In May, Vignesh Panchanatham ‘18 was presented with the Halbert White ‘72 Prize in Economics during the Princeton University economics department’s Class Day celebration, which recognized the achievements of the year’s graduating seniors. This honor is awarded to the year’s highest-performing senior economics major, who demonstrates excellence in their coursework as well as their Junior Paper and Senior Thesis.
Wolfgang Pesendorfer, Princeton economics department chair, said that Panchanatham “forged an intellectually challenging path throughout his Princeton economics education by consistently taking and mastering demanding courses and excelling in his Junior Independent Work and Senior Thesis.”
Students gathered at Davis Field on Friday morning for the 2022 matriculation ceremony, which formally kicked off the 2022-23 school year and welcomed the Class of 2026 to the upper school.
After the ninth graders finished their procession (greeted by the applause of their classmates), Head of School Brian Yager gave his opening remarks, starting by thanking the faculty and staff who spent the previous two weeks preparing for the new school year. Speaking to the seniors, he mentioned the importance of their role as leaders and the legacy they will leave behind, referencing a Greek proverb: “Civilizations and schools grow great when old people plant trees, the shade of which they will never enjoy.” Turning his attention to the incoming ninth graders, he advised them to “enjoy and embrace the process. Look to the students in the grades above you for guidance and inspiration, as well as for examples of what will be expected of you in the years to come.”
Yager then introduced the upper school vocal group Cantilena, which gave a spirited performance of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” before recently hired Upper School Head Paul Barsky took the podium.
Barsky made special note of two concepts he felt would be crucial for students to understand in the coming year. The first, from the Danish, was samfundssind, which implores people “to think of yourself as part of a bigger cause,” Barsky said. The second, umwelt, is a term coined by German biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll, which posits that, “We think our senses make up our reality, because well, that’s what we sense,” Barsky explained. “The wonderful gift of a Harker education is that it widens, deepens and enriches our senses. At Harker, our umwelt is expanded to include senses and realms that we did not know existed.” Barsky stated his hope that students would carry the lessons of these ideas into the coming year.
Senior Kris Estrada, the ASB president, gave a warm welcome to his fellow students, who responded in kind. Speaking to his classmates, Estrada noted the difficulty of navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and the obstacles it presented. “Although we have unfortunately missed a number of class trips and opportunities to bond with one another, we’ve somehow accomplished just that together,” he said. “We have persevered through the toughest situations and we have come out united and closer than ever.” Addressing the Class of 2026, Estrada emphasized the importance of their first day as high schoolers. “Whether you have been at Harker in years prior, or perhaps today marks the beginning of your life’s chapter as a Harker Eagle, I advise you to simply cherish today and the rest of your Harker days because high school is such a formative experience.”
The members of the Student Diversity Coalition spoke to the students about their mission to “foster an inclusive space for all members of our community,” said senior KJ Williams.
“We in SDC work to provide a space that actively hears and supports students in all forms of their diversity,” said Fern Biswas, grade 10. “Whether through speaker events, collaborative events or implementing new systems, we also hope to keep this school a place where open conversations about these issues take place.” The group announced some of their plans for the next year, including a continuation of last year’s Culture Week and the hosting of town hall events and conferences.
SDC then introduced Brian Davis, Harker’s new DEI director, who thanked the SDC for all the remarkable work it had done prior to his arrival. Davis referred back to Yager’s mention of the Greek tree proverb, which he felt was very “future-oriented and really thinking about our accountability in our imagination.” He emphasized his mission to be resource for Harker’s student body, “but more importantly, making Harker a place where you all feel loved, where you feel safe, where you feel heard and where you feel valued,” he said. Davis also mentioned plans to expand Harker’s pre-existing affinity groups and help develop affinity groups that are newly established. “Lastly, I encourage you all to be an upstander, to speak up when you seeing things happening in our community, but also ensure the safety in our inclusive community,” he said. “It’s really important for you all to know that Harker is a place for everyone.”
Per tradition, matriculation also included the introduction of the year’s student officers, followed by a recitation of the matriculation oath, led by ASB vice president Gordon Chen, grade 12. As each of the ninth graders signed the matriculation book, the audience was treated to the Harker String Quartet’s renditions of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses and “Viva La Vida” by Coldplay. The ceremony closed, as always, with a series of entertaining skits performed by officers of the student council and honor council, titled “Upper School 101.” Each skit featured students portraying characters from the popular TV shows “Phineas and Ferb,” “SpongeBob Squarepants,” “The Office” and “Squid Game,” with messages about school etiquette and resources available to upper school students, including the library, the advisory system, office hours and extracurricular programs. As a special surprise, Richie Amarillas ’22 made a guest appearance to promote the performing arts program.
The team of Alex Hu ’22 and rising seniors Rohan Bhowmik, Anthony Tong and team captain Sabrina Zhu performed admirably at the finals of the 2022 Tests of Engineering, Aptitude, Mathematics and Science (TEAMS) competition, which took place in late June in Dallas. In this annual competition, students form teams to solve real-world engineering problems. Their roller coaster project won them third place in Presentation, fourth place in Design/Build and fifth place on the exam portion. Just 25 of the 625 teams who participated this year were invited to compete in the national event.
Harker rising seniors Rohan Gorti, Arin Jain and Zubin Khera won the top prize of $20,000 yesterday in the 2022 INCubatoredu National Pitch Competition. Held in Chicago, the event featured the top five teams from around the country pitching businesses to compete for funding from a board of investors. The students’ business is TuffToy, which creates and sells high-quality, durable dog toys, and was pitched through a 10-minute video presentation. “Good day to be an Eagle, and a huge milestone for our incubator program,” said business and entrepreneurship teacher and team advisor Michael Acheatel.
The National Merit Scholarship Corporation issued its final list of 2022 National Merit winners today, identifying 2022 graduates Kate Olsen, Vienna Parnell and Bodhisatta Saha as winners of college-sponsored scholarships. Congratulations to all 13 of Harker’s 2022 National Merit scholarship winners!
June 2, 2022:
Catherine He ’22 was named a winner of a National Merit Scholarship yesterday in the third round of winners in the 2022 National Merit Scholarship Program, becoming the 10th winner from the Class of 2022. The scholarships awarded in this round were financed by US colleges and universities and awarded by officials from the sponsor colleges to finalists who plan to attend the institution providing the scholarship. He’s scholarship was provided by the University of Southern California. The next and final round of National Merit Scholarship winners will be announced July 11.
May 11, 2022:
Today, seniors Alice Feng, Arnav Gupta, Victoria Han, Rishab Parthasarathy, Sasvath Ramachandran and William Zhao were named winners of $2,500 scholarships in the 2022 National Merit Scholarship Program. These awards were granted to finalists who, according to NMSC, possessed “the strongest combination of accomplishments, skills and potential for success in rigorous college studies.”
The next winners announcement is scheduled for June.
Apr. 27, 2022
Seniors Cady Chen, Irene Yuan and Emily Zhou were among the first round of 2022 National Merit Scholars announced today. All 1,000 winners in this round, selected from those who reached the finalist level in this year’s competition, received corporate-sponsored scholarships. All three of the Harker winners were awarded scholarships sponsored by Nvidia Corporation.
The National Merit Scholarship Corporation will announce more winners over the next few months until the final list of winners is revealed in July. This story will be updated as additional Harker winners are announced.
The upper school and middle school speech and debate teams have had great second-semester results at major end-of-year championships.
At the elite Upper School Tournament of Champions, Harker experienced success in a number of events. Students have to place highly at regular season tournaments to even qualify to compete. Recent graduate Anshul Reddy was a finalist in Lincoln-Douglas debate, making him second overall in the nation! Carol Wininger, grade 11, and Max Xing, grade 10, were in the finals of the public forum debate silver division. Michelle Jin, grade 11, was second in extemporaneous speaking. Rahul Mulpuri, grade 11, finished in the semis of Lincoln-Douglas, as did Class of 2022 member William Chien in extemporaneous and Dyllan Han, grade 11, in original oratory. Arissa Huda, grade 11, and Ariav Misra, grade 10, advanced in congressional debate.
The middle school team also shined at their division of the Tournament of Champions. Joy Hu, grade 8, was the national champion in extemporaneous speaking and Sofia Shah, grade 8, was the Lincoln-Douglas debate champion! Pavitra Kasthuri, grade 8, was in the finals of both extemporaneous speaking and impromptu. Hu was also in the finals of impromptu. Shloka Chawla, grade 8, and seventh graders Ameera Ramzan, Phoebe Lee and Tarush Gupta were also in impromptu elimination rounds. Evan Yuan, grade 7, was in congressional debate elimination rounds. Danielle Steinbach, grade 8, and Sanjith Senthil, grade 7, advanced in Lincoln-Douglas, as did the eighth grade public forum duo of Kairui Sun and Roshan Amurthur.
The upper school also had good results at the California State Speech tournament. As with all speech and debate tournaments, State is not divided by school classification, so it is one large pool for all those who participate. Sara Wan, grade 11, was second in impromptu speaking, Zubin Khera, grade 11, was fifth in original oratory and William Chien ’22 was in finals of extemporaneous speaking. Austina Xu, grade 11, was in the semifinals of oratorical interpretation and Dyllan Han was also in semifinals of original oratory.
There is one last event for the upper school speech and congressional debaters, as well as the middle school team, this June at the National Speech & Debate Association Championships. The only result that has been released ahead of time is that William Chien was named the California Coast District Student of the Year for his excellent performances and positive impact on the larger speech and debate community. The coaches are very proud of the hard work put in by all of the students.
Recently, Adi Parige ’11, now working as a filmmaker in New Zealand, was interviewed for a documentary on the diversity of the city of Wellington’s film industry. Parige was a cast member of the 2011 upper school spring musical, “Pippin,” whose cast and crew performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that year. In the interview, he discusses his current projects, growing up in the Bay Area and his connection to diasporic Indian communities.
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!
Daedalus Quartet displayed adventurous spirit and instrumental mastery at Friday night’s Harker Concert Series season closer. The group opened with “Lyric Quartet” by Harlem Renaissance composer William Grant Still, composed as a tribute to his friend, violinist Joachim Chassman. The pastoral warmth of the first movement, “The Sentimental One,” gave way to the contemplative melodies of “The Quiet One” before ramping up the tempo and playfulness for the final movement, “The Jovial One.”
Daedalus cellist Thomas Kraines then invited composer Laurie San Martin up to the stage to talk briefly about the next piece, “Six Cuts,” which she workshopped with the quartet personally. Consisting largely of unconventional and harsh sounds, “Six Cuts” at times resembled the noises of everyday life, rendered by the quartet’s instruments in sharp detail.
Following the intermission, Daedalus returned with slightly more conventional fare, including Amy Beach’s “Quartet for Strings,” and ended with Mendelssohn’s “Quartet in F minor,” whose galloping final movement was a fitting show for the quartet’s mastery.
Author and columnist Wajahat Ali MS ’94 – who recently published his book, “Go Back to Where You Came From” and whose work has been seen in the The New York Times, The Atlantic and The Daily Beast – made a series of appearances via Zoom for middle school students last Friday to talk about his life growing up in a South Asian Muslim family, how his life changed after the events of 9/11 and how he ended up in his career as a writer.
Born and raised in Fremont, Ali described feeling left out of the dominant American narrative from a very young age. “School is oftentimes the first place where you learn your rank in the American hierarchy,” he said. “You realize that no one else speaks Urdu, you realize that no one else has lentil stains on their shirt. …You realize, oh, I’m not the protagonist of the narrative. I’m not even the co-protagonist. I’m the punchline, the sidekick, the villain.”
Growing up, Ali frequently felt pressured to conform to whiteness in an effort to be considered “mainstream,” he said. “You realize … whiteness is centered in America and brownness and Blackness and Asianness are on the fringes, and our job is not to rock the boat, but row the boat and smile with our white teeth showing and nod our heads and be grateful for a sidekick role.”
Ali discovered his gift for writing and oration in grade 5, where a teacher encouraged him to share a short story he’d written with his classmates, inspired by the Moorish Muslim character Azeem from the film “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” played by Morgan Freeman. “They laugh at all the right parts. They applaud at the end. Their eyes widen,” he recalled, “and for the first time ever, my class … embraced me.”
Ali found that his parents were supportive of his desire to develop his talent even though seeking a career as a writer ran counter to what Ali called the “checklist of success,” which he described as: “You went to the best school, you got the best GPA, you got the best wife and husband, you got the best job, you got the best car. Sure you might be miserable and you might be popping Xanax and you might hate your spouse and you might hate your job, but smile with your white teeth showing, and if you suffer, suffer well.”
He went on to attend UC Berkeley, remaining undeclared until his senior year. As an officer in the Muslim Students Association, Ali found himself directly exposed to the anti-Muslim sentiment that rose rapidly after 9/11. “I got emails telling me, ‘Go back to where you came from,’” he said. “I got emails telling me, ‘you terrorists.’”
The role Ali found himself in was one he and his peers had no experience with. “There was no training, no one held our hand. There were no lessons in how to be an ambassador,” he said, later describing how the aftermath of 9/11 left him standing on “two islands. I was American through citizenship, but I was ‘them’ because I wasn’t white. I was ‘us’ because I had a passport and was born and raised in this country, but I was ‘them’ because I am Muslim or looked Muslim-y.”
Moved to activism by the political and social climate, Ali began speaking more and writing more, inspired in part by one of his teachers, the poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, who told Ali that he could fight back through art and storytelling.
At the age of 21, just before graduating and while considering law school, Ali’s parents were arrested as part of an FBI anti-piracy initiative called Operation Cyberstorm. Nearly any sense of security he and his family had gained suddenly disappeared. “Everything was gone overnight,” he said. He was now in the position of having to take care of his family while managing his parents’ legal calamity. Following a torturous legal process, his parents ended up going to jail for four years.
Ali mentioned this chapter of his life as an example of how “the checklist at times blows up. Things don’t go according to plan. You won’t get into the school that you want to get into. You don’t do the major you want to get into. You won’t marry the person you want to get married to.” These circumstances, he added, also happen against a background of social problems such as climate change, which further add to the demands that younger generations must adapt to, but which can also become opportunities. “In a strange way, if [my parents’ arrest] had not happened, I would probably be miserable, going through my first divorce, realizing I married the wrong woman and probably popping Xanax every day,” he said.
“Oftentimes, if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, we get handed down a script and a checklist that we have not written or created,” he said. “And so the test … is how do we create our own checklist? What happens if that checklist blows up?”