and to help the students gain confidence that careful, hard work will bring concrete results at some level.
“The goal of the course is to provide students with experiences that teach values and practices that are not traditionally taught in the classroom but are hugely important in life/ work,” said Acheatel.
“We want to inculcate soft skills such as resiliency, problem-solving, creative thinking, public speaking and networking. These skills are built into the lean methodology of controlled failure, of seeking failure early as a means of improving. Furthermore, they learn these skills by working with mentors and pitching investors,” he said.
“Additionally, they learn technical skills that they’ll use in the workplace like financial modeling, conducting competitive and market research, executing marketing campaigns, creating and delivering pitches, developing investor reports, etc. These are skills that they will use in almost any job they take, yet they are not taught in traditional school environments,” Acheatel noted.
Nerine Uyanik and Arun Sundaresan, both grade 12, are in the Incubator 1 class, exploring the skills needed for serious entrepreneurship for the first time. Their company is designing electronic flashcards that address shortcomings in existing digital flashcards.
“Most digital flashcards have a two-sided format that inherently limits the content that can be asked,” said Uyanik. “To study certain concepts, such as vocabulary, would require either making many flashcards with closely related but still separate information or making a single flashcard that contains all the related information. One is inefficient, and the other is ineffective, potentially coming at the cost of the student’s own learning,” she said.
The pair is working on a multisided flashcard that suits a student’s needs better. For example, when studying a molecule, to learn its name, formula, molecular geometry and structure would require a program in which students can input all the information and determine how they review that info.”Nothing of the sort exists,” said Uyanik, “so I decided to take this incubator class to develop such an application.”
Partner Sundaresan came in with more background and is really looking for an opportunity to grow as an entrepreneur. “I’ve had a lot of exposure to business and entrepreneurship before, both academically and in extracurricular pursuits,” he said. “I feel like taking the incubator class was a natural progression in my explorations of business, as I will launch a for-profit company.”
The first lesson the pair learned was that although each came to class with independent ideas, there was enough crossover that they could grow their ideas together. “At first, we hesitated to work together since we envisioned pursuing completely different paths,” said Uyanik, “but Mr. Acheatel pointed out that we both were trying to address problems with existing study tools, just with different solutions in mind … so he encouraged us to work together at least during the early stages, where having more ideas on the table wouldn’t hurt. We then delved into the market research and analyzed our ideas realistically.” That’s when the real growth began.
“Arun realized that my proposition seemed more feasible to achieve through this class, so he decided to let go of pursuing his vision to focus on mine,” said Uyanik. “I realize how difficult it was for him to make such a decision, for we both had strong ideas and intentions when deciding to take this class. As he has come to understand my idea, though, I am grateful that he is now also convinced of its potential and confident in his work. Arun’s expertise in coding and technology makes up for my lack of experience in that area when addressing the specifics of product development, and my deeper understanding of the product helps drive the vision of the company. Through this class, I have come to value working with someone with a complementary set of skills and perspectives.”
“Since the first day,” noted Sundaresan, “when we were figuring out problems that our businesses would solve, we had to think creatively and in terms of how to solve existing problems. Presentation skills are also vital for this, because we create our own elevator pitches that are regularly revised and presented. Nerine and I have definitely used this class to expand our networks,” he said. “It’s a class, but it’s all real,” said Uyanik. “Everything we learn and do ties into making practical progress. The pitches we now refine in class will eventually be delivered to investors. Our homework – completing market analyses and conducting customer interviews, for example – reflects the work that businesses must do to grow. We learn to do, and we do to learn.”
Anay Karwal, grade 12, an Incubator 1 student, is developing Persona, an app that automatically recommends outfits to high school and college students, and to business professionals, based on their existing wardrobe and their fashion preferences. He is already seeing the kind of life-growth that Acheatel noted. “I joined the incubator class because I really wanted to attain an experiential perspective with a business,” said Karwal. “I’ve participated in DECA since my freshman year, and I wanted to utilize all the skills that I learned in order to create something tangible. By the end of the year, I want to have a working prototype to take into college.”
Karwal is seeing the building blocks to his goal emerge from the course. “From working at this startup alone, I’ve now realized that collaboration is extremely crucial in life, because it provides you a new perspective and is much more effective,” he said.
It is clear that Incubator 1 students are acquiring skills essential to developing a product, and that personal growth is part of that learning, including how to be flexible, how to work with others on complex tasks and, in Sundaresan’s case, how to switch gears when necessary to build out a successful product. But beyond the incubator program, the students are finding their advancing skills eminently useful in other classes and in life.
“With my experiences in DECA and this class, I refined my public speaking abilities and I constantly apply that to all my classes. The problem-solving skills I learned from this class help in my math and economics classes,” Karwal said, adding that he now appreciates learning from others. “The best thing I’ve gotten out of the class is my mentor, as he consistently provides me with help and guidance,” Karwal concluded.
Nanoseed is a Harker student-developed nonprofit that organizes student and business loans and grants to underserved regions in China. Graduating seniors pass down leadership of the company each year, and this year Andrew Sun, grade 11, heads up the venture and is “franchising” the fundraising program at other schools. “We’re interested in helping those who have been abandoned by traditional lending organizations in China,” Sun said.
For Sun, the rewards transcend grades and personal accomplishments. “I am passionate about effecting change beyond myself,” Sun said. “I’ve realized through heading Nanoseed that it’s incredibly gratifying to do something that will directly impact someone else’s life. It’s helped me realize that there is much more to life than grades and homework assignments, which is a balance I have definitely struggled with in the past. For example, Nanoseed’s benefit concert last year [to reduce poverty in rural China] really opened my perspective.
“The summer reading for the class also introduced us to a systematic approach to finding solutions to problems by testing one feature/aspect at a time, similar to isolating one variable in an experiment,” Sun noted. “This approach helped me also with improving my speeches in congressional debate, another activity I’m involved in. I’ve found applications of that systematic approach by changing one thing about a speech every iteration and seeing if that achieved the improvement I wanted it to achieve.”
For Sun, like Karwal, the biggest advantage to the class is networking and being able to interact with the other people in the class. “They’ve given me so many ideas for fundraisers, operations, etc., and have also been wonderful about offering help when I need it,” said Sun.
“The collaborative aspect of the class is really rewarding and I’m most grateful I took the class for this reason.” Claire Luo, grade 11, now in Incubator 2, formed a company last year called GetTime, whose mission is to decrease stress and increase productivity among teenage students through an engaging and efficient time management app. The current version of the app consists of three core features – a dashboard for tracking progress and tasks, a prioritized to-do list and a timing function to keep students on track throughout their study period. “What differentiates my app is that it combines task and time management on one platform and specifically targets high school students, which helps make the experience more streamlined and effective,” she said.
Luo, too, has gained wider perspective through her work in the incubator program. “One overarching truth I have learned is that flexibility and adaptability are key, for me as a person and for my company,” she said. “Whether this means continually soliciting feedback and revising features or altering my goals to fit new circumstances, I have learned to be more open to change. In particular, going out and talking to potential customers and mentors has encouraged me to embrace pivoting some aspects of my app.”
The payoff is there in the learning, even if the product never gets to market. “I have definitely been able to apply these skills, both in creating my company and in my own life,” said Luo. “For instance, designing the app and then asking for potential customer feedback was a new experience for me and required me to break down the tasks and keep going at it resiliently. The ability to have a clear project end goal and then executing each task one at a time has applied to any other large group project in other classes.
“In addition, presenting and pitching to investors has improved my presenting skills. In my other classes (and activities like DECA), I am more comfortable with speaking in front of larger groups and with using business terms. Also, I learned how to create more effective visuals that are clear and concise, which has been incredibly helpful in other classes.”
No surprise, Luo has also embraced the collaborative value of networking. “Networking is also an invaluable skill, since I am now more aware of the importance of going out and connecting with others in order to expand my network. The type of creative and entrepreneurial thinking cultivated in this class has improved my analysis skills, for example, by allowing me to better evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of certain things.” Luo feels the class has given her the tools to set and reach ambitious milestones.
“As starting a company is a very individualized process, setting goals is often up to what I want to accomplish, not what someone else tells me,” she said. “This class has inspired me to be proactive in adapting to changes and staying on top of my work, and has provided me the resources I need to achieve my goals.”
Kelsey Wu ’19 has scored big in her first semester at Harvard. Her paper, written at Harker as a John Near Excellence in History Education Endowment Fund scholar, was published in the fall issue of The Harvard Undergraduate Research Journal.
The paper, “The Loneliness Disease: Challenges of First-Generation Chinese-American Parents of Autistic Children” was selected by The Harvard Undergraduate Research Journal (THURJ) not only for publication, but also as the recipient of the Best Manuscript Award with a $700 stipend. The article is featured on the cover of the magazine as well.
A biannual publication, THURJ showcases peer-reviewed undergraduate research from all academic disciplines. Manuscripts are rigorously reviewed by the peer review board, and the selected manuscripts are further reviewed by Harvard graduate students, postdocs and professors. “In my case,” said Wu, “I received very detailed comments from two professors and one post-doc on criteria such as importance, novelty, logical flow, rigor of methods, strength of results, and style. I then made edits based on their suggestions and returned the paper to the peer review board for the next round of review.
“I’m endlessly grateful for the Near-Mitra program for providing me such a unique opportunity to engage in college-level humanities research in high school. It has laid a solid foundation for my research and academic writing skills in the social sciences, which are definitely conducive to my pursuit in college.” Here is a link to Wu’s original paper at Harker. We will post the link to the updated THURJ article when the magazine is uploaded.
Wu is working as a research assistant at Harvard Law School, is involved in Harvard Open Data Project, and sings for an a cappella group. She noted she has, “met a lot of interesting and inspirational people here and have made lots of really supportive friends” at Harvard. Go, Kelsey!
This article originally appeared in the winter 2019 issue of Harker Magazine.
Siddarth Satish ’06 found his passion when he won his first debate round in high school. Satish, who later became captain of the debate team, treasured his time learning and growing with his classmates. He qualified and represented Harker at the national circuit debate’s Tournament of Champions. “I can picture his smiling, enthusiastic face with ease,” said Tony Silk, upper school mathematics department chair. “I recall him easily connecting with his classmates, jumping into group work and always ready to help a friend out.” After graduating from Harker, Satish’s educational and entrepreneurial journey led him to become the founder and CEO of Gauss Surgical.
Satish always wanted to be an engineer, so he applied to the University of California, Berkeley’s chemical engineering program, which was ranked No. 1 in the U.S. During his time at Berkeley, he worked on computer-aided molecular modeling and fluid dynamics research and had several articles published in journals by his senior year.
After he completed his undergraduate work, a professor convinced him to join a graduate program – the UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Ph.D. Program in Bioengineering – that would allow him to explore his passion for fluid mechanics within a more applied context: medical technology. “It dawned on me that the work I was doing was unlikely to have an immediate impact in the real world. The prospect of designing medical devices, translating them to clinical use and concretely improving health outcomes was hugely enticing to me – it was real,” remembered Satish. “My graduate project was initially focused on robotic surgery but after spending a lot of time in operating rooms at Stanford, I realized that diagnosing surgical bleeding was an unsolved category, simply because the technology didn’t exist.”
This led Satish to develop a novel method of estimating hemoglobin mass from a photo of blood-soaked gauze. The algorithm could be delivered through a software on a camera-enabled mobile device – an iPhone app.
Of course, this was not a simple matter, but after developing a complex application of computer vision and machine learning algorithms and tackling the regulatory pathway for market access, Gauss Surgical was born.
Gauss has raised roughly $50 million in funding since its founding in 2011 and its app, Triton, is being used in more than 250,000 surgeries a year at medical centers including Mount Sinai Hospital, Duke University Medical Center and Northwestern Medicine. Satish is a named inventor on more than 50 issued or pending patents, was named to Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list and spoke at a TedMed conference.
Satish’s passion is ever-evolving from that first spark on the debate team. His passion was further ignited when he walked into an operating room in graduate school, when he negotiated his first round of funding for Gauss and when he made a presentation to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“I’ve been fortunate to rediscover and redefine my passions over time through these formative experiences and to let them evolve,” said Satish, who was raised by two engineer-entrepreneurs from India, where he was born. He immigrated to the United States when he was 7 years old, and he and his sister, Anita ’10, are both Harker graduates. Another Harker graduate is Satish’s wife, Alisha Tolani ’06, who is a resident physician specializing in obstetrics/gynecology at Stanford.
“I’ve also re-discovered my passion for the water, and Alisha and I have been on hundreds of dives all over the planet,” said Satish. “It’s been a rewarding experience since you get to see the world with such a different perspective.”
Vikki Bowes-Mok is also the executive director of the community nonprofit Compass Collective
In this year’s National Young Composers Challenge, junior Anika Fuloria was named a finalist in the full orchestra category for her piece, titled “Worker 21486 – Life and Death in the Hive,” which received high praise from the competition’s judges. “This is quite a remarkable piece,” said Keith Lay, who teaches in the composition program at Full Sail University. “It’s unlike any other submission that we’ve received this year.”
A prolific composer, Fuloria has written music for Harker’s 2018 and 2019 fall plays and composed “The Final March” as a tribute to the senior class of 2019, which was performed at the upper school’s spring concert in May. She also performs in the bass section of the upper school orchestra, and this past weekend performed at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with the CODA (California Orchestra Directors Association) String Orchestra, leading the bass section after placing first in the seating audition.
Mary Liu ’14, who currently works in the office of Congressman Ro Khanna, has been awarded a Schwarzman Scholarship. The program is “designed to prepare its graduates to build stronger relationships between China and a rapidly changing world and to address the most pressing challenges of the 21st century,” according to its website.
Liu’s bio notes she is a Gilman Scholar, studied applied mathematics at Columbia University, and dedicated a year in service to rural communities in China and Thailand where she volunteered as a community organizer, teacher and website developer. She is passionate about increasing economic opportunity in rural communities. Huge congratulations!
Sophomore Spencer Cha recently won the Southwest division of the Music Teachers National Association’s Composition Competition and will head to Chicago in March as a national finalist. Cha, who has studied piano for more than 12 years and has studied composition for three years, also will perform with the Golden State Youth Orchestra in May.
Cha also has won numerous piano competitions, including the California Association of Professional Music Teachers State Honors Competition, the San Francisco Chopin Competition for Young Pianists and the Marilyn Mindell Piano Competition, in addition to being a soloist with the Palo Alto Philharmonic and performing at Carnegie Hall. He currently performs with the upper school orchestra as an oboist.
Harker journalism students spent Nov. 19-23 in Washington, D.C., attending the Journalism Education Association and National Scholastic Press Association’s Fall High School Journalism Convention, where the Winged Post newspaper received an NSPA Pacemaker award.
The upper school’s Winged Post newspaper was awarded the Pacemaker for the 2018-19 school year, which was the third Pacemaker in journalism department history, following a 2016 win for the upper school news website, Aquila, and the Winged Post’s first Pacemaker win in 2008. The Winged Post was one of just 19 school publications chosen from among 220 finalists. Aquila was awarded sixth place in Best of Show in the Website category.
Individual awards included an honorable mention for Social Justice Reporting for senior Mahika Halepete’s story on the refugee crisis, and another honorable mention in Local Climate Change Reporting for a story covering the Green New Deal by juniors Arya Maheshwari, Varsha Rammohan and Michael Eng, and sophomore Lucy Ge.
Honorable mentions were also won for 2019 Digital Story of the Year for coverage of the California Democratic Convention by seniors Eric Fang and Kathy Fang, and juniors Arushi Saxena and Anna Vazhaeparambil, and a story by Kathy Fang and senior Jessie Wang on biology teacher Thomas Artiss’ beekeeping hobby.