Last week, senior Utkarsh Priyam was named one of 625 semifinalists in the 2021 Presidential Scholars competition. These semifinalists were selected from 6,500 candidates in the competition, who were selected from 3.6 million graduating seniors. Priyam is one of 12 seniors who were selected as candidates in this year’s competition, which each year identifies students who have excelled in academics, the arts, and career and technical education. As part of their application, candidates submit materials including essays, transcripts and self-assessments. The Presidential Scholars program was created by the U.S. Department of Education in 1964 and is recognized as one of the highest honors U.S. high school students can receive.
Harker upper and middle school VEX robotics teams had a very successful year, with seven teams qualifying for the world championship in May and four winning awards at the recent California State Championship. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most VEX events were held remotely. Live Remote Skills (LRS) events challenged a single robot to score as many points as it could, whereas Live Remote Tournament (LRT) events pitted a pair of robots against each other to score as many points as possible. Throughout the season, the teams participated in various LRS and LRT events, improved their robots and persevered through the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sophomores Amrita Pasupathy and Nidhya Shivakumar were tournament finalists in the California High School State LRT Championship and are currently ranked 12th in high school World Robot Skills Rankings. At the California High School State LRS Championship, ninth graders Jordan Labio, Sriram Bhimaraju and Zachary Blue were the Robot Skills Champions and earned the Excellence Award given to the top all-around team, based on robot performance and judging. Ninth graders Ella Yee and Julie Shi qualified for the state championships by being a Robot Skills Runner Up at an earlier LRS event.
In the California Middle School State LRS Championship, the one-person team of eighth grader Kaitlyn Su was named the Robot Skills Champion and earned the Amaze Award for having the top performing robot. She is also ranked first in middle school World Robot Skills Rankings. In the same event, seventh graders Janam Chahal, Kimi Yashar, MacEnzie Blue and Minal Jalil, earned the Design Award given to the team with the most effective robot design process. Sixth graders Rohan Goyal, Krishna Muddu, Risa Chokhawala, Orion Ghai and Ayden Grover qualified for the state championships. They earned a spot in the World Championship by claiming Robot Skills Runner-Up at an earlier LRS event. Spark Robotics — made up of eighth graders Vedant Balachandran, Rushil Jaiswal, Rishi Lalwani and Shivraj Panja, who also presented at the 2021 Harker Research Symposium — also qualified for worlds.
This story was submitted by speech and debate department chair Jenny Achten.
Senior Andrew Sun was named the congressional debate national champion at the online Tournament of Champions, hosted by the University of Kentucky. This tournament is difficult for students to even qualify to attend, let alone win first place! Students must place highly at regular season tournaments to be invited to attend the event.
Joining Sun in winning awards were seniors Akshay Manglik and Andy Lee, as well as juniors Anshul Reddy and Deven Shah, in Lincoln-Douglas debate. Junior William Chien and sophomore Michelle Jin placed in extemporaneous speaking. Junior Vedant Kenkare won a speaker award in public forum debate. Finally, junior Andrea Thia and sophomore Dyllan Han were in elimination rounds in original oratory. The coaches were also very proud of the other students who qualified to compete at the event, including senior Nathan Ohana, juniors Caden Lin, Arnav Jain and Rohan Rashingkar, sophomores Sara Wan, Carol Wininger, Austina Xu and Rahul Mulpuri, and freshmen Ansh Sheth, Max Xing and Iris Fu. Sun summarized his feelings about the weekend by saying, “Thanks to my amazing parents, coaches and friends (both in and out of congress) — it’s your support that makes this possible! Go Eagles!”
From April 9-10, Harker hosted the 15th annual Research Symposium, inviting the Harker community to experience the breadth of its research opportunities by viewing student presentations and hearing keynote speakers deliver fascinating talks on the theme of this year’s event: artificial intelligence, robotics and automation. The 2020 symposium was canceled due to safety concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year’s symposium was held virtually with all presentations, keynote talks and exhibitions delivered via Zoom, requiring impressive coordination between event organizers, presenters and technology staff.
Throughout the two-day event, middle and upper school students delivered poster presentations on research they had conducted on topics such as environmental science, physics, astronomy and medicine. The presentations were held in special breakout rooms, with plenty of time scheduled for each speaker. Corporate exhibitors – which included Microsoft, NVidia, Oculus and ZeroUI – each received their own room that visitors could drop into at their leisure, mimicking the atmosphere of the exhibition area in previous years.
The event kicked off on Friday with Wayne Liu of Perfect Corp, whose app YouCam Makeup allows users to demo beauty products using artificial intelligence and augmented reality technology, and was named one of Time Magazine’s best innovations of 2020. Liu provided an overview of the history of artificial intelligence and how it developed into the technology used by YouCam Makeup. “Facial recognition is not new,” he said, “However, to get to the point where you can [try on makeup virtually] … the technology needs to be very precise.” To achieve this precision, Perfect Corp gathered and analyzed millions of hair color and skin tone samples, and their app uses 3,900 polygon meshes to achieve accurate results.
Dr. Ben Chung, associate professor of urology at Stanford’s School of Medicine, provided an overview of robotics-enabled surgery and how it has been used to make certain very difficult procedures much easier and safer, such as the removal of prostate cancer. He also showed footage of his own procedures using surgical robots in which he removed a tumor from a kidney. “Where the robotic platform really helps us is the ease of the suture,” he said. “Making sure that your suturing is exact is really important because you need to make sure that the patient doesn’t bleed afterwards.” As the technology of robotic surgery evolves, Dr. Chung said, it will be applicable to more situations, such as conducting surgery over long distances in situations such as on a battlefield or in a space station.
Any discussion of artificial intelligence and robotics invariably touches on the legal and ethical aspects of these fields, and Ryan Calo’s presentation on legal rulings on the use of robots was a great forum for the topic. Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, explained that “robots have been with us for a very long and so we shouldn’t really be surprised that occasionally they have led to legal disputes.” These disputes extend as far back as the 1880s, when it was questioned whether using artificial wooden coins in vending machines constituted fraud. In the 1950s, courts found that robots could not be defined as dolls because they were not representations of human beings and thus could not be subjected to the same tariffs. Present day debates have centered on the ownership of artifacts retrieved by robots from shipwrecks and how to prosecute crimes in which machines are used to steal from homes.
Fitting for the symposium’s 15th anniversary, this year’s alumni keynote was delivered by Yi Sun ‘06, who 15 years ago was Harker’s first Science Talent Search finalist and a member of Harker’s first US Math Olympiad team, winning a silver medal. In his talk Sun, who now works as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s department of statistics, explained the process of how machine learning tasks often involve discerning signals from “noisy observations.” Using detailed diagrams, Sun discussed the mathematical concepts underlying the problem and how they are used to process data for electron microscopy.
The final keynote speaker for this year was Chelsea Finn, assistant professor in computer science at Stanford University, who presented on the process of teaching robots how to learn and solve problems the way humans do. Finn noted that while it was possible to teach robots to do certain tasks – such as piecing together a toy airplane or place shapes into a cube – through trial and error, these robots became highly specialized due to gathering data from very controlled environments using specific tools. Teaching robots how to perform “simpler, but broader” tasks with a greater range of applications is much more difficult, and Finn explained the methods she and her team have used to create robot “generalists.”
Late last week, senior Anna Vazhaeparambil was named a runner-up in the JEA Journalist of the Year contest. JEA recognized Vazhaeparambil for her dedication to improving coverage of junior varsity and girls sports. “While we would cover every single football game, for example, there would only be one or two articles written about softball or girls water polo,” she told JEA. Her mission to increase diversity in reporting informed her later work covering political events such as elections and protests. Jurors praised Vazhaeparambil for her perseverance and ability to cover a wide range of topics as well as her leadership qualities.
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March 5, 2021:
Senior Anna Vazhaeparambil, who serves as editor-in-chief of the student news website Harker Aquila, was selected as California Journalist of the Year by the Journalism Education Association. As the California representative in JEA’s Journalist of the Year competition, her portfolio will be evaluated during the spring JEA/NSPA National High School Journalism Convention. The top winner will receive a $3,000 scholarship and up to three runners up each will receive an $850 scholarship. Vazhaeparambil also was awarded the top $500 prize in the Arnetta Garcin Memorial Scholarship, which she was eligible for because Harker journalism advisor Ellen Austin is a JEA of Northern California member.
From Feb. 22-25, 139 students from The Harker School DECA Chapter attended the 2021 State Career Development Conference (SCDC). This conference was held virtually due to COVID-19, and students competed by submitting recordings of their events. To simulate the in-person conference feel, SCDC also featured Career Prep Academy Workshops and a Harker DECA chapter social. Overall, Harker performed admirably, with 59 overall finalists and 28 top four written event and top five role-play winners.
“SCDC was the culmination of Harker DECA’s efforts this past year, and I am extremely proud of how far our students have come,” said senior Anvitha Tummala, Harker DECA co-CEO. “Everyone has demonstrated such commendable adaptability with a virtual DECA experience, and due to a competitively successful SCDC, I’m excited to see our chapter compete at ICDC next month!”
The conference started off with the opening ceremony, which our chapter watched through a livestream on Zoom. Students were motivated to find their purpose by keynote speaker Quinn Tempest, a successful entrepreneur who has dedicated herself to helping people reach their life goals. Tempest said, “never stop asking yourself big important questions” and “purpose is the ‘why’ that drives what you do.”
“She discussed her personal motivators and what led her to be a successful entrepreneur, inspiring me to search for my own purpose in the work I do,” said Clarice Wang, grade 11, Harker DECA VP of operations. Since this competition was held online, submissions worked similarly to SVCDC, and members were given two days to record their written presentations and roleplays, put the documents in a Google Drive folder, and turn in the link to the DECA submissions portal.
“Though I’d much rather be presenting in person, it isn’t all bad! I liked that we could re-record if we made a small mistake, and the conference went very smoothly,” said Shreeya Merchia, grade 9.
SCDC activities continued with a Harker DECA Chapter social which took place on March 5. The Harker DECA Officer team prepared a variety of fun and engaging breakout-room activities such as baking cookies, playing Among Us, watching “Wandavision,” participating in sports trivia and more. Members were allowed to hop between as many of the bonding activities as they liked, the most popular being “Wandavision.”
“Although this is our second time competing in an online format, the Harker DECA chapter has been preparing for a virtual competition the entire year through Zoom study sessions. Students submitted videos of their presentations and PDFs of their business plans that were judged asynchronously,” said senior Bryan Zhang, Harker DECA VP of competitions. “Despite not being able to have live competition, we were still able to simulate business case studies and develop ourselves professionally. The virtual format also demanded higher levels of creativity and teamwork to stay ahead of the curve of other teams, which I am sure will benefit all competitors in the long term.”
The competition concluded with an awards ceremony hosted by California DECA on Thursday, March 11. Members joined a livestream as the California DECA officer team recognized advisors and announced ICDC (International Career Development Conference) qualifiers. To simulate stage recognition at an in-person conference, winners were spotlighted when their names were announced. Along with our chapter members’ achievements, Harker DECA was recognized for achieving Gold Level Certification for the Chapter Awards Program, as well as Thrive Level for the Chapter Campaigns and Membership Campaign.
“From kicking off the conference with a motivational message about purpose, our competitors no doubt found their purpose while competing at SCDC. I’m incredibly proud of the officer team for helping run this conference smoothly, and I am looking forward to making more conference memories at ICDC!” said chapter advisor Juston Glass. “Congratulations to all of our ICDC qualifiers. Go Harker Eagles!”
Members qualifying for ICDC are as follows:
1st Place
• Shreeya Merchia, grade 9; Principles of Marketing
• Vienna Parnell, grade 11; Hotel and Lodging Management Series
• Vedant Kenkare, grade 11; Marketing Communications Series
• Bodhi Saha, grade 11, Kaden Kapadia, grade 11; Sports Entertainment Marketing Team Decision Making
Plan
• Ananya Bammi, grade 10, Saavi Kumar, grade 10; Finance Operations Research
• Miki Mitarai, grade 9, Medha Yarlagadda, grade 9, Meishin Yen, grade 9; Hospitality and Tourism Operations
Research
• Margaret Cartee, grade 9; Principles of Business Management and Administration
• Bryan Zhang, grade 12; Sports and Entertainment Marketing Series
• Emily Zhou, grade 11, Emily Tan, grade 11; Entrepreneurship Team Decision Making
• Aditya Singhvi, grade 12, Andrew Sun, grade 12; Hospitality Services Team Decision Making
• Annmaria Antony, grade 10, Grace Hoang, grade 10; Marketing Management Team Decision Making
3rd Place
• Emily Tan, grade 11, Emily Zhou, grade 11; Business Services Operations Research
• Leisha Devisetti, grade 10; Sports and Entertainment Marketing Operations Research
• Cynthia Wang, grade 9; Principles of Marketing
• Rohan Varma, grade 12; Automotive Services Marketing Series
4th Place
• Max Xing, grade 9, Carey Chang, grade 9, Kevin Zhang, grade 9; Hospitality and Tourism Operations Research
• Ananya Bammi, grade 10, Saavi Kumar, grade 10; Financial Services Team Decision Making
• April Sun, grade 11; Restaurant and Food Services Management
• April Sun, grade 11; Hospitality and Tourism Professional Selling
• Camilla Lindh, grade 11; Quick Serve Restaurant Management Series
5th Place
• Simren Kochhar, grade 11; Entrepreneurship Individual Series
• Sara Wan, grade 10; Human Resources Management Series
• Sujith Pakala, grade 11; Quick Serve Restaurant Management
• Victoria Han, grade 11, Catherine He, grade 11; Travel and Tourism Team Decision Making
• Elvis Han, grade 11, Melody Luo, grade 11; Marketing Management Team Decision Making
Raji Swaminathan, middle school science teacher, recently published the third book in her series about the elements, titled “The Halogens – Oh, So Reactive!” As with the previous two books, this book follows Atom and her dog, Electron, as they travel to visit the elements via a magic periodic table. The book is currently available to purchase through Amazon and will be available to download for free on April 5-6. The second book in the series will be available for free March 25-28 and April 5-6. Swaminathan’s other two books, “Hydrogen and the Alkali Metals” and “My Basketball Game – A Lesson about Accuracy and Precision,” are available as free downloads through Apple Books.
On March 13, students and faculty from Bay Area schools attended the Student Diversity Leadership Gathering, hosted by Harker and led by Rodney Glasgow, head of school at Sandy Spring Friends School in, Sandy Spring, Md. A well-regarded speaker and facilitator in the areas of diversity and social justice, Glasgow delivered a keynote at the start of the event, detailing the ways in which his identity as a Black man changes both how the world sees him and how he sees and acts in the world.
He spoke on how the mask he wears as a precaution during the pandemic has hidden what he feels is his best feature, his smile, which he said puts others at ease. When wearing his mask, he said, “No one can really tell who I am. I’m suddenly every Black man at once. They can’t see that I’m a head of school. They can’t see that I’m an Ivy League graduate. They can’t see that I’m smiling. They can’t see that I’m kind. They can only see that I’m Black.”
Glasgow recalled instances in which he found himself centering his identity, such as when he was interviewing for a job and received half-hearted greetings or was grilled with questions in private to verify that he had graduated from Harvard. “This is an identity moment,” he said. This is not actually a Harvard moment. I’m sitting in a Black moment. I’m sitting in a poor moment. I’m sitting in a you’re-too-close moment. I’m sitting in a is-that-a-mask-you’re-wearing moment.”
In one powerful moment, Glasgow told the story of a Black parent who was detained while waiting with his daughter for the bus to arrive outside the school. After seeing the officer pass by once in his vehicle, he told his daughter to be ready, because he sensed the officer would return. “Could you imagine living a life where the police slowly creep by you and you don’t think, ‘thank goodness they’re going on to solve a crime, thank goodness they’re going on to keep the neighborhood safe,’ you’re thinking, ‘let’s just get ready because I think they’re coming back?’” Glasgow said.
Although the situation was resolved, the parent was upset that none of the other parents present during the encounter checked on him or his daughter. “When we unmask identity, all that’s really sitting there in the center is this deep, deep humanity,” Glasgow continued. “It’s this sense of, they didn’t treat me like a person; they didn’t take care of my daughter like she was human. She had to get on the bus and wonder, do they still see me as the person they saw yesterday?”
Following the keynote, adults and student attendees were put into groups to discuss identity and conduct group activities around their feelings on their own identities and how they affect their perceptions of the world. The attendees later met as a group to talk about what they had learned and what elements of the attitudes displayed during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that they saw in their school communities.
Tiffany Liou ‘08, now a reporter with the ABC-affiliated WFAA in Dallas, posted a video yesterday in which she speaks about the yearlong wave of violence against Asian Americans, including yesterday’s attacks in Atlanta that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent.
“I am angry, I am sad and I’m scared,” Liou says in the video. “I’m scared because I don’t want my family to become the next target.” She also shares personal experiences, such as a recent encounter at Target where the cashier would not speak to her or take her money: “I felt like she was disgusted by me because of my race. I felt like she was disgusted by my husband, who is Asian as well.”
Affirming her commitment to stand up for Asian communities, Liou also implores people to speak out and get active. “I need you to stand with us too,” she says. “Rhetoric matters. Speak up when you see hate, use your platforms to denounce racism, and reach out to your leaders and your elected officials to pass anti-hate legislation.”
Earlier this month, a group of Harker seniors published a website that tracks the rate of COVID-19 vaccination in the United States and the country’s progress toward herd immunity. Created with the feedback of Harker science teachers and epidemiology professors from Stanford University, the website provides a way for the public to monitor the progress of vaccinations in every state, including the percentage of people who’ve received their first and second vaccine doses and the percentage of each state’s doses used.
“In December, as stay-at-home learning dragged on, I found myself wistfully checking the news for updates on vaccines,” said senior Jason Lin, one of the students involved with creating the website. “I was looking for an easy-to-use platform that displays national and state vaccinations and progress to herd immunity. But to our surprise, I couldn’t find any. So I reached out to a few friends, and we got started.”
Lin was joined by a few fellow seniors for the project. “Bowen Yin built the website with his incredible coding finesse; Sara Yen verified data and reached out to professors for input with her journalism skills. Later, we added Claire Luo, who is working on publicizing the site, and Helen Li, who is helping us upscale and add more resources to the site,” said Lin. “We’re hoping that in the future, we might even help people find where to get vaccinated.”
Data for the website was sourced from organizations including the CDC, and experts knowledgeable in public health were consulted to ensure accuracy. Professors from Stanford offered their insight on how to display the progress toward herd immunity as well as how to factor in natural immunity. Biology teacher Mike Pistacchi and math teacher Bune Bloomquist were consulted to resolves issues pertaining to data.
The creators aimed to make the user experience simple and represent the data as accurately as possible. “The fundamental purpose of this site is to allow anyone to keep tabs on the vaccination situation,” said Lin. “We’re now in a stage where we’ve built something we’re proud of, and we want to let as many people as possible know it exists as an accessible resource.”