Over the weekend, 15 Harker students traveled to the University of Kentucky to compete in the 40th Tournament of Champions. The Tournament of Champions (TOC) is an elite national tournament that requires students to earn qualifying legs at national circuit invitational tournaments during the school year. With each preliminary round akin to an elimination round at a regular-season invitational, Harker students competed in Public Forum, Lincoln-Douglas and Congressional Debate.
After seven preliminary rounds, four Harker Public Forum teams made it to the sweet 16 (octofinal) elimination round bracket. This is the first time in the Public Forum division that a school has made up 25 percent of the elimination round pool. Senior Ziad Jawadi and sophomore Reyhan Kader as well as sophomores Aneesh Chona and Anuj Sharma were eliminated in the round of 16. Juniors Rohan Bopardikar and Akshay Jagadeesh were the fifth seed going into elimination rounds and won their octofinal, however juniors Frederic Enea and Aakash Jagadeesh were the fourth seed and also won their octofinal round. This meant that Harker eliminated itself from the tournament with Enea and Jagadeesh advancing over their teammates to the semifinal round.
In the semifinal debate, Enea and Jagadeesh debated Ridge MP (New Jersey), a team that had been in finals of both the TOC and Grand Nationals in 2010. On a 2-1 decision, Enea and Jagadeesh advanced to the final round of competition. The final round, against a team from Lake Highland (Florida), ended in a 5-0 decision in favor of Harker.
This is the second time that Harker has won the Public Forum Tournament of Champions, with Kaavya Gowda ’09 and Kelsey Hilbrich ’10 winning in 2009. Harker is the first school in the history of the Public Forum division of the Tournament of Champions to win multiple championships.
The Harker Forensics Team thanked the entire Harker community in an email message. “In the final round of competition, Fred took a moment before his speech to thank all of the teachers, staff, and students at Harker and while you may not have been in Kentucky with us this weekend, the spirit of Harker helped propel these students to this historical level of success. Thank you!” wrote Carol Green, forensics teacher.
Among Harker graduates, it’s not unusual to find students who enter college with a pretty clear idea of their future careers. What is a bit more unusual are the ones who plan to pursue a career in the performing arts. This year the Conservatory graduated seven seniors who are committed to such a path.
“Making this decision requires total focus, commitment and a ton of work and passion,” said Laura Lang-Ree, K-12 performing arts department chair. Students cannot just let their high school resumes speak for them; most colleges require live auditions from those applying to elite, professional programs. Conservatory teachers add their two cents to counselor and teacher recommendations and often play an active role in helping the students gather materials, create first-round demo videos, and prepare for live auditions. Arts schools look for raw talent combined with potential for growth, driving ambition, good grades and the ability to collaborate creatively and personally. Harker wishes the best to the following students as they dare to pursue their chosen paths.
After criss-crossing the country for nine live auditions in only a couple of weeks, Michelle Holt has chosen to study vocal performance at The Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Daniel Cho, recently seen showing his talents as Leading Player in “Pippin,” will attend Swarthmore College, where he will be majoring in performing arts education and possibly minoring in music or dance.
Adi Parige, who created such wonderful videos for this year’s fashion show, will pursue his dream of being a film director at the Rochester School of Film in New York.
Nirjhar Mundkur is combining his two passions, planning to take advantage of a crossover program between Cal Tech and Occidental in engineering and vocal performance.
Daisy Mohrman was one of 30 accepted out of 300 auditionees for a dance program at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.
Several thousand students applied to the B.A. program in theater performance at Wagner College in New York. Of those, 300 were invited to audition, and John Ammatuna was one of only 25 accepted.
Clara Blickenstaff will be double majoring in theater and business at the University of Redlands, where she received a theater scholarship.
Another highly competitive program is the Clive Davis School of Recorded Music at the Tisch School at New York University. Their website explains that the school “provides professional business and artistic training toward a B.F.A. degree for aspiring creative entrepreneurs in the music industry.” Christina Li was required to create a press package showcasing her performance, writing and business skills and was one of 30 to be accepted out of 300 applicants.
Harker parents Samir and Sundari Mitra (Shivani, grade 10) have established The Mitra Family Endowment for the Humanities which will match gifts for the Annual Giving Campaign up to a total of $100,000.
“The subject matters taught under humanities, such as history, languages, communications and philosophy, are critical skills and knowledge that develop well-rounded Harker students,” said Samir Mitra. “Humanities is the bedrock of a superior education and will enable our students to stand out as recognized contributors in their future professions.”
Those interested in helping the Mitras’ effort can contribute online at www.harker.org/onlinegiving, send a check to Harker Advancement Office, 3800 Blackford Ave., San Jose, CA 95117, or drop off a check at any campus front office.
“The Mitra family’s endowment offer, and every matching give from others, will benefit our students every year, for years and years to come,” said Melinda Gonzales, director of development.
Emily Chow ’08, a student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, has been awarded an Eric Lund Global Reporting and Research grant to study the effects of connectivity in the Virtual Village in Arabianranta, a section of Helsinki, Finland. The award is given to projects conducted on underreported areas. The goal of the grant is to enable a Medill student to conduct a study of his or her choice and attempt to publish the resultant report.
The Virtual Village is a community that values hyperconnectivity through technology. This means that the citizens have constant access to the Internet and are using applications, like live check in applications that report a user’s location, to increase their connection to one another. Chow went to study the community and see what the social effects of this connectivity were.
Along the way, Chow and her research partner traveled to the Aalto University Design Factory and collaborated with students from the Laurea University of Applied Sciences as they worked with senior citizens; the goal was to improve their standards of living from their own homes by using e-welfare packages which provided entertainment and health services virtually. Chow says, “Innovation in technology and product engineering is simply a way of life in Helsinki.”
Aneesh Chopra, U.S. chief technology officer, has written an extensive blog about his visit with Daniela Lapidous and Shreya Indukuri, both grade 11. Read the blog here. Read our story on their visit, too!
Innovation took top billing at Nichols Hall on Sat., April 23, as the doors opened to the sixth annual Harker Research Symposium featuring the yearlong scientific endeavors of 79 middle and upper school students. Themed “A Call to Innovation,” the day merged students and their families with leading technology companies and executives, in the sort of synergy that created Silicon Valley. Anita Chetty, science department chair and symposium director, estimated there were about 500 visitors, up 50 percent over last year.
Chetty recalled how relatively slow and limited the communication of information was in the “dark ages” of card catalogs – when a laptop was not yet even a dream. Today, Chetty noted, “When our students begin their research, they stand on a mountain of readily accessible information, not only mining it but also building upon it.”
Collaboration between students, universities and businesses was evident in breakout sessions on the summer internship work of upper school students such as Michelle Deng, grade 11, who worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on a faster method to calculate the metallicities of stars, as an indicator of origin. “I’ve always been partial to science,” said Deng. “Some of it is the culture at Harker. It is a pretty big leader in science.” Topics at the sessions ranged from the use of algorithms to predict protein structure, to an anaerobic method of hydrogen generation.
Harker welcomed back Jessie Li ’07, Nikhil Deshmukh ’04 and Jennifer Ong ’07, who demonstrated how research impacts the world. Li spoke about her work at MIT to develop a video annotation tool that has applications in face detection and robotic navigation. Deshmukh presented his work at Princeton University in retinal image processing and ultimately a better understanding of the brain. Ong encouraged students to publish their research in the international, student-led forum, “The Triple Helix.”
The relationship of innovative research to application was epitomized by keynote speakers Scott McNealy, co-founder and former CEO and chairman of the board of Sun Microsystems, and Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Facebook. Both men spoke of the importance of creative thinking and risk-taking in developing an idea into a company. Sponsored by WiSTEM, Kari Lee, senior engineering manager at Facebook, talked about how to position oneself to take advantage of opportunities.
Corporate exhibitors at this event were Barnes & Noble (Nook), eBay, Ericcson, Google/YouTube, InSync software, Inc., Kno, Inc., Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center, Menteon Learning, Meru Networks, Motorola Mobility, nVIDIA and Symmetricom. Watch for the a complete roundup of symposium events and speakers in the Summer Harker Quarterly mailing in June 2011.
The Harker robotics team competed at San Jose State University in April, the second competition of the robotics season and their last chance to qualify for the national competition. This drive team competed at UC Davis in early March and finished the preliminary rounds in the top 10 teams, but a malfunction in one of their alliance member’s robots meant that Harker and its partner robots were literally blocked from scoring.
At the San Jose event, the team went in with high hopes and a “113.5 pound, lean, mean, extremely tough machine,” said Peter Gao, grade 12, executive president of the team, which is run as an enterprise. Although the team did not advance to the national level, the experience of building and running the robot was the real value in the effort.
The robot was constructed entirely by students, with guidance from Eric Nelson, physics and astronomy teacher. This year, they built a simple and reliable robot to make it easily repairable and maintainable between matches. This simpler design, pioneered by team members Pranav Bheda, grade 10 and Jason Yu, grade 11, brought durability to the robot, as well as decreased construction time. Instead of having to finish building the robot very near to the competition date, the robotics team finished the robot with two weeks to spare, giving them a chance to develop a well-practiced drive team, well-prepared for competition.
After the San Jose event, Gao analyzed what went wrong. “On one hand, our driver was kind of rusty because the last competition was a few weeks before, and we didn’t give him sufficient practice time,” he said. “Also, there were strange programming/electronics errors that simply shut down our robot at the beginning of the round, and we’re still not sure what’s causing them.”
Still, the team had a fair to middling shot at glory. “I think we did a lot better than previous years, though not as well as I would have liked,” said Gao. “We managed to build a functioning and capable robot a week early, and got enough practice and testing time to iron out a lot of kinks. The gains from this year are not technical, but organizational and strategic: a simpler robot whose construction is heavily planned with periodic deadlines will be completed earlier and tested more thoroughly, leading to an overall more effective robot than a more complex one that is finished right on time.”
There is always next year and Gao has a few words of advice for next year’s team: remember that simplicity and reliability are most important with a robot. Without them, the robot is ineffective. Also, a human is many times more reliable than a machine.
Radio host Sam Van Zandt of KBAY came to Harker prior to the Synopsys Championship Fair to talk to Harker students about their projects. Listen to the interviews here!
Harker once again won a host of awards at this year’s Synopsys Championship Fair, held March 6-7. Two upper school students, Revanth Kosaraju, grade 11 (“A Novel Perfusion-Based Protocol for Decellularization of Adipose Tissue on a Bioreactor”) and Vikas Bhetanabhotla , grade 9 (“A Theoretical Study of Factors Affecting Molecular Specificity in Hyperpolarized MRI Scans”) both won grand prizes and eligibility for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Bhetanabhotla, a member of the research club, was mentored by Kosaraju.
Harker had many more winners in several different categories at the fair at the high school level. In physics, Prag Batra, grade 11, won a $75 special award and certificate from Varian Medical Systems and a $400 team award from the Genencor Biotechnology Awards along with partner Govinda Dasu, grade 11, who also won the Varian Medical Systems special award. In addition to his grand prize, Bhetanabhotla also won a First Award for individual project in the physics category and certificate of achievement from the NASA-Ames Research Center, which included a VIP visit to the facilities. Varun Mohan, grade 9, earned a $100 prize and a certificate from Trimble Navigation, while Avinash Nayak, grade 9, took home a PW460t digital camera from Hewlett-Packard and a second place award with a $75 cash prize and certificate from the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering. Christopher Sund and Ravi Tadinada, both grade 10, each won First Awards.
Paulomi Bhattacharya, grade 10, was Harker’s biggest winner in Environmental Sciences, winning a First Award for individual project, a Certificate of Achievement from the NASA-Ames Research Center with a VIP visit, a certificate and medallion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a $50 gift certificate and Certificate of Achievement from the United States Navy and Marine Corps. Zareen Choudhury, grade 9, received an Honorable Mention for her individual project. Payal Modi, grade 10, received the third place award high school award and a $25 prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Daniel Ryan Pak, grade 9, received a certificate of achievement in the Stockholm Junior Water Prize contest, as well as a chance to move on to the competition in Stockholm, Sweden.
In chemistry, Shreya Nathan, grade 12, won a First Award for individual project, a third place $25 prize and certificate from the Society of Vacuum Coaters, a third place award and $100 prize from the Santa Clara Valley local section of the American Chemical Society and a second place award of $75 from the Santa Clara Valley chapter of A Society for Materials (ASM). Suchita Nety, grade 10, earned a Second Award for individual project, a $50 prize from the San Jose State University from the Student Affiliates of the American Chemical Society and a first place $100 award and certificate from the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering. Pooja Shah, grade 10, received an Honorable Mention Award and certificate from the ASM Santa Clara Valley chapter.
Winners in the medicine/health/gerontology category included Lucy Cheng and Ramya Rangan, both grade 11, who received an honorable mention for team project, Varun Gudapati, grade 10, who earned an honorable mention for individual project, and Anika Radiya-Dixit, grade 10, winner of a Second Award for individual project.
Frederic Enea, grade 11, took home a Second Award for individual project in the engineering category, along with a certificate of achievement from the United States Army. Other engineering winners were Divyahans Gupta, grade 9, who received a certificate of achievement from Mu Alpha Theta; Vikram Sundar, grade 9, earning a Second Award for individual project as well as a $100 first prize award from Morgan Lewis; and Kiran Vodrahalli, grade 12, who won a First Award for individual project, a $100 first place high school award from the Northern California chapter of the American Vacuum Society, a $50 check and certificate from the Wireless Communications Alliance, a prize package from the United States Air Force (which included a certificate, charging stand, computer backpack and more) and the IEEE Award for Electro-Technology from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
Harker had two winners in the biochemistry/microbiology category. Anika Gupta, grade 9, won a Second Award for individual project, while, in addition to his grand prize, Kosaraju earned a First Award for individual project and was a finalist for the Synopsys Outreach Foundation’s n+1 Prize.
In botany, Claudia Tischer, grade 9, received a Second Award for individual project, and in computers/mathematics, Rahul Sridhar, grade 9, won a First Award for individual project, a $75 award and certificate from Varian Medical Systems and a $100 first prize from Morgan Lewis. Abhinav Khanna, grade 11, received a First Award for individual project in the behavioral/social category.
At the middle school level, Sneha Behtanabhotla, grade 6, won a First Award for individual project in the physics category, as well as a certificate of achievement from the Ricoh Corporation and a grades 6-8 certificate of achievement and Office of Naval Research medallion from the United States Navy and Marine Corps. Also in physics, Rishabh Jain and Neil Movva, both grade 8, were given a Second Award for team project, a certificate of achievement from the NASA-Ames Research Center and a VIP visit, and grades 6-8 second place award, with a $75 prize from the Santa Clara Valley chapter of A Society for Materials.
Nikash Shankar, grade 8, came up big in the medicine/health/gerontology category, taking home a First Award for individual project, an Isabelle Stone Award for Best Biological Science Projects, and a Santa Clara Valley Science and Engineering Fair Association Board of Directors Award (Middle School), which included a trip to the state science fair and a $100 cash prize. Classmate Sriram Somasundaram was also a winner in this category, earning a First Award for individual project.
In environmental sciences, eighth grader Vineet Kosaraju received an honorable mention for individual project, a grade 6-9 second place award with a $50 cash prize from the Society of Vacuum Coaters and a first place award from the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering, which included a $100 cash prize and a framed certificate.
Andrew Jin and Stanley Xie, both grade 8, took home the First Award for team project in the biochemistry/microbiology category. Classmate Pranav Reddy, meanwhile, won a First Award for individual project, as did Steven Wang, another grade 8 student, who also earned a first place award for grades 6-9, which included a $75 cash prize and a certificate from the Society of Vacuum Coaters.
Samyukta Yagat, grade 8, won a First Award for individual project in botany, where Archana Podury, also grade 8, received an Honorable Mention for individual project.
Sixth grader Amrita Singh earned a Second Award for individual project in the zoology category and also won a second place award from the Northern California branch of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science, which included a certificate and a $125 cash prize.
Special credit goes to upper school science teachers Richard Barber and Chris Spenner and middle school science teachers Lorna Claerbout, Ilona Davies, Scott Kley Contini, Benjamin Morgensen, Daniel Sommer and Raji Swaminathan, who were all instrumental in Harker’s success this year.
In early April Pat Walsh, lower school math teacher, had a pair of engineers from IBM and the Harker community visit his classes. Eric Butler ’81 and Dianne Reese, mother of Greg and Phil Perkins, ’05 and ’07 respectively, came to give students a view of what engineering is all about and how math plays a big part in engineering. Here is fifth grader Ben Hyver’s special report to Harker News Online on the visit.
On Fri., April 8, two former Harker students who now work at IBM as engineers visited Pat Walsh’s math classes. Presenting the interesting topic of Mars rovers, Mr. Butler and Ms. Reese used an NXT-bot to model the real machine that would be sent up to different planets. Our experiment in the classroom consisted of a challenging obstacle course in which we would have to program the rover to steer around. To do this, we would measure the distance from here to there, find the circumference of the wheel, then divide the two. This would give us the number of rotations we needed to complete the movement. After, it would turn and continue on with the program. Watching with amazement, Mr. Walsh’s students were enlightened and inspired by these engineers as they practically demonstrated math to work in space technology. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to experience Mr. Butler and Ms. Reese’s Mars Rover model as this provided a beneficial forty-two minutes of learning and fun.
With spirit week in full swing and the weather clearing up nicely, Wednesday’s long lunch was enjoyed on Davis Field while spectators viewed the annual powder puff football game. Two all-female teams, one made up of grades 9 and 12, the other made up of grades 10 and 11, faced off in a game of flag football, with the sophomores and juniors utilizing a combination of passing and rushing to secure a 12-0 victory.
Sports attire was worn all over the upper school in keeping with the day’s theme. On Monday, students, faculty and staff could be seen wearing pajamas and slippers and participating in a sleeping bag race for “PJ Day,” and Tuesday featured all manner of brightly colored and obnoxiously patterned clothing for the theme of “Would You Be My Friend if I Wore This Every Day?” which featured a lunchtime balloon stomp. Cowboy hats, boots, flannel shirts, oversized belt buckles and scarves were the style du jour for Thursday’s “Wild West Day,” with students taking to the water at the Singh Aquatic Center for the duct tape regatta. On Friday, students will dress in their class colors and participate in the much-anticipated spirit rally.