13 Harker singers were recently named members of the California Choral Directors Association (CCDA) Coastal Region Honor Choir. Seniors Ava Arasan, Aria Jain, Sukrit Kalsi and Anika Pandey; juniors Arjun Gurjar, Shayla He, Katelyn Hsu, Miki Mitarai and Arushi Sharma; sophomore Hasini Namala; and freshmen Helen Gu, Charlotte Ludlow and Aditya Ramanathan will spend the next several weeks readying their repertoire for a special performance at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in November.
Last weekend, at the 14th annual Math Prize for Girls competition, held at MIT, junior Olivia Xu (pictured, center) placed 11th out of 240 competitors, earning a $300 prize, and junior Catherine Li received an honorable mention. As top 36 placers, Xu and Li are eligible to compete in the Math Prize Olympiad.
Invitations to the competition were extended to the top 300 girls who participated in last year’s American Math Competition (AMC). Competitors were tasked with answer 20 short-answer questions in two-and-a-half hours.
The event, which was emceed by Nitya Mani ’15, who is now a Ph.D. student at MIT, also included a game night and a campus tour and admissions talk for prospective students.
The first concert of the 2022-23 season of the Harker Concert Series featured the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, a local institution for more than 30 years. Founder and conductor Barbara Day Turner made special mention of her previous collaboration with Jaco Wong, the upper school instrumental music director, who composed for SJCO while studying at San Jose State University.
SJCO’s repertoire for the evening included faithful performances of well-known favorites including Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” and the middle movement of Elgar’s “Serenade for Strings.” Showcasing its mastery over a diverse repertoire, the orchestra also performed composer Leroy Anderson’s light-hearted “Plink, Plank, Plunk!” and, as a special surprise, Jaco Wong’s own “Whampoa Overture,” a colorful composition inspired by Wong’s childhood memories of Hong Kong.
Following the intermission, SJCO delivered Ahmed Alabaca’s mournful yet hopeful “Across the Calm Waters of Heaven,” a response to the 2015 mass shooting in Alabaca’s hometown of San Bernardino. The orchestra concluded with a rousing rendition of Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango,” eliciting an extended ovation from the appreciative audience.
This story was submitted by Harker speech and debate chair Jenny Achten.
Senior Rahul Mulpuri won first place at the prestigious Greenhill Round Robin in September. Only the top 12 Lincoln-Douglas debaters in the nation are invited to the round robin, and winning it is very difficult. Mulpuri was invited due to his semifinal finish at nationals last year. The topic of the debate was whether or not the United States ought to adopt a single-payer health care system. Speech and debate coaches expressed excitement over Mulpuri’s start to the season!
Yesterday, senior Sarah Mohammed visited the White House to read her poetry at a ceremony honoring the 2022 National Student Poets! Mohammed was invited as one of last year’s National Student Poets. The reading was attended by first lady Jill Biden, who Mohammed took the opportunity to meet.
This past summer, K-5 visual arts chair Gerry-louise Robinson and middle school art teacher Sofie Siegmann traveled to Thailand to learn more about the country’s art, culture and history, and how they can be integrated into Harker’s visual arts programs. The trip was part of the Raju and Bala Vegesna Teacher Excellence Program, which supports teachers seeking exciting professional development opportunities.
“Thailand is a rich melting pot of art and culture that has embraced traits from all the countries that border it,” said Robinson. “There are so many visible connections with India and East Asia, cultures that are part of our Harker community.”
The excursion began with a three-day stint at the University of Fine Arts in Bangkok, where Robinson and Siegmann gave a presentation and participated in a project with the university’s teachers and students. “We got to explore the many disciplines that the college has to offer and chatted with many professors who are practicing artists in their own right,” said Robinson.
“It was the most rewarding experience, because it brought everybody together,” said Siegmann “The students worked at home, and in the end we all created a wall with over 500 pieces!”
They then visited temples in the northern and southern regions of the country, admiring and analyzing the many different techniques that made each of the temples unique. The trek also included stops at places where locals were creating ceramics in a variety of styles, as well as visits to art studios to meet with and learn from local artists. During the several workshops they attended, Robinson and Siegmann took part in soap carving, paper making and mask painting.
Robinson said she hopes to use the striking scenes she experienced in Thailand’s floating markets into her instruction, in addition to paper making projects and works involving elephants, which are icons of Thai culture. Siegmann said she planned to integrate at least two pieces inspired by what she learned in Thailand into each of her classes, including paper making, soap carving and printmaking.
The teachers thanked global education director Jennifer Walrod for organizing the trip. “Jennifer Walrod did an outstanding job in putting this trip to Thailand together,” said Siegmann. “It was such a smooth, adventuresome experience.” Sakchai Boon-Intr, a professor at the University of Fine Arts, was also instrumental in making the experience so worthwhile. “He did so much to enable us to be at the college and engage with the students and staff,” Robinson. Finally, they thanked the Vegesnas, whose endowment granted this unique opportunity.
“Thank you to the Vegesna family for making this possible,” Siegmann said. “What an opportunity!”
Last week, the middle school marked the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month by inviting East Palo Alto City Councilmember Antonio López to speak at a special morning assembly. A passionate and energetic speaker, López talked about his upbringing in the mostly Latinx city of East Palo Alto. “It’s a community mostly of immigrants, a community where English may not be the first language,” he said.
He also described it as a “city that nobody cared about,” recalling a story about a music class with 30 students but only six recorders, each of which had to be sanitized after every use. Quality groceries were also out of reach for many people, including López’s family. As a child, he walked 45 minutes each way with his mother to the grocery store.
A major believer in the importance of quality education, López thought of school as his “sanctuary” growing up. “For a lot of us growing up in East Palo Alto … education was a thing that changed my life and I’m sure your parents’ lives,” he said.
The son of Mexican immigrants, López talked about his familiarity with the pressures of having parents with high expectations due to the risks they took moving to another country. While attending Duke University, he informed his parents that he wanted to be a poet, which did not get a positive reaction. He nevertheless pursued and earned a Marshall Scholarship to attend the University of Cambridge and went on to win the 2019 Levis Prize from Four Way Books.
Upon returning home near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, López saw that East Palo Alto was still experiencing many of the same problems he had seen growing up, and decided to take action. With the help of his young cousin Adolfo, he organized a campaign for councilmember and began knocking on doors. “He didn’t have a passion for civic engagement, but he was open to learning about it,” López said of Adolfo, who set out learning about local issues, budgets and infrastructure. His platform of equal opportunities for youth won him the councilmember seat in December 2020.
“I want you all to have interests. I want you all to have passions. I want you all to guard those passions,” he said. “And I want you to be open to all the different ways that you can be inspired, that you can be pushed, that you can be encouraged.”
Bay Area-based artist Leah Rosenberg was named the second artist-in-residence of the Dickinson Visual Arts Endowment. Rosenberg has employed a wide variety of media to explore the many ways color is insinuated in the human experience, including painting, installation, sculpture, video and even food.
Featured in local, national and international solo and group exhibitions, Rosenberg has also participated in fellowships at Berkeley’s Kala Art Institute and the Montalvo Arts Center. Past residencies include San Francisco Recology (where she repurposed paint from a household hazardous waste facility), Vermont Studio Center, Project 387, Facebook, Google, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and McColl Center for Art + Innovation. Her installations appear in locations across the Bay Area, including San Francisco International Airport, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and UCSF.
Rosenberg’s residency will begin Oct. 10 with a lunchtime lecture at the Nichols Hall auditorium. In the following weeks she will conduct a series of workshops with middle and upper school art students, culminating with a special reception on Nov. 17.
The Dickinson Visual Arts Endowment was created in 2021 to support Harker’s visual arts programs and students, as well as deepen the school’s connection to the wider international arts community. Last year’s inaugural artist-in-residence of the endowment was Berlin-based painter and performance artist Britta Clausnitzer.
Late last month, senior Amiya Chokhawala received a Youth Leadership Award from St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister the Hon. Dr. Terrance Drew. She was recognized for founding the nonprofit organization STEMHer, which inspires young women from less privileged backgrounds to pursue STEM careers through workshops, tutoring and Q&A sessions. Through a partnership with St. Kitts and Nevis’ CARE Foundation, STEMHer brought free coding and artificial intelligence workshops to girls aged 12-16, held both virtually and in-person. STEMHer also created a short documentary on its partnership with the CARE Foundation. Earlier this year, Chokhawala was featured on the Future of the Business World podcast, hosted by the Wharton School of Business.
At the International Linguistics Olympiad in the Isle of Man in July, Rishab Parthasarathy ’22 received a silver medal and helped Team USA Red place first in individual competition and take the bronze with a tie for fourth in the team competition. Parthasarathy earned his spot on the team toward the end of the 2021-22 school year after placing fourth overall in the North American Linguistics Open Competition. He was also a finalist in the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search.