The Class of 2022 gathered at Davis Field yesterday for this year’s baccalaureate ceremony, during which it offered a heartfelt farewell to Harker and welcomed the junior class into its new role as next year’s campus leader.
The ceremony kicked off with a performance by a special trio made up of seniors Yejin Song and Lucas Chen on piano and cello, respectively, and junior Cassie May on violin, who performed the first movement of Paul Schoenfeld’s “Café Music.”
Following some welcoming words from Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs, Cantilena marched onto the stage to perform its rendition of Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend.” Junior Gwen Yang then took the stage with fellow upper school Honor Council member Alexa Lowe, grade 12, to accept the responsibility for continuing the school’s honor code on behalf of the junior class.
Upper school head Butch Keller, who will retire at the end of the school year, introduced this year’s baccalaureate faculty speaker, English teacher Christopher Hurshman, whom he called “the world’s most interesting man,” owing to his wide range of interests and international upbringing. Hurshman spoke on the sense of loss that accompanies major life changes such as the ones the Class of 2022 is experiencing. “Over every new beginning there hovers a shadow of melancholy and loss and grief,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s right to be excited about the future that’s opening up ahead of you, but you’re also about to experience a great loss, and perhaps you’ve been anticipating it.”
Using examples from his own life experience, Hurshman pointed out how both they and the world they have become familiar with will change drastically as they move into the wider world beyond high school. He also advised students to recognize and treasure the “ordinary moments” that will shape who they are, despite the feelings of immense pressure young people often feel to have an impact on the world. “It’s possible to come to the realization that the nitty-gritty particulars of your life, the specific circumstances and relationships and responsibilities in it, are precisely where you will build meaning, and you’ll build that meaning by making conscious choices about what’s important to you.”
Keller then reappeared to welcome this year’s student speaker, senior Ayan Nath, who he introduced by playing a sound clip of Nath’s cover of Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” at the 2019 Hoscars. “We all knew from that moment on he was someone that was going to make an impact on our lives,” Keller said, saying later in his introduction that as much as he could entertain his classmates, “you picked him as your student speaker tonight because you respect him for being such a wonderful person.”
Nath commended the seniors on reaching this key moment in their lives. “We made it through four years … of getting cut off every morning at the Saratoga [Ave.] intersection by yet another red Tesla. Four years of using Schoology grade display — developed by our own [fellow graduating senior] Arjun Dixit — a couple hundred times a day. Four years of the highs and lows that are high school,” he said, summarizing the difficulties faced by the students during the COVID-19 pandemic, which included challenges posed by remote learning and the cancellation of many yearly events.
While graduating high school is often seen as the first step into students’ adult lives, followed by the addition of new responsibilities, “I believe that becoming an adult does not necessarily mean we have to give up on youthful or fun hobbies or activities,” he said. “Even if you love painting, playing Foursquare or have a strong affinity for creating nonprofit organizations, I encourage you to keep doing these things, even though they might not necessarily fall under your realm of responsibilities. Stay true to who you are and remember not to grow up too fast.”
To the juniors, Nath stated that he was proud to call many of them friends. “It is with this mindset that I urge you to be nice to the Class of 2024 and to love them as much as we have loved you,” he said. “Also, congratulations on beating us in Spirit Week.” He also advised them to treat their upcoming senior year “as an opportunity to mend broken relationships or get to know someone new. Go to prom. Go to homecoming. Watch or perform at Quadchella or Hoscars.” Academically, he urged the juniors to treasure the unique opportunity to be a Harker student for one final year. “Your teachers love you, and interacting with teachers and classmates in small environments is something that’s not guaranteed at the university that you end up attending,” he said. Concluding, Nath restated his hope that his classmates won’t lose all of their youthfulness with the onset of adulthood: “I hope that we will continue to bring our youth with us wherever we go and never lose touch with who we are.”
Senior Rishab Parthasarathy was recently invited to participate in the 2022 International Linguistics Olympiad, set to take place July 25-29 on the Isle of Man, an island nation in the Irish Sea. Having placed fourth overall in the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition, Parthasarathy will be a member of Team USA Red. The IOL is held in a different country each year and consists of both team and individual competitions, in which participants solve problems in various linguistic fields. Earlier this year, Parthasarathy was named a finalist in the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search.
At Friday night’s Senior Showcase, 17 seniors became graduates of the Harker Conservatory’s certificate program, each having spent four years studying one of the conservatory’s six disciplines: vocal music, instrumental music, dance, theater, musical theater and technical theater. The evening also included performances from the graduates and the presentation of the Life in the Arts award to Steve Boyle ’06.
The slide show included in this story features each of this year’s Conservatory graduates, in the order they are listed below:
Tanya Schmidt ’08, who is currently a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, was recently named one of the two winners of the 2022 Anne Lake Prescott Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize by the International Spenser Society, an organization devoted to reading and studying the works 16th century English poet Edmund Spenser. According to Schmidt, this award is presented to authors of “distinguished papers on any aspect Spenser’s life and works.”
Schmidt’s advisor, Susanne Wofford, spoke highly her work before she was presented with the award. “It was truly a surreal moment for me when a Spenserian whose scholarship I greatly admire started talking about my dissertation research as ‘witty and far-reaching,’” Schmidt said. “I had to pinch myself!”
On April 22, junior Nicholas Wei was awarded the 2022 California Science & Engineering Fair Project of the Year, which is given to the top high school researcher each year among thousands of science fair participants. With a prize of $5,000, this is the top honor from the CSEF. His research project, “Investigating Epigenetic Modifications in Chromosome Structure in Cardiomyocyte Differentiation Mechanisms for Heart Disease Treatment,” was sponsored by upper school biology teacher Matthew Harley.
Nicholas also received the Grand Prize, Best of Championship in Biological Sciences at the Synopsys Championship and was named an Intel Science and Engineering Fair finalist.
“I’ve been at Harker since kindergarten, and I can truly say that it is the Harker community and learning environment such as the Harker Research Symposium that has helped define who I am now,” Wei said, “a scholar greatly interested in pursuing both the life sciences and classical studies.”
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?”
At the Cupertino Earth Day and Arbor Day Festival on Apr. 23, junior Gwen-Zoe Yang presented a performance of a skit she directed, titled “The Tale of Three Trees.” Yang has been involved with the festival since 2014, performing in skits and reading poetry. In addition to the skit, she also read an original poem, titled “Raindrops,” together with 50 other students from area schools, including Harker fifth graders Sanyi Yao and Olivia Zhu.
Harker students had another outstanding year taking the National Latin Exam, with 40 students earning awards and two perfect scores (Trisha Iyer, grade 10, and Jonathan Xue, grade 9). In addition, three students (Iyer, Alec Zhang, grade 10, and Nicholas Wei, grade 11) received special book awards in recognition of earning gold medals on the previous four exams. Iyer received an additional special book award for scoring perfectly on the last three exams, a feat achieved by just 26 of 100,000 test takers worldwide.
The full list of awards won by Harker is below.
Intermediate Latin:
Summa Cum Laude/Gold Medal – Kai Hong and Jeremy Peng, both grade 9
Intermediate Latin, Reading Comprehension:
Perfect Exam: Jonathan Xue, grade 9
Summa Cum Laude/Gold Medal: Omkar Govil-Nail, grade 10; Daniel Chen, Felix Chen, Andy Chung, Hima Thota, Lindsey Tuckey and Ethan Wang, all grade 9
Maxima Cum Laude/Silver Medal: Ford Johnson, grade 10; Audrey Cheng, Jason Li, Varun Thvar, grade 9
Magna Cum Laude: Hannah Levanon, grade 9
Cum Laude: Chase White, grade 10
Advanced Latin, Prose:
Summa Cum Laude/Gold Medal: Ainslie Chen, Isabella Lo, Harriss Miller, Rohan Ramkumar, Agastya Ravuri, Jason Shim, Grant Yang, all grade 9
Maxima Cum Laude/Silver Medal: Eric Zhang, Nelson Gou, both grade 9
Magna Cum Laude: Natalie Chen, grade 10; Caleb Tang, grade 9
Cum Laude: Chloe Lee, grade 10
Advanced Latin, Poetry:
Perfect Exam: Trisha Iyer, grade 10
Summa Cum Laude/Gold Medal: Catherine Li, Michelle Wei, Alec Zhang and all grade 10; Alan Jiang, grade 11
Maxima Cum Laude/Silver Medal: Kabir Ramzan and Edward Huang, both grade 10
The American High School Theatre Festival has invited the Harker Conservatory’s musical theater program to perform their production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest international arts festival. More than 450 schools applied to be one of the 25 selected, making this one of the most competitive seasons in AHSTF’s history. Harker has performed at Fringe every four years since first being invited in 2007.
“Director [Laura] Lang-Ree’s program at The Harker School once again shines as one of the best applications we have seen this year,” said a spokesperson for AHSTF. “Hundreds of schools around the world have applied this year and while we have an extensive waiting list, this theater program is one of 25 that immediately got through as a finalist for AHSTF once again.”
At Wednesday’s Leadership Donor Celebration, held at the middle school campus, Neil Mehta ’02 announced the establishment of The Mehta Endowment in Support of Scholarships and Entrepreneurship. This new endowment will provide financial assistance in the form of scholarships to qualified students who otherwise could not attend Harker. It also will support Harker’s business and entrepreneurship program with the creation of the Mehta Scholar Program, developing Harker’s network of student, alumni and parent entrepreneurs and investors.
A member of the first Harker upper school graduating class, Mehta said at the event that finding a way for more students to receive the unique kind of high-quality education he received at Harker has been a dream ever since he wore the cap and gown 20 years ago. “Harker changed my life in remarkable ways, and ever since I graduated, I’ve been looking for opportunities to pay it forward,” said Mehta, who is now the founder and managing director at Green Oaks Capital. “Today, I’m pleased to share that at least five students each year will be able to attend the upper school with a scholarship specifically designed to support young people of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.”
The endowment will be established with an initial gift of $5 million, and every amount donated to the Harker capital fund as part of the donors’ 125th Anniversary Gift will be matched, up to an additional $5 million. The full transcript of Mehta’s announcement speech at the event has been provided below:
Dear Fellow Members of The Harker Community,
I won life’s lottery the day I was born. I was fortunate to grow up with remarkable parents who cared deeply about who I would become, and who provided me with a set of values and priorities that allowed me to flourish within and beyond the walls of the classroom. Harker took this luck and amplified it. Since its earliest days, Harker has had an ability to bring out the best in young people – to push them to achieve things they don’t think themselves capable of; to expand the horizons of their minds; to remind them that hard work matters, and that to whom much is given, much is also expected. All of those things were true for me.
Harker changed my life in remarkable ways, and ever since I graduated, I’ve been looking for opportunities to pay it forward. Today, I’m pleased to share that at least five students each year will be able to attend the upper school with a scholarship specifically designed to support young people of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.
It’s no exaggeration to say that whatever personal or professional accomplishments I’ve enjoyed in my life wouldn’t have been possible without the opportunities that I was afforded at Harker. I had extraordinary teachers who challenged me intellectually. I had sports coaches who put in time and effort to shape the person I would become (and encouraged us to play on, even as a new varsity program that was sometimes hilariously overmatched). And I had exceptional peers who were by my side throughout high school, many of whom remain my closest friends even today.
As more time has passed since graduation, I’ve come to appreciate a few things. First, while raw talent is evenly distributed, the opportunity to make the most of it remains largely limited to the well-off. Too many brilliant young people never attain their greatest potential simply because their families lack the resources to give them the best shot at it. Second, education is one of the highest leverage ways to amplify opportunity. When you are able to influence someone positively, early on in their development, you can profoundly change the arc of their life. And third, Harker provides the kind of education that gives talented students a springboard to become people of consequence – not just learners, but doers. A Harker education is an investment that pays lifelong dividends.
The Harker School is an exceptional place in the truest sense of the word. At a time when many schools in California are shuttering programs that let students aim for and achieve their grandest ambitions, Harker remains an exception, cultivating talented minds and affording them the conditions to flourish. It’s a place where you succeed because of what you can do.
Nowhere is there more human potential than in the young minds of our future. Their talent and energy are more urgently needed today than ever before. I’m confident that Harker is the right steward for those minds and hopeful that the Mehta Scholarship will help open its doors to anyone who can make the most of it, regardless of their ability to pay. My aspiration is for this scholarship to change the lives of its recipients, and also for its recipients to change the face of Harker, helping build a school that represents the technicolor of our community.
If you’re a high-achieving young person with big dreams, I hope you take the time to apply, even and especially if you don’t think that you could afford a school like Harker. I’m supporting this scholarship because the greatest talents, those that can really put a dent in the world, are vanishingly rare. To miss out on your potential simply because some are born lucky and others aren’t, is a loss not just for you, but for all of us. The Mehta scholarships are a small step towards ensuring that more talented students will have the opportunity to make the most of their abilities. We can’t wait to see what you’ll do.
P.S. One person in particular deserves special gratitude for his work with me on this gift is Joe Rosenthal. Joe took a keen interest in me as an unremarkable 14 year old. When I felt like giving up, he wouldn’t let me. He encouraged me to dream big when it felt irresponsible to do so. Thank you, Joe.