The new middle school student newspaper, the Eagle Gazette, was distributed to the campus community just before the winter break. Pieced together by a large team of editors and writers, the paper covers a wide variety of topics, including food, school life and athletics.
Its origins stretch back to the start of the 2021-22 school year, when a newspaper club was founded and quickly grew beyond expectations, eventually bringing in more than 30 staff members. Advisors Jennifer Walrod and Julie Meadows intended for the newspaper to be almost entirely student-run, limiting their role to weekly meetings with editors to discuss their plans and any difficulties they had encountered.
Eighth grader Ananya Pradhan one of the paper’s five editors-in-chief, joined the paper shortly after being elected to the middle school leadership council. In addition to appealing to her love of writing and design, the Gazette offered students a voice on campus. “I believe that the ability for us, the students, to have a creative outlet to express our beliefs, talents, and opinions, is an incredibly valuable opportunity and necessity, as I am a strong supporter of the idea that the student’s voices should be represented and celebrated throughout our community,” she said.
The paper’s five editors each oversee a different section of the paper and advise contributors in addition to planning out meetings and setting deadlines. Editors also contributed to the early design of the paper. “We brainstorm with writers to think of intriguing articles,” said Phoebe Lee, grade 7, another of the Gazette’s editors. “I loved seeing all the writers brainstorm about their ideas together for the future editions. After so many revisions and much coordination, it was such a rewarding feeling to see all the writers’ ideas materialize into the first edition of the Eagle Gazette.”
In future issues, Pradhan said she hopes to see more story ideas pitched by student writers, and Lee said she wanted to see more sections added to the paper, such as one dedicated to learning more about middle school teachers. “In addition, sections like movie or gaming reviews will help to reach a wider audience,” said Lee.
Pradhan found it heartening to see an enthusiasm for writing in so many of her peers. “It always amazes me to see how many enthusiastic peers I have who love writing, and me leading them in growing as writers of the Eagle Gazette has been truly invaluable,” she said, adding that the Gazette is also helping to preserve printed media amidst the prevalence of digital information: “We’re doing our part to also keep the printed news alive, available, and accessible to everyone, even for the younger generations, who will be our future writers and leaders.”
The annual Kicks Against Cancer fundraiser will return in early January to benefit Camp Okizu, the nonprofit organization that provides outdoor activities and programs to families with children battling cancer. In addition to being affected by the wave of closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Camp Okizu was also impacted by the North Complex fire that ravaged Northern California in fall 2020. Last week, Camp Okizu announced plans to host both in-person and virtual activities in 2022.
For this year’s Kicks Against Cancer fundraiser, the boys and girls varsity soccer teams partnered with Chipotle, located at 1645 Saratoga Ave., Ste. 10, San Jose, raising more than $800. Customers who visited the restaurant on Monday afternoon donated a portion of the cost of their purchases by mentioning to the cashier that they were participating in the Kicks Against Cancer fundraiser. A special promo code was used for online orders. Students are selling T-shirts and baked goods during the week of Jan. 4 and on the day of the Kicks Against Cancer soccer games on Jan. 7 at Davis Field, which will start at 3 p.m. as the JV boys soccer team takes on Menlo. Girls varsity will take the field at 4:30 p.m. to face Monte Vista Christian and boys varsity will play Menlo at 6:30 p.m.
Last month, Amelia Huchley ’19 was featured in a story by The Student Life, the newspaper of the Claremont Colleges, which covered her recent win in the Claremont Concert Orchestra’s Concerto Competition. She is the first vocalist in more than a decade to win.
Huchley, who graduated from the Harker Conservatory with a musical theater certificate and now attends Scripps College, told The Student Life about pursuing a career in music and the difficulty of making a living as a professional singer.
“At a lot of turns, I do get a lot of people saying to me, ‘You know how hard it is to make this work, right?’ And I do,” she said. “But on the other hand, I feel like I’m learning, and I’m making progress with my voice, and obviously some people do become professional opera singers. It’s not like it’s never going to happen. … I know it’s going to be really difficult. I do feel like I owe it to myself to try it and see if I can do it.”
She also discussed her love of singing and why she finds performing live so fulfilling.
“Even if you get up and do the exact same performance the next day, even if the performance that you did was recorded, it’s never going to happen exactly that way again, and that is really freeing.”
See the full story for more of Huchley’s thoughts on music and performance.
Harker upper school singers were recently named to three honor choirs. Seniors Teresa Cai and Anya Warrier, juniors Alan Jiang and Aniket Singh, and sophomores Anya Chauhan and Miki Mitarai will represent Harker in the National Association for Music Education’s (NAfME) National Honor Choir. They will perform in a virtual concert to be held Jan. 22-24.
Mitarai, Jiang and junior Aria Jain also will be members of the American Choral Directors Association Western division’s honor choir, which is slated to perform in Long Beach in March, at the ACDA Western region’s regional conference.
The California All-State Choir, selected by the California Choral Directors Association, will feature Cai, Jain, Jiang, Mitarai and Singh, as well as juniors Ava Arasan, Kris Estrada and Anika Pandey, sophomores Shayla He and Katelyn Hsu, and Varun Bhupathi, grade 9. According upper school music teacher Susan Nace, Harker has a higher percentage of students participating in the All-State Choir than any high school, and the highest rate of acceptance among independent schools.
“The directors of all the honor choirs are highly respected composers and conductors from throughout the United States,” Nace said. “Although we require our Certificate Candidates to audition every year, any of our choral musicians may audition. The audition is rigorous and includes sight-reading, vocal technique evaluations, and vocal quality evaluations.”
Nace added that Harker’s rate of acceptance this year was the school’s highest yet.
This month, Berlin-based painter and performance artist Britta Clausnitzer is Harker’s guest as first resident of the Dickinson Visual Arts Endowment, a new endowment that will support Harker’s visual arts programs and students.
On Jan. 14, Clausnitzer will take part in a collaborative performance project at the middle school campus, titled “Tiger on the Loose,” and on Jan. 19 she will appear at the upper school campus for another performance of “Tiger on the Loose,” a guest lecture at Nichols Auditorium and a special reception at the Rothschild Performing Arts Center.
In her home city of Berlin, Clausnitzer has become known for unique depictions of legendary figures from film, literature and classic art. Since 1994, her work has been showcased at exhibitions across Europe and the United States. She also works at as a curator and museum educator.
“I have always loved art and the way it moves and transforms us,” said Pam Dickinson, director of Harker’s Office of Communication, who established the new endowment. “It’s actually a gift for me to have this opportunity to give some heartfelt love to Harker’s art department and art students.”
Visual arts department chair Joshua Martinez expressed excitement at the upcoming residency and what has been made possible by the Dickinson Endowment. “This endowment will strengthen our school’s connection to the global art community by facilitating the expansion of our artist residency program,” he said.
On Dec. 2, Shikha Mittal ’05 spoke to middle school students via Zoom about her path to becoming a lawyer. Starting out as a finance major at Santa Clara University, she decided to lean into her love of debate and negotiation and go into law. “I realized pretty early on in my college years that law was an area that might be a good career fit for me.” She ended up in the tech industry as an in-house lawyer at a Bay Area startup, and currently works at Databricks, an enterprise software company.
While discussing the rigors of law school, she recalled long study sessions for exams and preparing for the bar exam, which she described as “one of the hardest exams you’ll ever take in your life.” However, she advised that those factors shouldn’t dissuade students from seeking a career in law. “If you feel like you are interested in law and you want that to be your career, I wouldn’t say law school should be a detractor,” she said.
Mittal also talked about the differences between being an outside counsel lawyer, who works at a firm that is hired by companies, and an in-house lawyer, who is an employee of the company. She said that she has enjoyed the work-life balance as an in-house lawyer, as well as other perks of being an employee where she works.
Last month, Harker’s DECA chapter hosted its first fall conference, during which 50 grade 9 DECA members from the Silicon Valley district prepared for the upcoming DECA competitive season.
Attendees enjoyed a light breakfast before activities began in Nichols Hall. Following some introductory presentations and icebreaker activities, the students took part in a testing exercise modeled after tests given at DECA conferences. “I was excited that a lot of our first-year members got to experience this before their first competitive conference,” said junior Anika Muddu, Harker DECA’s vice president of competitions.
After lunch, students learned about DECA roleplay tournaments and developed responses to a prompt about ethics in the hotel industry. After presenting their responses to volunteer judges, the students received feedback on how to improve. “The roleplay tournament was a great first introduction to what the roleplay experience would be in a real conference. It’s definitely a different feeling when you know that you want to do well and place,” said Gabe Li, grade 9.
Later, the students had the opportunity to take part in workshops on a variety of topics. Stanford lecturer Matt Abrahams hosted a workshop on persuasive speaking, while entrepreneur and angel investor Suneela Muddu presented on how to pitch a business. Other workshops included “Investing 101” by Cisco engineer Yuri Mitnick and “Social Media Marketing,” delivered by Chegg social media manager Daisy Zhang.
During the closing ceremony, awards for the day’s competitions were doled out. Awardees were as follows:
Testing:
First Place: Cindy Yu
Second Place: Emily Mitnick, Gia Emelie, Gary Jin
Third Place: Shiven Balaji, Valerie Li, Ruhan Sahasi
Roleplay Tournament:
First Place: Sam Parupudi
Second Place: Tiana Salvi
Third Place: Saahira Dayal
Top 10 (Listed Alphabetically): Maya Affaki, Saahira Dayal, Ariana Gauba, Gabe Li, Valerie Li, Lauren Lin, Sam Parupudi, Tiana Salvi, Shaila Tandon, Caleb Tang
Last week, girls soccer won their season opener against Monta Vista with a score of 5-0. They’re headed to Andrew Hill on Tuesday and will return to Harker on Thursday against Del Mar.
Girls basketball won 44-31 over Sobrato on Tuesday in their home opener. Their schedule this week sees them facing Lincoln on Tuesday, Overfelt on Thursday and San Jose High on Saturday, all at home.
After last week’s loss to Monta Vista, boys basketball looks to bounce back on Tuesday against University Prep before heading to BASIS on Friday.
Boys water polo’s historic season ended the weekend before Thanksgiving break with a 13-7 loss to Gunn High. Their CIF Northern California Championship run included wins over Dixon and Ponderosa. Congratulations to the team on a fantastic season.
More than 200 members of the Harker community headed to the upper school’s Rothschild Performing Arts Center on Nov. 20 for this year’s TEDxHarker School, organized each year by students in Harker’s business and entrepreneurship program.
The impressive lineup of speakers assembled for this year’s event included chef, author and restaurateur Alice Waters, who appeared via Zoom to speak on school-supported agriculture and its effects on climate change and social inequality. She also advocated for the procurement of school foods directly from farmers, and touched on her work with the Edible Schoolyard Project and the Alice Waters Institute for Edible Education, which has partnered with the University of California.
Author Dan Roam spoke on the power of visual storytelling, as detailed in his book, “The Back of the Napkin: How Visual Storytelling Works.” Roam, who has worked with leadership at companies such as Google, Microsoft and Boeing, presented on how simple illustrations can help leaders make sense of complex situations.
Hetal Vasavada, a contestant on the sixth season of the competitive cooking show MasterChef, talked about how she pursued a career outside of the STEM fields pursued by many Indian-Americans. Originally on the path to a career in the sciences, Vasavada discussed her pivot to the food industry and how she convinced her family (as well as herself) that it was the right choice.
This year’s TEDxHarker School student speaker was senior Aaron Tran, whose passions include bioinformatics and scientific ethics and philosophy. Spurred by the worrying amount of misinformation that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tran talked about solutions to the concerning lack of information literacy and the growing mistrust people have of one another.
In addition to the speakers, attendees also enjoyed perusing the exhibitor area, where they played with robotic toys made by Petoi, tried out slime samples from Dots N Stripes and got an up-close look at the Vinci electric bike.
At lunch, students had the chance to sit down with local business mentors to ask questions and receive advice.
Videos of this year’s TEDxHarker speakers are expected to be uploaded to the TEDx YouTube channel in the coming months.
On Saturday, the girls tennis team defeated Menlo for the fourth time this season to become the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Northern California champion for the first time in the program’s history, capping off a massively successful run that also saw the team earn its region’s second consecutive CCS championship.
Displaying dominance for the entire season, the team went undefeated in league play and allowed just 7 points in 10 games. The girls also met division rival Menlo four times, winning every contest, and took second place at the Point Loma Invitational in San Diego, where they defeated CIF Southern California champions Westlake.
As an additional feather in the program’s cap, the duo of Rachel Hernandez, grade 10, and Olivia Guo, grade 9, reached the semifinals of the CCS doubles tournament and Audrey Feng, grade 9, won the individual league title.