Earlier today, Krish Kapadia ’19 was named among the last round of 2019 National Merit scholarship winners, with a college-sponsored scholarship from Boston University. This win brings the total number of winners from Harker to 11. Congratulations to all who were recognized!
July 5, 2019:
Last month, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced the first round of 2019 college-sponsored National Merit scholarships. Recent graduates Nishka Ayyar, Joshua Broweleit and Amelia Huchley were named as winners in this round, and each will receive between $500 and $2,000 for as many as four years at the undergraduate level from the universities they plan to attend. Another round of college-sponsored scholarships will be announced on July 15.
May 9, 2019:
Seniors Ayush Alag, Enya Lu, Rithvik Panchapakesan, Akshay Ravoor, Katherine Tian, Alex Yu and Katherine Zhang were among the second round of winners announced in the 2019 National Merit Scholarship Program yesterday. Each student won a $2,500 scholarship from the National Merit Scholarship Program. The next two rounds of winners will be announced in June and July. Congratulations!
Sept. 25, 2018:
In mid-September, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation identified 68 Harker seniors as Commended Students in the 2019 National Merit Scholarship Competition. This designation places them among the 50,000 highest-scoring students (about 3 percent) from the 1.6 million who took the 2017 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Qualifying Test. Combined with the 43 seniors recently named semifinalists, this news brings the total number of seniors recognized by National Merit to 111, or 57 percent of the Class of 2019.
Harker’s 2019 National Merit Commended Students are:
Ryan Adolf, Hasan Awais, Sumantra Banerjee, Raymond Banke, Sayon Biswas, Donna Boucher, Alycia Cary, Nicole Chen, Ishani Cheshire, Shreya Dasari, Rithika Devarakonda, Nikhil Dharmaraj, Elizaveta Egorova, Aryana Far, Sukrit Ganesh, Carl Gross, Karan Gupta, Ria Gupta, Riya Gupta, Zachary Hoffman, Constance Horng, Jason Huang, Shafieen Ibrahim, Cameron Jones, Abhinav Joshi, Damini Kaushik, Arjun Kilaru, Prameela Kottapalli, Hannah Lak, Taylor Lam, Christopher Leafstrand, Angela Li, Katrina Liou, Erin Liu, Katrina Liu, Adrian Ma, Mathew Mammen, Ihita Mandal, David Melisso, Sara Min, Sonal Muthal, Suraj Pakala, Brian Park, Nishant Ravi, Alexander Rule, Viveka Saraiya, Karli Sharp, Kelly Shen, Andrea Simonian, Sian Smith, Alexander Teplov, Alyson Wang, Anna Wang, Catherine Wang, Cindy Wang, Clarissa Wang, Eric Wang, Gene Wang, Johnny Wang, Michael Wang, Richard Wang, Shania Wang, Henry Wong, Tiffany Wong, Zachary Wong, Kelsey Wu, Laura Wu and Tiffany Zhao.
Team Harker crushed it at the National Speech & Debate Tournament, where Haris Hosseini ’19, and Avi Gulati, a rising senior, nailed first and second places in original oratory. This event, billed as the largest academic competition in the world, is the culminating event of the speech and debate season. And there’s more good news: Alycia Cary ’19 made it to the semifinals for oratory; Andrew Sun, a rising junior, was 15th in congressional debate; and Jason Huang ‘19 made it to the semifinals of congressional debate.
“When these results are added to earlier results at the National Debate Coaches Association National Championship (sophomore Akshay Manglik’s top-three-in-the-nation finish in Lincoln-Douglas debate and Anusha Kuppahally, grade 12 and Maddie Huynh, grade 11, finishing fifth in policy debate), we have had quite the season!” noted Jennifer Achten, speech and debate chair.
Check out the feature article on this year’s speech and debate team in the spring/summer 2019 issue of Harker Magazine or right here, reprinted in Harker News!
Fourteen Harker students earned perfect scores on AP tests taken in the spring.
In economics, Ashwin Rammohan, grade 12, got perfect scores – no wrong answers – on both the macro- and microeconomics AP tests, one of only four students in the world to earn perfect scores on more than one AP exam! Enya Lu, grade 12, got a perfect score on the AP Macroeconomics test, making her one of only 31 worldwide to do so. Rithvik Panchapakesan, grade 12, was one of only 26 students worldwide who aced the AP Microeconomics test.
In computer science, there were 193 perfect scores worldwide and nearly 6 percent of them were from 11 Harker students. Arya Maheshwari, Michelle Si, Daniel Wang, Russell Yang and Bowen Yin, all grade 10; and David Feng, Finn Frankis, Alyssa Huang, Rashmi Iyer, Chaitanya Ravuri and Bryan Wang, all grade 11, all had perfect scores.
Only six schools worldwide had four or more students with perfect scores.
Harker students have turned in numerous perfect scores over the years. Search “perfect score” to find related articles in Harker News.
Harker upper school students performed well in a pair of recent math contests. Yesterday, junior Jeffrey Kwan received an honorable mention from the Mathematical Association of America for being one of the top scorers in the 2019 USA Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO), among 300,000 participants.
In April, Harker placed ninth in National Assessment & Testing’s Four-By-Four competition due to the high scores posted by a team of sophomores comprising Arya Maheshwari, Luisa Pan, Sidra Xu and Nicholas Yi. The contest has teams of four solve a series of problems over 10 rounds, each lasting three minutes.
Shahzeb Lakhani and Alivia Li, both grade 9, are Harker’s latest winners of the H&R Block Budget Challenge! The students each earned $20,000 by coming in second out of thousands of entries worldwide.
Students who participated in the challenge were given a virtual job, complete with a 401(k), credit card bills and student loans. They then had to successfully manage their paychecks for 10 weeks. Li and Lakhani were two of just 10 competitors nationwide to receive the $20,000 scholarship.
Harker has had winners in this contest for four years running. Last year, Luisa Pan, now grade 10, won. Roma Gandhi, grade 11, won in 2017, and Rithvik Panchapakesan, grade 12, won in 2016. Each semester, five awards are given out nationwide.
“I believe that the hardest part of managing my budget was definitely understanding all of the concepts,” said Lakhani. ”Since I planned out the entire challenge within the first month, I had to learn quickly what functions did what. I was able to understand these a lot better thanks to some help from last year’s winner, Luisa Pan.”
He did run into some speed bumps, and managing them made the project challenging. “I found that planning ahead and making adjustments when things went sideways was one of the most important keys to success,” Lakhani said. “Being organized and creating tools such as the machine learning application I applied to predict risk was equally important, because the tools allowed me to make more informed decisions.”
Lakhani gained a practical life lesson, too. “I learned that staying on top of things and checking in often aided in paying bills on time,” he said. “Even when you think all hope is lost and you have no chance of winning as I did, if you keep working hard, things might turn around for you.”
Li noted, “The hardest part of the challenge for me was mainly learning the basics of personal finance in general and how to plan and pay for living expenses. Once I got the hang of using the interface and knew what to check and where to do so, everything quickly became second nature.
“The most important thing I learned through this experience was definitely how to plan out future finances. Getting a good handle on keeping a spreadsheet and staying organized is undoubtedly the most valuable and practical skill I have acquired through the H&R Budget Challenge,” she finished.
Six Harker middle school girls were named finalists and one named a semifinalist in the 2019 ProjectCSGIRLS Competition for Middle School Girls, which encourages entrants to create technology projects that will improve people’s lives. Individual finalists were Deeya Viradia, grade 8, and Anika Pallapothu, grade 6, and team finalists were eighth graders Carol Wininger and Amiya Chokhawala and seventh graders Trisha Iyer and Anika Mantripragada. Saanvi Bhargava, grade 6, was named a semifinalist. This was the first year Harker students entered the competition.
Participants were tasked with creating a computer science or technology project that addressed a social problem in the categories of health, world safety, intelligent technology or inequality. Finalists are eligible to attend the ProjectCSGIRLS National Gala, which will be held June 8-9 in the Washington, D.C., metro area. National winners will be announced at this event, which also will include notable speakers and workshops.
At yesterday’s school meeting, Zachary Wong ’19 was presented with The Forgotten International’s 2019 Compassion Award for his work bringing water to impoverished regions of Nepal via the nonprofit organization Water In Nepal, which Wong founded and runs with other California high school students.
Founded in 2007, The Forgotten International works to alleviate extreme poverty around the world, especially for women and children, by supporting community organizations it believes will have the most impact.
Wong traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal, in December of last year to help construct a sedimentation tank for the village of Patlyachaap. The sedimentation tank filters out sludge that builds up in water sourced from a pond near the village and is expected to last up to 100 years.
After being presented with the award, Wong thanked his parents and teachers and reminded the students to “remain kind, remain compassionate, remain grounded.”
The business & entrepreneurship department launched two incubator courses this school year, and the young entrepreneurs have been going full tilt all year. Here is a quick look at the first year of these classes. Watch for a full length feature article on the classes in the winter issue of Harker Magazine in December 2019.
In summer 2017, Harker’s business and entrepreneurship department held an incubator class for high school entrepreneurs, one of the first in the nation. The class was an intensive, student-led and community-supported program in which student entrepreneurs received a seed grant, mentorship, academic curriculum and internal support from a student leadership team to help them develop and grow their startup companies. The class was so successful and well received it was converted into a full academic class for the 2018-19 school year. Read about the 2017 class here.
The two new academic incubator classes began in fall 2018: Honors Entrepreneurship: Startup Incubator 1 and Honors Entrepreneurship: Startup Incubator 2.
In Incubator 1, students created and commercialized their own product or service. “Teams are led through the Lean Startup processes of developing hypotheses about a business concept, testing those hypotheses, adapting and continually iterating,” said Michael Acheatel, business & entrepreneurship teacher. “Once students have validated their business concept hypothesis, they receive a seed grant to propel their business plan into reality, thereby learning business foundations in entrepreneurship, marketing, economics, finance and business operations firsthand. “
Incubator 2 is geared toward students who have already launched a company and are focused on growing their business. “Students are led through three-week long ‘sprints’ where students identify their individual goals and tasks at the beginning of the sprint and present a demo of their accomplishments at the end of the sprint,” said Acheatel.
Students in each of the courses receive coaching and mentorship from entrepreneurs, investors and business experts who visit the classes. Students also get out to visit with Bay Area startups and venture capitalists to experience entrepreneurship at the next level. “We had eight student companies complete the course this year and enrollment for next year is growing rapidly,” said Acheatel.
A key element in the classes was provided by Next47, a venture capital firm. The company supported the program as an essential part of education and donated $10,000 in venture funds. “We believe that entrepreneurial skills are life skills,” said Lak Ananth, CEO and managing partner of Next47. “Being passionate about an idea, taking the time to think through it, market it, and have the wherewithal to see it through – these are skills that are necessary to succeed in life. Exposing kids to this process is incredibly valuable. Even if these businesses don’t succeed, the process will inculcate in them the fire to keep getting better.”
Mentors are a critical element of the entire process and Phu Hoang has contributed his time to helping two of the ongoing ventures climb the ladder to success. He has been working with Mahi Kolla, grade 11, founder of The Minty Boutique, and Nishka Ayyar ’19 and Riya Gupta ’19, founders of of PromElle, to refine and channel their efforts as they expand their businesses.
“Mahi is an extraordinarily gifted young woman,” said Hoang. “She is hard-working, a very fast learner, and has tremendous passion for her company. It’s just so rare to see that at such a young age. What has been such a pleasure mentoring Mahi is that she can understand and soak in complex advice and suggestions and builds a plan to execute on them. I feel like my mentoring of Mahi is at the same level of strategic thinking and complexity as my mentoring of much older and more experienced founders of venture-backed companies.”
PromElle, Ayyar and Gupta’s venture, also has been around a couple of years. “PromElle is a more mature business than the Minty Boutique,” said Hoang, noting both women have now graduated. “They had done a lot of things right before I got involved. First of all, the idea of PromElle is brilliant and very needed. But they actually market-tested the concept by hosting a prom dress exchange at Harker when they were freshmen to test their idea. Most adult entrepreneurs don’t test their ideas that effectively. Once they got clear confirmation of the value that they can bring, they were able to get app development help at a very reasonable cost.”
Hoang, who holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and was an early engineer at Yahoo, noted he has been working in technology all his life. “I enjoy working with entrepreneurs to help them realize their vision, build their products and grow their businesses. My son joined Harker as a freshman in 2017, and I got to see how advanced and entrepreneurial the kids are, so I reached out to Michael at some point to offer to contribute.”
This year, Incubator 1 startups included Sero, started by Cameron Jones ’19, an intelligent bike assistant with anti-theft and fitness tracking capabilities; PeerCoco, by Sayon Biswas ’19 and Nemo Yang ‘19, which is a peer-to-peer college consulting network for international high school students; GetTime, started by Claire Luo, grade 10, a student-focused time-management app that allows users to input tasks, set timers and track progress in a gamified manner; and PolyForm, the brainchild of Nakul Bajaj, grade 11, who is developing a platform for voters to answer polls and discuss policy at the local, state, and national level in civilized manner.
At the beginning of the year, these students identified problems they and other students face in daily life or that they see in the world. “They begin to assess the problem from a business perspective by looking at how these problems are currently being solved (competitive analysis) and identifying who has these problems (market analysis),” said Acheatel. Students then conduct customer interviews to validate their assumptions, then begin the solution ideation process to conceptualize their proposed solution, noted Acheatel.
In February, students pulled their projects together and pitched to a panel of investors for funding to develop a prototype of their product, known as the minimum viable product (MVP). “All four [Incubator 1] companies successfully raised seed funding and have since developed their prototypes,” Acheatel noted. “Now that the entrepreneurs have had three months to develop their products, they will pitching to investors in late May for funding to fully launch their companies,” he said.
There were also four Incubator 2 companies. The Minty Boutique, a luxe stationery company that utilizes unique designs and functional products to cater to the #BOSS lifestyle; PromElle, the first peer-to-peer marketplace for teen fashion where teen girls can lend/rent or buy/sell formal, party and everyday wear; Nanoseed, developed by Jason Huang ’19 and Suraj Pakala ’19, a nonprofit organization in the field of microfinance that empowers rural Chinese farmers to form cooperatives and build sustainable businesses; and PillBot, being developed by Johnny Wang ’19 as an automated solution to medicine dispensary with a tamper-proof design and overdose protection.
Each Incubator 2 company pitched at sHarker Tank – BECon for $15K in prize money provided by venture firm Next47. Read all about that effort here.
PromElle took first place at sHarker Tank BEcon and presented at the Association for Corporate Growth Silicon Valley’s 2019 GROW awards. Officers are currently in communication with SharkTank about appearing on their show.
The Minty Boutique took second place at sHarker Tank BEcon and was written up in a blog post by Stukent. Kolla is excited about the year’s progress. “In August through September, we launched our first iteration of our academic planners which sold out within a week,” she said. “From there, we reached out Harker to become the new manufacturer of the Harker academic planners. We are currently working with the freshmen class dean and the Office of Communication to finalize this partnership.”
PillBot took third place at sHarker Tank BEcon and received funding and support from various nationwide competitions. Wang found the class valuable for his development needs. “The class provided a good framework for the students to build and grow their businesses,” he said. “The curriculum gives us enough flexibility so we can focus on individual business goals. The majority of instruction is not done by lecturing but one-on-one mentoring with both teachers within the B&E department and external mentors. By leveraging on the Harker alumni/parent network, we are able to learn much more than just listening to lectures.”
Nanoseed earned fourth place at sHarker Tank BEcon and has grown to more than 20 branches. It held a benefit concert that raised $9,000 to fund loans. “To me though, what was most memorable about the class was the variety of people we get to interact with,” said Huang, “from lawyers and mentors coming in to talk to us, helping us with legal or financial issues, to us being able to pitch directly to real investors who provided valuable feedback on how we could improve our organization.” Read this 2017 article on the company’s inception.
The students also pitched to Ananth and principals at Next47’s headquarters in Palo Alto and visited Tesla and Manticore Games.
The class continues in the fall with new and returning entrepreneurs. Watch for the comprehensive article in the winter issue of Harker Magazine, coming out in December!
Harker’s A Quiz Bowl team – juniors Rohan Cherukuri, Jeffrey Fung, Kyle Li and Arun Sundaresan – spent Memorial Day weekend in Atlanta, where they finished in the top 5 percent at the High School National Championship Tournament for National Academic Quiz Tournaments. Coached by Sundaresan’s father, Sankar Sundaresan, the team tied for 19th place overall out of 336 teams. After qualifying for the playoffs, the team notched three straight wins before losing a close contest to Detroit Catholic Central, historically a very strong performer at the national level.
In another notable achievement, sophomore Daniel Wang received the Sophomore Rising Star award for his performance at the event.
In mid-May, junior Allison Jia was named one of two winners of the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair! Jia’s project, which studied proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases, won her a $50,000 prize! It also was named Best in Category for cell and molecular biology and won a First Award, earning Jia an additional $5,000 and $1,000, respectively.
Senior Ruhi Sayana also did well at the fair, winning a $10,000 scholarship from the Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies Association for her project in the biomedical and health sciences category, in which she also won a $1,000 Third Award from Intel ISEF and a $500 Second Award from the Ashtavadhani Vidwan Ambati Subbaraya Chetty Foundation. In the computational biology and informatics category, junior Cynthia Chen received a Third Award of $1,000. All three students won trips to the Intel ISEF at the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science & Technology Championship in March.
Jia’s efforts were writtten up in several publications: