Over the summer, nearly 30 Harker students participated in internships at a number of different universities and businesses, including Stanford University, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN) and the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Students worked in a wide variety of disciplines. Paulomi Bhattacharya, grade 11, and Jay Reddy, grade 12, worked on nanochemistry projects during their stint at UC Santa Cruz, while senior Shival Dasu, another Santa Cruz intern, helped restore a telescope at the James Lick Observatory. Aranshi Kumar, grade 12, analyzed occurrences of diabetes in Santa Clara County teenagers during his internship at Hunter Labs, and Akshay Ramachandran, grade 12, worked on the development of electroactive polymer materials at Artificial Muscle.
In late August, science department chair Anita Chetty visited Santa Cruz to see several students present on the research they performed during their summer internships. “I was so proud of our students,” she said. “They were poised, eloquent and I felt as though I was listening to graduate students talking about work that had been done over a long period of time.”
On Sat., Oct. 15, several Harker students from grades 11 and 12 will accompany advancement director Joe Rosenthal to Santa Cruz’s Evolutionary Revolutionary event, which will feature several speakers from the university’s science faculty in addition to an audiovisual performance by Symphony Silicon Valley. The event will be held at Cupertino’s Flint Center.
On Sat., Oct. 22, from 8 a.m.-2 p.m., Harker will host TEDx Harker School, an independently organized TED event on the theme of youth entrepreneurship, at Nichols Hall on the upper school campus, located at 500 Saratoga Ave. in San Jose. The event’s keynote speaker will be Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist, former chief evangelist at Apple and the author of 10 books. His current project is the “online magazine rack” Alltop.com.
Other speakers include Serious Energy CEO Kevin Surace, named one of the top 15 innovators of the decade by CNBC, Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur since 1994, Rahim Fazal, who sold his first online business during his senior year of high school, and Karl Mehta, Ernst & Young’s 2010 Northern California Entrepreneur of the Year.
TEDx Harker School, organized by students Neeraj Baid and Neel Bhoopalam, both grade 11, is open only to high school students. Those who wish to attend can register at the TEDx Harker School website. The registration price includes lunch and refreshments throughout the day.
Jeffrey Kwong, grade 12, has been accepted to the National High School Honors Orchestra as a cellist. Kwong will be the first Harker student represented in the orchestra, and in late March, will join nearly 100 other musicians from across the United States for a performance at the National Orchestra Festival in Atlanta.
Kwong has been involved in Harker’s music program since grade 6, and is also a Conservatory Certificate candidate. Orchestra director Chris Florio said, “Jeffrey has been a tremendous player in our orchestra program for the last seven years. He placed first last year in a state competition run by ASTA (America String Teachers Association) and is a member of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra along with five other Harker students.”
In late September, 81 upper school students came together at the Honors and Ethics Conference to discuss difficult situations that can occur on campus. Each advisory sent one student volunteer (and one advisory sent two students). Once they arrived, students were split into groups of eight, with two students from each grade level. The students sat at round tables with a moderator and listened as Evan Barth, the dean of upper school students, told them that the situations they were about to presented with were realistic, but were not real.
The students then heard three different case studies: one about two students talking between periods about a test they’d taken, and having a third student approach who had not yet taken the test; another concerning a plagiarism case with an outside confrontation; and finally, a property issues case.
The tables the students sat at were not unlike the Honor Council, a group of three faculty and 10 students whose mission is to uphold the school’s honor code. All the case studies were designed to create the same gray areas the Honor Council must discuss, and inspire conversations that were, Barth says, “entirely organic. The adults involved in the conference had to keep their agendas out of it.”
The initial inspiration for the conference came from a business ethics conference Barth attended in Arizona. Eventually, he’d like to involve other schools besides Harker in the conference so students can discuss the similarities and differences between what they face on campus, and how they’re dealing with those issues.
After the students finished discussing their three case studies, they had 15 minutes of silent reflection, and then a chance to share those reflections with the group. Barth recalls one student in particular who said that even though some cases started out seeming very black-and-white, there ended up being many gray areas, and all those areas needed to be discussed and analyzed.
“The more people talk about these things,” Barth said, “the more the level of overall integrity, both on campus and in life, has to go up. People get very excited and into that feeling of wanting to make changes while they’re at a conference, but then they leave and go back to the grind or back to their homework and that fades. The goal is to take a couple of those moments when you felt that buzz and implement them in day-to-day life.”
Reprinted from Harker Quarterly, Fall 2011. By Kelly Espinosa
Get ready for the fun and festivities on Sun., Oct. 9 at Harker’s annual Family & Alumni Picnic. Our “Top Hatters” (parent committee chairs) have a super HAT-TASTIC event planned that’s guaranteed to knock your socks (and hat) off. Put something crazy on your head and join in the fun!
Throw Your Hat in the Ring!
Everyone needs an admission pass to enter the picnic on Sun., Oct. 9, so make sure you’ve got yours. Visit the online registration page before Sept. 30 to grab your pass for the advance purchase price of $8. Admission is also available at the door for $12. All hat lovers 5 to 75 need a pass!
We’re Passing the Hat …
… and selling tickets for our Grand Prize Drawing! Students K-12, faculty and staff are selling “lids” full of picnic drawing tickets to help us raise money for our school. Sellers are earning incentive prizes as they go and on picnic day we’ll pull out the names of five lucky grand prize winners. This year’s prizes include: a giant SIMPLE 3-speed Beach Cruiser, an Xbox with Kinect 250GB, an iPad2 wifi 16GB, a Las Vegas getaway for two and our fabulous first prize of $10,000! Tickets are available on all three campuses and can be turned in until 3:30 on picnic day to be eligible for the grand picnic drawing at 4 p.m. Happy selling … and maybe even winning!
Go Mad Hattery!
Our Silent Auction promises to have you “bidding like mad” on super silly teacher packages, fabulous trips and wacky, wonderful one-of-a-kind items. How about an evening in San Francisco at “Beach Blanket Babylon”? Or a tour on an America’s Cup yacht? Maybe great seats and a personal field visit during an Oakland A’s game or a beautiful diamond necklace? You can eat, play, tour, trek and create with some of your favorite teachers by bidding on a Teacher Package, or sign up for an evening of fun and games, or a laser tag challenge, or a day at the ballpark, or even a good old fashioned sleepover! Make sure to stop by the “Go Mad Hattery” on picnic day to bid, bid, bid on your favorites.
There’s still time to donate to our Silent Auction. We can always use restaurant certificates, tickets to sporting events, one-of-a-kind art or jewelry items, sports memorabilia and more. Visit us online for more details.
HOLD ON TO YOUR HAT … IT’S GOING TO BE FUN!
Put on your panamas, dust off your derby, break out your beanies and get ready for a wacky, whimsical, wonderful day on the Blackford campus. We’ve added some new surprises to the picnic lineup this year; of course, we haven’t forgotten your old favorites either (with a hat-tastic twist). You can be sure it all adds up to one fabulous family day!
The “Sunbonnet Bowl” will be open as you arrive at the picnic and you’ll be delighted to see the lovely flowers and decorations galore in this family gathering area. The spectacular student show is the big attraction at 11 a.m., but the Sunbonnet Stage will be filled with student performances and special guests throughout the day. Drop your raffle tickets, buy your carnival tickets and you’re set for a HAT-RIFFIC day!
At the “Hat Trick Tavern” we’ll be celebrating sports and all the hats that go with them. We’ve added an outdoor patio, and moved the popular wine booth into the MPR for adults only! Add in the specialty beer and wine, the football gameand super sports munchies and this could be your new favorite area at the picnic.
“Flip Your Lidsville” is this year’s whimsical picnic town, located in the Blackford gym. The town’s people are excited to show off their “main street” and all the “businesses” are sprucing up for our arrival. Stroll by Mr. Hood’s Hardware or the Night Cap Café, take a peek into Hattery Barn, Brimco or the CAPital ONE Bank.
Our most popular area, “The Cap-Tipping Carnival,” will be chock full of carnival games, blow-up attractions and hat-themed activities, all designed for maximum fun and prize-winning! So be sure to mark your calendar, purchase your admission passes and plan to come early and stay late so you won’t miss one second of the lid-flipping, cap-tipping picnic fun we have planned!
Hats Off to YOU!
Our generous picnic sponsors, donors and volunteers really make this event possible… and we want to make sure to give a big “thank you!” to all who have stepped up and done their part as we prepare for a “tip-top” event on Oct. 9! This is truly a Harker family day and our entire family has gone above and beyond this year in every way possible!
Don’t Eat Your Hat …Visit a Food Truck!
Have you joined the food truck revolution? Are you tweeting your friends to find the location of the gourmet ice cream truck or those spectacular garlic noodles? If you’ve been hearing about this craze and wondering what the fuss is all about, the Family & Alumni Picnic has you covered. Harker will be featuring five of the Bay Area’s premiere food trucks at this year’s event on Oct. 9, no tweeting required! In addition to our traditional offerings of Round Table Pizza, authentic Indian cuisine, great grilled burgers, sausage and chicken sandwiches, the food trucks will provide a twist to our food choices this year and give hungry picnic-goers an opportunity to participate in this craze that is sweeping the nation. The trucks will be serving up super-sized Vietnamese sandwiches, tasty Hawaiian fried chicken, killer Cajun cuisine and gourmet ice cream desserts like you’ve never seen before. “We are excited about the whole food truck idea,” says picnic coordinator Kelly Espinosa, “and we hope our culinary experiment at this year’s picnic will be a delicious success!”
Brimming with Pride!
When you see an upper school student on picnic day (and you’ll see many of them) you can bet they are having fun and helping with the event in some special way. Most grade 9-12 students come to the picnic to volunteer first and then they hang around and have some fun themselves. As the upper school has grown over the years the students have found new and exciting ways to “serve” at this family-focused event. Upper school students play in the jazz band, perform in the student show, cover the event as reporters and photographers, run game and activity booths with their favorite clubs, help with setup and cleanup and more … it’s awesome! For the past three years the varsity football team has been in charge of the popular football toss game. “It’s a great way for the team to show their Harker pride, give back to the school, and get some exposure in the larger Harker community,” says coach Karriem Stinson. “My guys work hard and it’s nice to see them interacting with younger students and putting into action the values we teach on the field everyday. Plus, they really have a good time!”
New this year, the Eagle Buddies program will be teaming up grade 4 students with their grade 11 buddies at the picnic. This gives the buddy pairs an opportunity to hang out, play games and get to know each other in the safe environment of our most favorite family festival. What could be more fun? We hope those grade 11 kids have their Ping-Pong-tossing, ball-bouncing, train-riding, frog-flipping muscles warmed up, because fourth graders never get tired! We’re so very proud of all the upper school students who have found a way to give back on picnic day. Their contributions add so much to the “family” part of this fun-filled day!
Picnic Posse Heads Out!
In the middle school, students have formed our first ever Picnic Posse! The group is made up of picnic-loving students who want to help promote picnic spirit and enthusiasm throughout the Blackford campus. “Our students have a special relationship to the picnic,” says campus dean Lana Morrison, “because it all happens right here!” The new Picnic Posse gives interested students a chance to be more involved, get a behind-the-scenes look at the event and help our school at the same time. Posse members will be making posters, helping on the curb donation days, creating bulletin boards, making picnic announcements and more as we count down the days to our Hats Off Harker event!
Lower school classes have been getting themselves excited for the Oct. 9 Family & Alumni Picnic, titled “Hats Off Harker,” by decorating their doors with festive posters, each with a different twist on the picnic’s theme of stylish headwear. Students’ and teachers’ faces are pasted on each door poster, and many different hats, from sombreros to top hats to pith helmets, are well-represented.
Hundreds arrived at the upper school campus on Sept. 26 to see decorated astronaut Dr. Gregory Chamitoff kick off the 2011-12 season of the Harker Speaker Series with an in-depth talk about his inspiring life. His appearance was spurred by his visit to his alma mater, Blackford High School, now the site of Harker’s middle school campus. Prior to his speech, Chamitoff spent nearly an hour talking to Winged Post and Talon staffers. Once at the podium, after introductions by Chris Nikoloff, head of school, and Paul West, grade 12, Chamitoff began by recognizing some of the teachers who inspired him during his days at Blackford High, and by introducing his family, who were in attendance, as well as some Blackford High alumni. He briefly recapped his years as a high school student, struggling to find the right crowd in which to belong. “It felt to me like in high school, who you were was defined by where you had lunch,” he joked. He found that he was most comfortable among science students. He reminisced about the pranks he and his friends would organize, including one where they built a flying saucer to frighten the neighborhood. For this particular project, the young Chamitoff wrote to NASA to ask how to make it fly. To his delight, a NASA engineer wrote back with an explanation. “I still have this letter from a long time ago, explaining exactly how the lift would work on this flying saucer,” he said. This inspired him to pursue his dream of being an astronaut. Before continuing, Chamitoff touched on the topic of fulfilling one’s dreams. “You have to set your own standards in your work, and the standards that you set are really for you and based on what you can do and what you want to do,” he said. “You can’t compare yourself to the people sitting next to you.” Having many different interests is also an asset, citing the complaint that many high school students have about learning things in school that do not interest them. “It turns out those subjects later on in life could be very important to you,” he said. “The other thing is skills; sports, hobbies, whether it’s music or dancing or anything you’re interested in doing, these are things that you love to do, you have a passion for, and things you have a passion for are things that end up defining you, things that build character and make you who you are,” he added. Teachers also play an important role, he said, explaining that, “in my job right now, everybody is my teacher.” He said he often finds himself in the role of the student. “You can learn something from everybody,” he said. Chamitoff’s most recent mission was as a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle “Endeavour” on its final voyage earlier this year. In 2008, he spent six months aboard the international space station (ISS) as a flight engineer and science officer. He fondly recalled the camaraderie among his crewmates, who gave one another amusing nicknames. During the Q&A session following his presentation, Chamitoff revealed that his nickname was “Taz,” after the popular Looney Tunes character, because of the sounds he would make while eating. He told most of his story through photos, taking the audience from the launch of “Endeavour,” which included one striking image of the shuttle bursting through a cloud bank, a thick column of exhaust casting its shadow across the top of the clouds. The object of that particular mission was to complete the construction of the ISS. As “Endeavour” approached, what originally started out as a “dot on the horizon” eventually became a structure the size of two football fields. The “Endeavor” crew was actually delivering two key items to the ISS. One was a palette of spare equipment that would be used to sustain the station through 2020. A photo showed the palette being transferred from the shuttle’s robotic arm to a robotic arm attached to the space station, a job Chamitoff said was similar to a video game, “but if you look out the window, it’s real stuff, and it’s big stuff that you’re moving around.” The other piece being delivered was an alpha magnetic spectrometer (AMS), a $2 billion piece of equipment made to look for “dark matter” that may explain why stars rotate at certain speeds around galaxies. It is also designed to look for anti-matter created by the Big Bang. “If they discover an anti-matter galaxy with this, that will be a fundamental breakthrough,” Chamitoff said. Chamitoff took the audience through more amazing photos of him and his crewmates at work on the space station. One wide-angle shot, taken at the end of the final spacewalk, was taken at the highest spot on the ISS, showing it complete after 12 years of construction, which required 36 shuttle flights. “During this spacewalk, we hit the 1,000th hour of spacewalking time,” Chamitoff said. “We were able to announce, ‘space station assembly is complete,’ after all this work by 15 countries for all this time.” The final photograph of the presentation showed the view from the window where Chamitoff slept during his stay at the ISS. “I’ve taken about 22,000 pictures in space, and this is my favorite one, and I took it during this mission,” he said. Upon arriving at the space station, he put his sleeping bag next to his favorite view from the space station. “Every night I would get into my sleeping bag, and I would open up a shutter, and I would look at this view and I would just stare at it until I was forced to go to sleep,” he said. In it, the earth and its glowing atmosphere float below the space station, with thousands of stars visible in the distance. “You feel like you can reach the future from here; you feel like you’re already part of the future, and all you need to do is go a little faster,” he said, “and this space station, which is really comfortable to live on for six months, could take you all the way to Mars.” Chamitoff’s presentation was followed by a video showing highlights from the mission, including several impressive first-person views from the spacewalks, and amusing footage of the astronauts maneuvering about the space station and catching floating pieces of candy and droplets of water with their mouths. Following the short film, Chamitoff took questions from the audience. In response to a question about floating debris inside the space station, he explained that spacecraft have advanced filtration and ventilation systems that keep the surroundings clear. Another audience member asked about the continued delay of a new space vehicle after the space shuttle had been retired. “It’s very disappointing,” he said, saying he thought the space shuttle was retired too soon. “There was this path of retiring the space shuttle, and there was this path of building the next vehicle, and those two paths should have been connected by milestones,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to retire the shuttle until the next thing is sitting on the launchpad.” He estimated that the next vehicle could be ready in five or six years. Until then, American astronauts will have to acquire seats on Russian Soyuz rockets. Responding to a question about physical changes in space, Chamitoff explained that he actually lost 10 percent of the bone mass in his hips and pelvic area during his time in space, and adjustment to life back on earth was difficult as a result. “Gravity feels really strong when you come back,” he said. “You feel like gravity’s not happy unless you’re flat on the ground and every part of you is squished on the floor.” It was several months before he could move normally as before, but his bone mass eventually returned. Chamitoff said he knew from age 6 he wanted to be an astronaut and one particular step in the realization of that dream stood out for him. On his first space walk, as he hung by a hand rail from the very bottom hatch of the space station, the Earth 200 miles beneath him, he paused for a moment at the thought of trusting his life to the tether that held him to the space station, the Earth and his family. “You have to convince yourself that it’s OK to let go,” he said. “Because you have work to do.”
Earlier today, students Shreya Indukuri and Daniela Lapidous, both grade 12, spoke at a special keynote lunch at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting in New York City. They appeared with Mike Haas, founder of the Alliance for Climate Education, which organizes assemblies at high schools to promote climate science and bring awareness to the current climate crisis.
The students talked about how seeing an ACE assembly in their freshman year inspired them to take action and start thinking of ways to save energy at Harker. “We thought about how we could save energy at our school and noticed areas of error, such as air conditioning running in the gym every weekend,” Indukuri said. The students then talked about how they applied for an ACE grant to install smart meters, among other measures, on the Saratoga campus that would track energy uses and help identify areas where it could improve. Their solutions combined to save the school approximately $20,000 annually. Furthermore, the students said, they started a program to help get smart meters installed at other schools, even traveling to the White House to meet with Steven Chu, United States energy secretary, to discuss expanding the program nationwide.
Shreya Indukuri and Daniela Lapidous, both grade 12, will appear at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York City on Tuesday, and will be speaking at a keynote lunch with Mike Haas, founder of the Alliance for Climate Education. A live webcast of the event will start at noon Eastern time (9 a.m. Pacific) on Tuesday.
The students will also be interviewed by “Time” magazine’s Bryan Walsh, and have been attending other related events in the city for climate science week. They are posting updates through Smart Powered’s Twitter page with the hashtag #CGI2011.
MercuryNews.com recently published a story about Harker’s 41-6 victory over Emery on Sept 9, highlighting quarterback Spenser Quash’s four touchdown tosses, three of them to wide receiver Daanish Jamal, grade 12, and one to senior Avinash Patel. The story also notes that Quash, grade 11, was five for seven passing with 48 total yards. Zach Ellenberg, grade 12, subbed for Quash in the second half and threw a three-yard touchdown to Patel to put the game away. The win puts the Eagles at 2-0 on the season. In their first game of the season against San Jose High, Quash had two touchdown passes in the Eagles’ 34-13 victory.
Parents new to The Harker School were invited to the Silver Creek Country Club on Aug. 16 to meet and socialize with each other as well as with school administrators, not to mention enjoy an assortment of snacks and drinks. A fitting welcome for this year’s many new families!