This article originally appeared in the summer 2017 Harker Magazine.
The annual alumni tour of Butch Keller, upper school division head, and his wife, Jane, upper school math teacher, began in March with a trip to Southern California to watch Izzy Connell ’13 in her final track meet as a Pepperdine student and have dinner with the rest of the Harker alumni at Pepperdine.
Josh Tien ’13 and Alisa Wakita ’16 joined the Kellers and Connell for dinner the next evening where the group celebrated Connell’s engagement to Ryan Mui ’13, who had proposed that day. Mui is currently at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. “It’s a great opportunity to get to know Mr. and Mrs. Keller on a more personal level,” said Connell.
The East Coast leg of the Keller Tour started with several fun-filled days in New York City. At their next stop, New Haven, Conn., the Kellers met up with Alyssa Amick ’15 for lunch and a tour of the Yale campus. They then had dinner with other Yale students at Elm City Social.
In Ann Arbor, Mich., the Kellers toured the University of Michigan campus with Sheridan Tobin ’15, followed by lunch with Tobin and Arjun Ashok ’15 at the famous Zingerman’s Delicatessen. Dinner that night with other Harker alumni attending Michigan brought many smiles and plenty of laughter. “The sense of community at Harker has always been so special,” said Tobin, “and the Keller Tour was the perfect reminder of that.”
The final stop brought the Kellers to the University of Washington. Sean Pan ’14 met the Kellers for lunch and a tour of the UW campus. “I was very glad to have gotten dinner on the Keller Tour at least once during my four years in college!” said Pan.
Though it was a rainy trip, noted Jane Keller, “the weather could not dampen the joy in seeing our alums fulfilling their dreams in the next phase of their education.”
Search for “Keller Tour” in Harker News for more details on this annual journey!
Congratulations to Izzy Connell ’13 on being named a CoSIDA (College Sports Information Directors of America) third team Academic All-American this week. Connell graduated from Pepperdine University this spring as a psychology major with a 3.96 GPA. She also was the school’s top female sprinter in the program’s history, holding nine school records, and was named Pepperdine’s Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year for the 2016-17 season. Check out the full story here:
This article originally appeared in the winter 2016 Harker Magazine.
Two Class of 2015 alumnae have taken their passion for food and journalism to new levels with In a Nutshell Food, a YouTube channel they created.
Fred Chang and Priscilla Pan have been making how-to videos of delicious foods while pursuing their academic dreams in California and abroad. Pan attends the University of Southern California, where she is studying biomedical engineering with a mechanical emphasis. “I’m also planning to minor either in entrepreneurship or computer science, two subjects that I think will greatly complement my engineering background,” she said.
Chang is attending Yale-NUS in Singapore. She is considering a politics, philosophy and economics major with concentrations in philosophy and economics. “On top of that, I’m a computer science minor – strictly speaking, a mathematical, computational and statistical sciences minor with a focus in computer science,” she said. Before graduating from Harker, the friends began making fun food videos under the name In a Nutshell Food – and then opportunity knocked. “Our journalism teacher, Ms. [Ellen] Austin, was always a huge supporter of In a Nutshell Food,” said Pan, “and when the Columbia Scholastic Press Association (CSPA) award season rolled around, she encouraged basically everyone to submit their work – articles, videos, photos, etc.”
The pair earned a first-place prize for their video, giving momentum to what was already a fun project. Chang was surprised when she heard the results. “I had no words. It was really nice to have the affirmation that we were indeed doing a good job, especially because it was mostly just for fun,” she said.
The duo had posted 29 videos as of mid- October, and the effort to keep the pipeline full while in college has been a labor of love. “We knew we’d always want to continue making videos,” said Pan. “Especially the summer after our junior year, when many others were attending summer internships and research positions, we were in the kitchen filming and cooking.”
Though Pan and Chang opted to monetize their YouTube channel by allowing ads, they continue to be motivated by the purest desires – good journalism and good food. “At the core of it all,” said Pan, “we started making food videos because as journalism students, we really enjoyed writing, photographing and taking videos of our niche, which was food. I especially love feeding my creativity by coming up with unique ways to film our videos.”
Chang agreed the payoff is in doing something they love. “I don’t know how else to say it: food is my life’s passion,” she said. “Food videography for me is the most wholesome format of sharing my love for food online. If I had enough money to survive on for the rest of my life, I’d just spend my time engaging with food media and eating and cooking. All of the improvement and self-learning is indeed great, but I don’t need any extrinsic motivation because this is how I would spend my time anyway.”
This summer’s videos covered a variety of foods, based on season, upcoming holidays and food trends. “We have a lot of current food trends (like smoothie bowls),” said Pan, “our favorite baked goods, easy back-to-school meals, drinks, etc. We want to keep some stuff a secret!”
“Subscribe to our channel to find out!” Chang said. What’s next for In a Nutshell Food? “We’re definitely going to continue producing biweekly cooking videos along with vlog channel videos through the end of 2016 and most likely through our sophomore year of college,” said Pan. “But our future plans might still change.”
Chang is also hopeful but practical. “For now it’s really more of a let’s-try-to-make-it-happen thing, but there isn’t much of a longterm plan beyond the semester.”
This article originally appeared in the winter 2016 Harker Magazine
1992 Jamil Valliani was promoted to partner at Microsoft, where he leads product teams in the U.S. and China working on Microsoft’s search team. He is most known as the product leader for Bing image search, video search and home page. These products touch more than 100 million users and serve billions of searches every month. Jamil enjoys traveling around the world and is an active volunteer in the Seattle community. Jamil is in touch with Iliya Pesic (now chairman of Silvaco).
1996 Yong Joon Yoo and his new wife dropped by Harker to tour the campus and reminisce with Joe Rosenthal during their honeymoon trip to the Bay Area.
1997 Edward Hong and his wife, Jenny Chung, attended the Harker Family & Alumni Picnic, caught up with Joe Rosenthal, and then returned to the Saratoga Avenue campus so Eddie could take a tour with Karri Baker ’84, alumni director, and reminisce about his years spent in the Harker dorms. Eddie said, “Harker will always be a special place for me. You guys nurtured and parented me in the most evil ages of adolescence. How can I forget about it? You really made me who I am now.”
2002 Isabella Liu worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign as a field organizer in Florida. She first got involved in January and played a key role in San Francisco during the California primary. Though she had the option to organize in the Bay Area and battleground states like Virginia, she chose Florida, which was the biggest, most influential swing state.
2003 We are sad to report that Sparsh Bhargava passed away on Oct. 28 of natural causes while on a business
trip to Germany, just four days after his 31st birthday. Sparsh left Harker after grade 5, when his family moved to Boston. Also attending Harker at that time were his brother, Samarth ’06 and cousin, Shivani Bhargava ’06. His obituary states, “His name means ‘touch,’ and he lived every day with a mission to enrich people’s lives: family, friends and the less fortunate. We are better people and the world is a better place because of him.” A memorial fund has been established, geared toward touching children’s lives: https://www.youcaring.com/childrenseducation-683341#. For the full obituary: http://joycefuneralhome.tributes.com/obituary/show/Sparsh-Bhargava-104105361
2005 Hillary Brooks married Andrew Lawrence on Aug. 27 at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. The couple met while studying abroad in China. The wedding was a mini reunion for Harker classmates. According to Joan Brooks, mother of the bride, “Though miles have often separated the group with their college choices and careers since their 2005 Harker graduation, it’s so wonderful that they have worked at remaining very good friends.” Heartiest congratulations to the happy couple! Pictured left to right (all ’05 unless noted): Eric Gavarre, Katie (Ball) O’Leary, Mariama Eghan, Yagmur Ilgen, Hillary, Andrew, Erika Gudmundson, Genna Erlikhman ’09, Estelle Charlu and Boris Fedorov.
2007 Harker alumni based in New York City stopped by Webster Hall on Oct. 24 to support the band Letters From The Fire, featuring Mike Keller. The band toured across the country until Nov. 9 promoting its new album, “Worth the Pain.” Letters From The Fire started at Harker as the band Park Lane, which was a regular contestant in Harker’s annual Battle of the Bands. Pictured left to right (all ’07 unless noted): Anna Huang, Siobhan Stevenson, bassist Clayton Wages, Mike, Jessica Lee, Gwynne Davis ’08 and Chanelle Kasik.
Jason Martin is the new owner of Sal’s Pizza in Campbell, and he’d love to have Harker alumni and current families stop by to eat. Alumni parent Tina Najibi said, “My family has been ordering pizza from Sal’s ever since I first ate a slice at a Harker event when my kids (now both graduated) were in the lower school. It is, in my opinion, the best pizza in the Bay Area! Their calzones are the best that I’ve tried anywhere.”
2009 Ryan Tam married Stephanie Wang in a beautiful ceremony in Palo Alto in August. Ryan and Stephanie met at USC and are now living in the Bay Area. According to class agent Stephanie Guo, “It was a beautiful occasion and a wonderful reunion.” Ryan added, “It was great celebrating the big day with old friends, K-Life!” Pictured left to right (all ’09 unless noted): Nate Kwok, Andy Yee ’08, Jonathan Liu ’09, Andrew Chin, Marcus Wong, Ryan, Stephanie, Kyle Hall, Stephanie Guo, Winny Huang and Khwaab Dave.
Jia Jun recently graduated from the University of Washington with her M.S. in bioengineering, and has moved back to the Bay Area. She took a job at Gilead Sciences as a senior research associate. Jia said, “I have been missing all the reunions since I’ve been away (since graduation, actually), and I’ve been finding so many Harker connections recently! My boyfriend started his MBA program at Stanford, and another member of my ’09 class is his classmate, and I unexpectedly found out that my boyfriend’s sister’s college classmate went to Harker as well (Class of ’03). Small world!”
D.J. Blickenstaff’s Hollywood career is on fire! He was cast as “Arman” in Netflix’s “Dear White People,” a 10-episode show based on the 2014 movie of the same name. The show follows a diverse group of students as they attend an Ivy League college where racial tensions are often hidden. The show will air in 2017 and D.J., originally cast for episodes two and eight, was recalled for the finale, episode 10.
A few 2009ers are in graduate school in Boston and managed to get together. Vinay Kumar celebrated his 25th birthday in New York City with Harker friends. Pictured are classmates Manasa Reddy and Veronica Hsieh (first row); Vin, Valerie Hwa, Jackie Ho, Sean Morgan and Lung-Ying Yu (second row); Andy Fang, Arjun Mody and Sachin Mitra (back row).1
Vlad Sepetov was interviewed by Huck Magazine on his iconic and iconoclastic album covers. He is clearly a serious force in album design! http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/vlad-sepetov-designs-album-art-worlds-greatest-hip-hop-artists/
Michael Prutton just finished his master’s degree in medical device and diagnostic engineering at USC.
2012
Sanjana Baldwa is working with a fascinating startup, Go Jane Go, to develop an application that will connect female road warriors in real-time. The company’s motto is, “Business women embracing the experience of #TravelingWhileFemale.” Via in-app messaging, women can “connect with each other for activities to make solo business travel a lot more safe, fun and easy.” Sanjana, who graduated this year from Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied psychology, human-computer interaction and communication design, will be concentrating on her forte, user experience. The website ( http://www.gojanego.com) already has garnered some great blog posts by traveling women.
Pavitra Rengarajan was part of a group of engineering interns who had dinner with Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan at their Palo Alto home in early October. Zuckerberg posted this image on his Facebook page.
2013 Nikhil Panu and his app, Squadz, were among just 10 teams selected to participate in the Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures Social Innovation Lab! “In addition to being promising solutions to pressing social issues in the areas of health, education and community development, these ventures and their leaders represent the strength and diversity of Baltimore’s social innovation and entrepreneurship community,” said Darius Graham, SIL director, in the university’s news story. The report noted, “Squadz is a social activity and venue booking platform that connects the community to play pickup sports, while generating revenue for community centers and recreation facilities.”
And in sports news, Nikhil was featured on a Johns Hopkins basketball promotion. Nikhil graduated from Johns Hopkins in three years and is now a post-grad student there.
2014
Mary Liu received the Distinguished Cadet Award at West Point, the United States Military Academy, and was selected for the Omar Bradley Research Fellowship. She ultimately elected to leave the academy to go on a mission trip. Mary is now teaching high school physics, economics and statistics at a school in Weihai, China, and working with the Catholic church as a bible study leader. She promises to keep us posted on her next adventure!
2016 While staffing Hillary Clinton’s national headquarters in Brooklyn, Shannon Hong called in to answer student questions during Cyrus Merrill’s history class. “She is my youngest guest speaker/former student ever!” said Merrill.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2016 Harker Magazine.
Class of 1982
Dana Lurie married her best friend of 10 years, Dalila Vargas, on Oct. 22. Janean Mariani and Michele Magboo, along with their husbands, helped Dana and Dalila celebrate the day. In 2015 the couple spent two months driving around the country in a camper van, visiting as many national parks as possible. Dana is looking forward to the 35th reunion and seeing as many classmates as possible! Pictured with Dana and Dalila is Janean.
Liz Robertson reports that she and her husband, Keil Albert, are active supporters of their son’s parent participation school, Stevenson PACT in Mountain View. Keil works with the parent education committee and Liz with the garden committee. In past years Keil also has taught science. Keil is a volunteer golf coach at First Tee of Silicon Valley and is celebrating his 22nd year at Geoconsultants in San Jose, locating water well sites and designing production wells. Liz is celebrating her 12th year at SciGene in Sunnyvale, applying her marketing skills and running the company, which manufactures instruments and reagents for genetic testing, for the president/owner, who lives in Pasadena. “Our new ‘favorite’ vacation destination is Austin, Texas, which we visit twice a year since my parents and brother relocated there about 10 years ago,” Liz reports. “We love to swim, golf, go to waterparks and attend concerts in my parents’ new home city of Georgetown, an Austin suburb, which has the ‘Most Beautiful Town Square’ in Texas. We are all looking forward to a Christmas cruise with my folks and my brother’s family (10 in all) to the Caribbean. We have our Stingray City/Dolphin Adventure shore excursion in Grand Cayman already booked! I am also the webmaster for the California Groundwater Association.”
Ashvin Swaminathan ’13 was recently awarded Harvard’s David Mumford Undergraduate Mathematics Prize, which is given to the “most promising” outstanding seniors who have chosen mathematics as a concentration, according to the Harvard University website. Swaminathan will graduate from Harvard this month with degrees in mathematics and physics. Last month he was awarded a Soros Fellowship for New Americans, earning additional funding for his graduate studies in mathematics, which he plans to begin in the fall at Princeton.
The career of D.J. Blickenstaff ’09, a musical theater certificate graduate, continues to heat up! Check him out in the trailer for Netflix’s new series, “Dear White People,” which premiered April 28! https://www.instagram.com/p/BRi7bRfh6tx/
This article was originally published in the Winter 2017 Harker Magazine.
Since he was a little boy, Colin Dickey MS ’91 had always dreamed of becoming an architect. But while at Harker’s middle school – inspired by highly respected and beloved English teachers, including the late Sylvia Harp – he had a change of heart.
“Harker nurtured a kind of creative rigor that I appreciate – not just memorizing and repeating information but getting us to think critically and to go beyond received truths,” Dickey said. “At some point, I realized that one could easier build things out of words than out of bricks and wood.”
And so, at 12 years old, while most boys his age were playing sports or video games, he spent his after-school hours reading books and writing stories on his mother’s word processor. With the nearby labyrinth-like Winchester Mystery House – designed and built by Sarah Winchester, widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester, and said to be haunted by ghosts – serving as his muse, his early interest in architecture would creep its way into his latest and greatest passion.
Fast-forward 25 years. Dickey holds a Master of Fine Arts in critical studies, as well as a doctorate in comparative literature, and is an associate professor of creative writing at National University. He is the co-editor of “The Morbid Anatomy Anthology” and author of three supernatural nonfiction books, including his most recent, “Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places,” which The New York Times Book Review called “a lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories … absorbing … [and] intellectually intriguing.” The book also was lauded by the Los Angeles Times, Men’s Journal, Publishers Weekly, The Seattle Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Dickey also has received positive feedback from readers.
“Some random person on the Internet told me the other day that my latest book was helping her get through a difficult time, and I was honored and humbled to have had that kind of impact,” he said.
In writing “Ghostland,” which is “not overtly pro or anti any belief in the supernatural,” Dickey said his focus was on uncovering the answers to a series of questions: “Why do certain buildings come to be seen as haunted? Is there something architecturally about these spaces that may lend them an aura of the ghostly? Why do we tell some ghost stories and not others? Is there something to be learned about the way we tell ghost stories, something that reflects deeper anxieties, hopes and fears?” While some may be skeptical or even afraid of this particular genre, the author hopes everyone will be a part of the conversation.
Between books, Dickey carves out time as a guest speaker, and is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and Lapham’s Quarterly. In his post at National University, he is primarily tasked with “sculpting and guiding a new generation of voices” – a privilege and a duty he takes very seriously.
“Most of my students come to me with a great deal of raw talent. My job is to act as a sounding board, giving them the space to adapt and refine those voices,” Dickey said. “One of the main pieces of advice I find myself giving is to simply write – and read. Students, even writers, don’t read as much or as widely as they should.”
For information on Dickey’s books, upcoming appearances and more, visit colindickey. com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @colindickey.
Judge John Owens MS ’85, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and is a member of Harker’s board of trustees, visited the lower school yesterday to speak to third graders at the request of teacher Heidi Gough. Owens discussed his career, told entertaining anecdotes about cases he worked on and took questions from the students. Interestingly, Sarah Leonard, primary division head, was Owens’ teacher while he attended Harker.
Formerly a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olsen LLP, Owens’ practice focused on representing individuals and corporations in government investigations, and conducting internal investigations into allegations of corporate misconduct, according to the firm’s website. Prior to joining Munger Tolles in 2012, he was a federal prosecutor for 11 years. Owens graduated first in his class from Stanford Law School in 1996. He served as a law clerk to Judge John Clifford Wallace, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2016 Harker Quarterly.
Alumni from all classes through 1997 are listed under the years they would have completed grade 8 at The Harker School, Harker Academy, Harker Day School or Palo Alto Military Academy (PAMA). For all classes after the Class of 1997, alumni are listed under the class years they would have graduated from high school, regardless of whether they completed high school studies at Harker. For unlisted classes, we invite you to email alumni@harker.org if you are interested in becoming a class agent or would like to nominate a classmate.
Please join us in congratulating the following alumni:
Jerome Keene ’96 married Briana Parra last spring. His sister, Rachel Keene ’00, was a bridesmaid, andSteve Blomquist ’96 was a groomsman.
Nicole Lindars ’10 got married on June 4. Her husband is Harker middle school teacher Chris Caruso, who began teaching grade 6 Latin and grade 7 history last year.
Class agent Andrea Miles ’96 and her husband,Gary, had their first baby, Soren Jeffrey Miles, on Dec. 24, 2015.
Christopher Park ’97 and his wife, Kwi Young Sung, welcomed baby Hadley into their family.