Harker Latinists and classicists wrapped up some tough exams and came out shining!
National Latin Exam
More than 154,000 students across America and in 19 foreign countries took this year’s National Latin Exam. As usual, Harker students did a terrific job. Of the 41 upper school students who took the exam, 35 won awards. Special congratulations to Andrew Semenza and Edgar Lin, both grade 10, who earned perfect scores!
Nine gold medals (with summa cum laude certificates): Lin; Semenza; Bobby Bloomquist, grade 9; Peter Connors, grade 10; Alexander Lam, grade 11; Mathew Mammen, grade 9; Nicole Selvaggio, grade 9; Allison Wang, grade 12; and Alexander Young, grade 9.
Fifteen silver medals (with maxima cum laude certificates): Divija Bhimaraju, grade 10; Josh Broweleit, grade 9; Timothy Chang, grade 9; Cameron Jones, grade 9; Sara Min, grade 9; Arthur Oung, grade 9; Ayush Pancholy, grade 9; Akshay Ravoor, grade 9; Ashwin Reddy, grade 9; Kaushik Shivakumar, grade 9; Elisabeth Siegel, grade 12; Alyson Wang, grade 9; Tiffany Wong, grade 9; Peter Wu, grade 11; and Heidi Zhang, grade 9.
Eight magna cum laude certificates: Justin Au, grade 10; Isabelle Gross, grade 12; James He, grade 11; Era Iyer, grade 11; Sarisha Kurup, grade 11; Michael Kwan, grade 10; Winnie Li, grade 11; and Arnav Tandon, grade 11.
Three cum laude certificates: Allison Cartee, grade 9; Clarissa Wang, grade 9; and Tiffany Zhao, grade 9.
National Roman Civilization Exam
Harker students also did well on this year’s National Roman Civilization Exam. More than 1,800 students nationwide took the exam. This year, five students from Harker took the exam and they all won awards!
A total of 675 students nationwide participated at the advanced level, 95 of whom earned gold medals, including two from Harker: Alexander Lam and Venkat Sankar, both grade 11.
A total of 900 students nationwide participated at the intermediate level, 123 of whom earned gold medals. Harker had two gold medalists, Lin and Semenza, as well as a silver medalist, Ravoor.
National Latin Vocabulary Exam
This year over 2,500 students nationwide took the National Latin Vocabulary Exam. Seven Harker students took this year’s exam and all won awards.
Latin 3: 570 students nationwide took the exam; 82 earned gold medals. Ravoor earned a gold medal, while Kaushik Shivakumar, grade 9, earned a silver medal.
Latin 4: 300 students nationwide took the exam. Semenza earned a silver medal.
Latin 5: 115 students nationwide took the exam; 19 earned gold medals. Four Harker students earned awards: Lam earned a silver medal, Sankar earned a gold medal, Allison Wang, earned a gold medal and Wu earned a bronze medal
National Classical Etymology Exam
Over 5,500 students nationwide participated in the National Classical Etymology Exam. Eleven Harker students participated and eight earned awards.
Advanced Level: 1,848 students nationwide participated; 262 gold medals awarded. Li and Nikhil Manglik, grade 11, earned silver medals.
Intermediate Level: 2,317 students nationwide participated; 388 gold medals awarded. Lin, Pancholy, Semenza and Shivakumar all earned gold medals; Nikhil Dharmaraj, grade 9 and Ravoor earned silver medals.
Medusa Mythology Exam
Finally, results are in for the Medusa Mythology Exam. Allison Wang and Young each earned a corona laurea (laurel crown/wreath; equivalent to a fourth place award). Rahul Bhethanabotla, grade 10, Manglik, Min and Ravoor each earned a corona olivae (olive crown/wreath; equivalent to a fifth place award).
Update – Mar. 27, 2015
Today, Andrew was the subject of a news story in ChinaDaily, and earlier this week was featured in a TV news segment on the Chinese language network Sinovision.
Mar. 10, 2015
Harker senior Andrew Jin won a first-place medal of distinction in the Global Good category in this year’s Intel Science Talent Search. He is the first Harker student since 2006 to be named a winner in the competition and is one of three first-place winners in this year’s Intel STS, each of them claiming a prize of $150,000.
Jin, along with seniors Steven Wang and Rohith Kuditipudi, were named finalists in this year’s Intel STS in January, making Harker the only school nationwide with more than two finalists. Harker had 15 Intel semifinalists, the most of any school in the country.
Last week, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced that 51 Harker seniors qualified as semifinalists in the 2016 National Merit Scholarship Program. These students scored in the top 1 percent nationwide on the Preliminary SAT, which was taken last year by about 1.5 million grade 11 students. Overall, 62 percent of Harker’s Class of 2016 scored in the top 3 percent nationally.
The semifinalists are as follows, in alphabetical order by last name:
Vivek Bharadwaj, Jonathan Dai, Rohan Daran, Rohan Desikan, Victoria Ding, Ayushi Gautam, Grace Guan, Prithvi Gudapati, Cynthia Hao, Shannon Hong, Angela Huang, Kaylan Huang, Stephanie Huang, Joshua Hung, Raghav Jain, Maya Jeyendran, Abhinav Ketineni, Kristen Ko, Vineet Kosaraju, Janet Lee, Jason Lee, Adele Li, Lisa Liu, Evan Lohn, Anthony Luo, Sophia Luo, Jonathan Ma, Sadhika Malladi, Natasha Mayor, Shivali Minocha, Anika Mohindra, Aishwarya Murari, Emily Pan, Kristen Park, Sohil Patel, Divya Periyakoil, Karen Qi, Sanil Rajput, Nikita Ramoji, Elisabeth Siegel, Natalie Simonian, Gurutam Thockchom, Karen Tu, Anish Velagapudi, Allison Wang, Esther Wang, Alice Wu, Daphne Yang, Richard Yi, Michael Zhao and Jessica Zhu.
This past Sunday, Harker senior and avid dancer Sharanya Balaji performed for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who appeared at the SAP Center in San Jose. Balaji, who was previously featured in the San Jose Mercury News for organizing a benefit dance show for arts programs at schools, performed in one of three dance acts at the event. “The act that I was a part of was a medley of Indian classical dance forms,” Balaji said. “We were the representatives for Bharatnatyam.”
Prime Minister Modi’s appearance at the SAP Center was the last stop on a two-day tour of Silicon Valley that included meetings with the leaders of valley companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple. Balaji learned of the opportunity from her dance teacher. “We were chosen as the sole representatives for our dance style,” she said. Although the Mercury News piece was not a factor in her group being chosen, she said, “it did definitely get me more noticed during rehearsals.” Balaji is writing an article for Harker Aquila, a student publication and we will provide the link as soon as that story is ready!
Students were all over the place, checking lights, testing sound, practicing bows and curtsies, making last-second adjustments to their pitch and phrasing. It was an April afternoon and the cast and crew of the upper school 2015 spring musical “Into the Woods” were moving restlessly about Blackford Theater. In just over an hour, they would finally play to an audience after months of preparation. Yet this was not so much the end of their effort as the beginning of another, as in a couple months they would be in the thick of the world’s largest arts festival. (continued)
Karina Momary, middle school debate coach, had a nice surprise in her snail mail box one morning in mid-September: a letter from the White House! She received a missive from President Barack Obama acknowledging the middle school debate team’s success this past year. In addition to the letter, the envelope also contained photos of the First Family. This acknowledgement came after the middle school debate team was named an Overall School of Excellence by the National Speech & Debate Association, an award given to just three schools nationwide. This is the fourth time in a row the MS team has received this award! Read more about both upper and middle school debate triumphs this summer at Harker News! https://staging.news.harker.org/?p=26731
Congrats to Vineet Kosaraju, grade 12, who was named a 2015 Davidson Fellow and will receive a $10,000 college scholarship! Kosaraju was one of only 20 students nationwide selected this year for the annual fellowship. The last Harker student chosen as a Davidson Fellow was Yi Sun ’06, in 2006.
On its website, the Davidson Institute summarized Kosaraju’s project, titled “3D RNA Engineering in a Massive Open Laboratory”: “Vineet created an interface that allows for the design of accurate 3D RNA molecules, and also discovered some design rules that create stable RNA designs. This allows for the more efficient creation and stabilization of new RNA molecules, bringing us closer to the eventual dream of personalized, commonly used RNA therapeutics.” Read more about his work here: http://www.davidsonfellowsscholarship.org/vineet-kosaraju/
The Davidson Fellows Scholarship was named one of the seven most-prestigious undergrad scholarships by U.S. News & World Report, along with Intel, Siemens and National Merit scholarships. http://www.usnews.com/…/7-prestigious-undergrad-scholarships
Maverick McNealy ’13 was noted in the San Jose Mercury News on July 16 for holding down third place at the inaugural Barbasol Championship PGA golf tournament in Opelika, Ala. See story at http://bayareane.ws/1Okicw1. McNealy, who won the Haskins Award as the top college linksman, is also the 2015 Division I recipient of the Jack Nicklaus National Player of the Year Award, presented by Barbasol on June 5.
An article posted at www.Nicklaus.com notes McNealy’s accomplishments this year:
“A sophomore from Portola Valley, Calif., McNealy led NCAA Division I with six collegiate victories this year. He posted a dominant 10-stroke win at the Pac-12 Conference Championships, where his 18-under aggregate score of 262 established a new league tournament scoring record. The Pac-12 Conference Player owns a 69.05 season scoring average, the second best in recorded NCAA history. McNealy claimed medalist honors at the NCAA Chapel Hill Regional, Southwestern Intercollegiate, Olympia Fields/Fighting Illini Invitational, The Prestige at PGA West and The Goodwin. McNealy was selected to compete this summer on the United States Palmer Cup team.”
Nitya Mani, grade 12, earned first place in the Karl Menger Memorial Awards for the second year in a row! The award was presented by the American Math Society at the 2015 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) in mid-May. Mani received the first-place award of $2,000 for her project, titled “Characterizing the Constructible N-Division Points of the Rational C-Hypocycloids through Straightedge and Compass Constructions.”
“In her project Nitya investigated the important question of constructibility of division points on plane curves and showed that, for any integer N, the N division points of any rational c-hypocycloid are constructible with an unmarked straightedge and compass, given a pre-drawn hypocycloid. She also characterized the constructibility of N division points of a tricuspoid in the absence of a pre-drawn hypocycloid. Nitya’s original and very impressive work uses many advanced results and techniques from several areas of mathematics, including Galois theory, abstract algebra and algebraic number theory,” said Menger awards chair Mihai Stoiciu. See more at: http://www.ams.org/news?news_id=2685 (Photo is also from that site.)
Andy Fang ’10, co-founder of the Palo Alto based on-demand food delivery startup DoorDash, was included on Forbes magazine’s prestigious “30 Under 30” list of young movers and shakers in the consumer tech category.
DoorDash (www.doordash.com) hires its own drivers to offer home delivery from restaurants unable to provide such service. In just two years, 22-year-old Fang, a Stanford graduate with a degree in computer science, and business partner Stanley Tang, have raised an impressive $19.7 million in startup funding. DoorDash now serves five major metropolitan areas.
A leading source for reliable business news and financial information, Forbes is well known for its annual lists and rankings. The 30 Under 30 list (http://www.forbes.com/30under30/#/) prides itself on predicting the brightest and most ambitious young adults to watch in the coming year.
The 2015 categories include venture capital, enterprise technology, consumer technology, sports, social entrepreneurs, science, retail, music, media, marketing, manufacturing, law, entertainment, health care, games, food, finance, energy, education and art. More than 600 millennials were featured on the lists, with Silicon Valley at the forefront of startup culture.
Fang, a former Harker Quarterly cover boy (having been featured in a graduation photo in the summer 2010 edition), said he is honored to have been selected. “I’m grateful for my friends and family for helping me get to this point and glad to have the support of the Harker community!”
If any readers know of other Harker alumni to have made the Forbes lists that we may have overlooked, please bring them to our attention by writing News@harker.org.