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.”
Earlier this month, the Harker Research Club hosted a panel with Vikas Bhetanabhotla ‘14, Cynthia Chen ‘20, Anastasiya Grebin ‘18 and Ruhi Sayana ‘19, who spoke about their post-high school careers and offered advice on how to find research opportunities.
The panelists each shared what they had done after graduating from Harker and how the research they conducted as Harker students helped shape their current work. At Harker, Sayana, who currently works in a lab at Stanford University studying neurodegenerative diseases, had a significant interest in pediatric oncology before becoming interested in genetics. “When I was applying to labs at Stanford, I was trying to look at something at the intersection of pediatric disease and genetics, and that’s how I ended up at the lab that I am now,” she said. “So [my work at Harker] definitely informed it.”
Bhetanabhotla, who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018 and now works at Palo Alto Networks, was heavily interested in machine learning. “My research was the intersection of cosmology with machine learning, so that research experience with machine learning really guided my interests through college,” he said. This carried through to his post-college career, as machine learning is now a part of his work at Palo Alto Networks
“In high school pretty much all of my research was wet lab, and I jumped around a lot,” said Grebin. “I did some plant science. I did some data set analysis for cancer mutations.” As a sophomore, she participated in a directed evolution project that “didn’t pan out,” but she now attends CalTech, “which is the place where directed evolution was essentially invented,” and her work now incorporates directed evolution to create viral constructs.
Most of Chen’s projects at Harker were in bioinformatics, which incorporated biology and computer science. Her work in that area earned her a spot as a finalist in the 2020 Regeneron Science Talent Search. She is now attending Harvard University and works in a lab at MIT, doing research to learn how to better explain how artificial intelligence models work. “I think the projects [I worked on at Harker] gave me a good starting point for figuring out what I wanted to explore further in college,” she said.
The panelists also offered advice on how to find research opportunities in high school. “It’s all about casting a wide net,” Bhetanabhotla said. “I knew I was interested in the astronomy area a little bit but I was also interested in biology potentially so I just emailed a lot of different professors.”
Sayana agreed. “You’re in high school,” she said. “This is the time to explore as much as you can, and if you’re reaching out to labs there’s a very high chance that a lot of people won’t respond to you, so the wider out you go, the better chance you’re going to have at getting a response.”
Chen recommended the approach of emailing research labs that seemed potentially interesting or open to taking on high school students, “because I didn’t really know specifically what I wanted to do in terms of research in high school because you’re exposed to so many different subjects.”
Grebin did much of her research in high school at Harker after school. “I kind of advocate for that path for at least the first couple of years before you decide to move on to working in a lab and doing slightly more in-depth research,” she said. “Simply because you have so much more ability to pick what you want to do. I miss being able to pick the project that I want to work on as an undergraduate.”
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.”
The group’s performance of Ysaye Barnwell’s “Spiritual” was recorded and posted to YouTube as part of the annual C# Harvest Concert, which took place virtually this year. The event is organized by CMU C#, the vocal club that oversees D Flat Singers and other vocal ensembles. “Since holding a live concert wasn’t an option this year, we decided to make it virtual,” said Banga. “The structure of the concert was the same as usual in that we had acts by C#’s performance groups and other CMU a cappella groups, and we also held auditions open to the entire CMU community for the smaller group acts.”
Adapting to the virtual format meant finding new ways to rehearse and put together a performance. “We meet regularly using Zoom, but the lag makes it impossible to sing as a group,” Banga said. “So, we spend most of our rehearsals talking about musicality, learning new techniques and giving individual feedback.”
To create the performance for YouTube, the singers each recorded themselves singing their parts along with the conductor’s recording. “Afterwards, the rest of the choir recorded themselves while listening to the section leader recordings,” said Banga. “This way, we could blend with each other even when we weren’t in the same room.”
The decision to support 1Hood stemmed from the wave of massive protests that took place this year in response to police killings of Black Americans. “The Black Lives Matter movement impacted us all so much this year, and like many others, we were extremely upset and frustrated by the injustices in our country,” Banga noted. “After a great deal of reflection on what we could do as an org, we realized that there is a tremendous lack of diversity in mainstream Western choral music.” As such, Banga and the D Flat Singers’ conductor decided to sing pieces by living Black composers for the entirety of the semester. “We’re currently working on commissioning a piece by a Black composer for next semester,” Banga said. “C# also committed to donating all proceeds from our concerts to BLM related organizations, and 1Hood was a perfect match since they’re a Pittsburgh-based organization that supports Black artists and activists.”
On Sept. 25, CareerConnect held a Harker alumni panel via Zoom. Three alumni – Haley Tran ’17, Lucas Wang ’17 and Vignesh Panchanatham ’18 – talked about things that students should know before graduating high school. They discussed founding and joining clubs, finding summer opportunities, their college experiences and more. In addition, they answered many questions from students, giving insights into what to know before graduating high school and ways to learn more about topics professionally.
In all, the event was a success and gave students a chance to learn more about how to take advantage of all the opportunities Harker has to offer. “This event helped me learn more about the little niches in school and outside of school to do before graduating high school,” said Jessica Zhou, grade 10. “Fostering a connection with teachers in the subjects you are interested in can help you down the road when doing events or projects related to it and making sure to do what you enjoy is extremely important.”
Earlier this week, Michael Sikand ‘18 spoke to Michael Acheatel’s business and entrepreneurship students. Sikand, currently attending the University of Michigan, spoke about how he was first introduced to business studies in his freshman year at Harker.
“When I pulled up to Harker in freshman year … I didn’t even think [business] was something people studied or that people thought about,” he said, adding that he now views his first B.E. class with Juston Glass as “one of the greatest gifts” he has experienced in life. “What high schools are allowing you to immerse yourself in the world of B.E. in freshman year?” he asked.
During his time at Harker, Sikand got heavily involved with DECA and helped start the Harker Incubator program, the first high school program of its kind. “It exposed to me to a lot of great ideas, and I’ve always been someone who loved helping others succeed and telling other peoples’ stories and enabling other people to get excited about business,” he said.
After graduating, Sikand headed to the University of Michigan to study at the Ross School of Business, where he and fellow Harker alum Dolan Dworak ‘18 came up with an idea for a company called Pythia, which would connect college professors to companies “to do business projects with corporate data.” The company failed, as Sikand put it, because “merging academia and business is very difficult because the incentives are misaligned and we wanted to be the intermediary that did it, but we didn’t really have the funding to do it.”
Nevertheless, Sikand said the experience was valuable because it helped him build relationships with professors at Michigan. “I know professors at Michigan on a first-name basis and that just created huge dividends for me because it’s enabled to me to kind of network with the smartest and most successful people on campus,” he said.
Sikand later started a business podcast and media company, both called “Our Future.” Aimed at young professionals seeking a shorter, more entertaining business podcast, “Our Future” has grown considerably in popularity since its inception, reaching, by his estimate, thousands of people each week. His guests have included notable business leaders, entrepreneurs and other figures, including executives from the NBA and AirBNB as well as legendary entrepreneurs such as Guy Kawasaki.
Recently, Sikand has been looking into ways to expand the podcast into other media. “I realized that what I was doing went beyond audio; I wanted to create a multimedia startup that really spoke to the young professional that’s intellectually curious and wants to learn and grow in the business world,” he said. To this end, he started a newsletter to deliver weekly advice and information from top business leaders. He is currently exploring additional ways to distribute this content.
Members of the classes of 2018 and 2019 have organized a fundraiser for Black Lives Matter, The Bail Project and Campaign Zero. Their statement, including details on how to donate and provide additional support, is as follows:
Hello Harker students, alumni, faculty and family,
In light of explicit police brutality and racial injustice, we are starting a fundraiser to support Black solidarity organizations. Donations will be split equally between Black Lives Matter, The Bail Project and Campaign Zero. Black Lives Matter drives the cultural movement for Black justice, The Bail Project combats mass incarceration and Campaign Zero researches policy solutions to end police brutality. To donate, Venmo @HarkerBLM or go directly through harkerblm.org.
Please give if you can and consider transforming your allyship into effective action. The goal is to help these organizations do important work long after the social media incentives fade.
Here are more educational resources to help you learn, protest and use your voice to help others do the same: https://bit.ly/harkerblm.
Amy Jin ‘18, currently attending Harvard, is now a team member for the Crown Education Challenge, an international contest for K-12 students that contains tracks in art, STEM and writing. Founded in March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent wave of worldwide school closures, the contest hopes to inspire students to continue their learning, become active in global issues and foster hope in troubled times.
The contest’s theme is finding hope during a pandemic, and each category encourages students to submit work relating to the theme. For the art category, students are invited to submit visual art, music, digital art, films and dance pieces. STEM submissions can include original research on ways pandemics can be prevented or addressed in the future, taking the form of posters, videos, apps or other media. Writers may submit journalistic pieces, poetry, short stories, screenplays, podcasts or essays relating to the theme.
Submissions are being accepted until 11:59 p.m. Pacific time on May 31.
The next round of winners in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Competition was announced today, this time for college-sponsored merit scholarships. Recent graduates Akhil Arun, Matthew Lee, Jacob Ohana and Patrick Zhong were among those listed as winners, bringing Harker’s total of National Merit scholarship winners for the year up to 17.
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Eight more Harker seniors were named winners in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Competition last week. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation identified Megan Tjandrasuwita, Jerry Chen, Gwyneth Chen, Morgan Douglas, Anooshree Sengupta, Andrew Semenza, Kaitlin Hsu and Swapnil Garg as $2,500 scholarship winners.
These students and other Bay Area National Merit winners were mentioned in a story by the San Jose Mercury News, published Friday.
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Last week, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced that Divija Bhimaraju, David Wen, Adrian Chu, Megan Huynh and Amy Jin, all grade 12, were recipients of corporate-sponsored scholarships in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Competition. This is the first round of awardees in this year’s program, and more winners will be announced over the next three months.
In September, 46 seniors – roughly 25 percent of the Class of 2018 – were named National Merit semifinalists, placing them in the top 1 percent nationwide among students who took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test in their junior year.