Update: Harker has a third student in the Broadcom MASTERS science competition! Cameron Jones, who started 9th grade at Harker this year, is a semi-finalist along with classmates Anjay Saklecha and Krish Kapadia.
Jones graduated from Corte Madera School last June and his project involves infusing fine carbon powder into rubber bands so they can be used to measure biometrics. Check out his story in The Almanac. Best of luck to all three boys in the finalist judging, tomorrow! Go Harker Researchers!
Anjay Saklecha and Krish Kapadia, both grade 9, were selected as semifinalists in the 2015 Broadcom MASTERS, a program of Society for Science & the Public. The pair were nominated after winning first place last spring in the medicine/health/gerontology category of the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science & Technology Championship for their project, “Determining the Efficacy of Different Methods to Assess the Level of Dehydration Using Human Saliva.”
“As a Broadcom MASTERS semifinalist, you have already proven your ability to succeed in these subjects, which will lead you to an exciting career in any field,” noted Allie Stifel, Broadcom MASTERS program manager.
The next step in the Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering Rising Stars) takes place on Sept. 2, when 30 finalists will be announced from among the 300 semifinalists. Finalists will attend the Broadcom MASTERS Finals Week competition from Oct. 1-7, 2015 here in Silicon Valley, where they will present their research and compete in hands-on challenges for top prizes, including funds to attend a STEM summer camp, iPads and the Samueli Prize of $25,000.
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
The American Scholastic Mathematics Association recently published the results of its annual mathematics contest, and Harker earned first place in the senior division (grades 9-12) and first place with special merit in the junior/intermediate division (grades 7-9). The contest is done by mail during the fall semester. Each participating school receives packages of question sets, which are opened on designated dates over a period of months. Students have 35 minutes to answer each question. Answers are scored once the last examination is administered. Schools from all around the world participated, including China, Czech Republic, Bahrain, Vietnam, Kenya, Kuwait, Indonesia, Austria and Poland.
Sixth grader Srinath Somasundaram came in third place in the inaugural Zeidman Awards for his engineering research project titled “A Novel Design and Evaluation of an Air Cushioning Mechanism for Helmets to Minimize Impact Acceleration on the Head.”
The awards were created to recognize students for their advanced knowledge and outstanding achievement in the fields of electrical engineering and computer science. Engineer-scientist-entrepreneur Bob Zeidman, president and founder of Zeidman Consulting, a contract research and development firm based in Cupertino, presented six Bay Area middle school students with the awards during the Santa Clara Valley Science & Engineering Fair Association’s Synopsys Science & Technology Championship at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.
The competition was stiff, with students from middle schools throughout the region presenting original solutions designed to address serious issues, including Alzheimer’s disease, autism, diabetes and visual impairment.Awards included cash prizes and signed copies of Zeidman’s latest book “Just Enough Electronics to Impress Your Friends and Colleagues,” based on his popular seminar “Electrical Engineering for Non-Electrical Engineers.” Hurrah to Srinath!
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.)
Nikash Shankar, grade 12, who qualified as a regional semifinalist in the Biotechnology Institute’s BioGENEius Challenge, presented his research in San Francisco last week.
“Out of a field of nearly 50 students, Nikash was selected to compete as a finalist at the challenge,” said Gabriella Arroyo, executive assistant at BayBio, Northern California’s life sciences association. “While he did not place, the competition was very strong this year and he should be proud to have participated in the challenge.”
Shankar’s project is titled “Insulin and Metformin: A Therapeutic Approach for the Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease after Type II Diabetes Mellitus Using a Novel In-Vitro Cell Model.”
Here is Shankar’s description of his project:
“In recent years, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has been considered to be in part a neuroendocrine disorder, even referred to by some as type III diabetes. AD is characterized by a paucity of insulin and insulin resistance, which results in accumulation of β-amyloid peptides to form plaques in the brain leading to neuronal degeneration. Epidemiological evidence suggests a link between type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and AD.
“The present study investigates the effect of insulin and metformin, an insulin sensitizer, on the production of β-amyloid by using a novel in-vitro neuronal cell model. The findings demonstrated that when neuronal cells, transfected to produce endogenous β-amyloid, were exposed to high glucose conditions [50 mM], they exhibited high cellular toxicity and increased β-amyloid generation. Metformin, at a dose of 10 mM, and insulin, at a dose of 1μM, were effective in lowering the production of β-amyloid. However, tyrophostin, a known inhibitor of the insulin-signaling pathway, did not modulate the effect of metformin on β-amyloid. Hence, the effect of metformin on β-amyloid is probably mediated through mechanisms other than insulin signaling pathway. These findings suggest a possible role of insulin sensitizers in reducing the risk of AD in T2DM.”
Shankar originally submitted a poster, which, after being viewed by a number of judges, was selected, allowing him to compete in the 2015 Amgen Bay Bio Area BioGENEius Challenge, the local qualifier to the next level.
Jonathan Ma, grade 11, was selected to attend the U.S. Physics Team Training Camp this year. He was one of only 20 students chosen nationwide. Ma will travel to the University of Maryland to attend the camp from May 17-28, where the team members will improve laboratory and problem-solving skills, hear lectures by prominent physicists and work with peers.
“The competition for a position on the U.S. Physics Team is intense and each student who participated in the 2015 selection process is deserving of recognition. They are the future of America’s success in physics related fields. AAPT is honored to recognize the exceptional scholars who qualified for the team and to support their further participation in the International Physics Olympiad,” said Dr. Beth A. Cunningham, Executive Officer of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
The training camp is a crash course in the first two years of university physics. Students learn at a very fast pace. They have an opportunity to hear about cutting edge research from some of the community’s leading physicists. At the end of the training camp, five team members will be chosen to represent the U.S. in Mumbai, India, at the 46th International Physics Olympiad, July 5-12.
This article appeared in the spring 2015 Harker Quarterly.
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the inaugural issue of the journalism program’s magazine Wingspan in January 2015. Wingspan will publish four times a year, with in-depth news, features and design done by students. Harker Quarterly is proud to reprint this article on the Silicon Valley gender gap, which further explores the topic of women in technology (see also the winter 2014 HQ, page 6, “Inspiring Girls Who Code”).
by Kacey Fang, grade 12 and Elisabeth Siegel, grade 11
Photos and original layout by Shay Lari-Hosain, grade 11
She sits down in the last open seat of the Neural Networks computer science class in Nichols Hall – middle table, last row. The two tables adjacent her and the three in front each have two to three of her male classmates clustered around them, immersed in code. The male teacher walks around, answering occasional questions.
These 11 boys had been junior Anika Mohindra’s companions in the advanced topics course she took in the first semester of her junior year. A post-AP class, Neural Networks introduces students to artificial neural network technology and its applications.
“I remember when I walked in on the first day, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m the only girl in this class,’ and that made me a little nervous,” Mohindra said. “I know gender disparity is a problem, so letting it affect me makes me feel a little deficient.”
Computer science (CS) department chair Dr. Eric Nelson taught the class the last time it was offered six years ago. With two degrees in physics, he has previously worked in corporate research environments and at astronomical observatories. He said that the students’ choice of seating is voluntary, as he has no seating chart, and noted the strong gender discrepancy is not typical in Harker’s CS classes.
“[Last] semester was unusual, [with] only one [girl] in each section,” he wrote in an email. “[This] semester a third of the class (out of 18) is girls. Each girl handles the situation differently. Some work alone, and others are highly interactive with the other members of the class.”
AP CS teacher Susan King similarly encourages students to find work partners on their own. In her observation, students tend to favor working with members of the same gender.
“We work in partners a lot, and I want people to be comfortable with their partners,” King said. “Have I observed females particularly getting isolated by a bunch of males? Yes, I have. I’ve observed it in a number of schools. It hasn’t happened in a class of mine at Harker.”
King received her Bachelor of Science degree in CS from Montana State University in 1975, at a time when 19.8 percent of such degrees were conferred to females, according to the National Center for Education (NCES).
“I certainly know what [being isolated] is like,” she said. “I was often the only female in math classes or CS classes.”
That was 40 years ago, but the disparity continues. Mohindra’s experience as the minority gender reflects a broader downward trend of gender equity in technology.
As increasing numbers of women earn degrees in business, biology and physical sciences, the number of CS degrees received by women today is less than a third of what it was 30 years ago. In 2011, 18.2 percent of bachelor’s degrees in CS were given to women, compared to 37.1 percent in 1980, according to the NCES 2013 Digest of Education Statistics.
The term “pipeline” has become used throughout the industry with regard to how women become dissuaded from pursuing technology fields. Women are lost bit by bit through a pipeline that constricts as they move from early education through the subsequent years to employment age.
Harker positions itself as a “world-class institution” in the heart of Silicon Valley, the tech capital of the U.S. With 64 percent of last year’s female graduates self-reporting a plan to major in a STEM field, according to survey responses collected for The Winged Post’s college map, many already encounter or will go on to face gender disparities within these fields as they move along the pipeline.
Taking it to the next level
Senior Nitya Mani’s interest in STEM began at a young age, when her parents read her Richard Dawkins’ books on evolution. Love for math especially was a consistent part of her childhood. Since her years at Joaquin Miller Middle School in San Jose, she has done math research, taken a slew of advanced math and CS courses, and competed in math contests.
As Mani puts it, she “grew up on the math team.”
For the past semester, Mani, like Mohindra, had been the only female out of 13 in her advanced topics course in CS, Numerical Methods.
While most of the upper school’s classes have balanced gender ratios, there is a male majority in advanced CS courses like the ones Mani and Mohindra took.
According to Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academics, enrollment in the upper school’s science departments such as biology and chemistry are relatively equal, but the courses following AP CS are 60 to 70 percent male.
Nationwide, The College Board has noticed a disparity between the genders in AP CS exams and a less severe one in AP Calculus BC exams. In 2013, 18.7 percent of AP CS test-takers and 40.5 percent of AP Calculus BC test-takers were female, according to the organization’s annual report.
“Historically there have been a disproportionate number of males taking AP exams in CS A,” said Amy Wilkins, The College Board’s social justice consultant, in an email interview. “Last year alone nearly 300,000 students with the potential to succeed in an AP course did not take one.”
Parental views can hinder young girls from STEM classes based on preconceived biases about whether girls can participate in the field.
Having grown up with a now 20-year- old brother, a 15-year-old brother and a 10-year-old sister, Chandini Thakur, grade 11, sees a different emphasis on STEM interests of males and females in her family. She plans on becoming a medical doctor, and her older brother studies computer engineering in college.
“My dad has already started working on getting my younger brother connected to people in engineering and not as much on my future career in the medical field,” she said. “It’s interesting to see that, because my sister’s already expressing an interest in engineering, and he’s not paying attention to that as much as he should be.”
As a teacher, science department chair and former AP teacher Anita Chetty has learned to pay attention to classroom dynamics. She recalls differences in reactions to girls’ and boys’ classroom participation in her years as a student.
“If boys made a mistake, people laughed it off,” she said. “If you were a female, you felt as though if you made a mistake it was not going to be funny. It was like, ‘You’re dumb.’”
Chetty’s interest in STEM led her to earn a B.S. in biology from the University of Calgary in Canada and two degrees in STEM education: a Bachelor of Engineering in education leadership at the University of Lethridge and a Master of Engineering in secondary science at the University of Portland.
As in Chetty’s observations, differences in attitudes towards disappointment divide students along gender lines. Her comments are rooted in research discussed in Dr. Diana Kastelic’s dissertation for the University of Denver, “Adolescent Girls’ Support for Voice in Education.” In her paper, Dr. Kastelic writes, “When boys fail, blame is placed on external factors, while success is attributable to ability. Surprisingly, girls’ achievement is attributed to luck and hard work, and failure is blamed on lack of ability.”
Mani refers to these and other subtle barriers against women pursuing STEM as “implicit discouragements.” She mentioned comments she received last summer from a Yale University professor alongside a male classmate.
“[The Yale professor] told the guy about the opportunities, and then he told me that I should look at the pre-med department, because that would be a better place
for me,” Mani said. While the professor’s motive was anyone’s guess, Mani said that hearing similar comments was commonplace and often disheartening. “There’s a lot of things that people do to implicitly discourage you. Now, it’s not so much [from pursuing] STEM, but to discourage women from pursuing pure STEM fields.”
For women and other minorities entering STEM, microaggressions, such as the one Mani faced, often result from unconscious bias.
From high school to college
After graduating from high school and beginning a major in STEM fields at campuses across the country, demographics in classrooms grow increasingly worse for females as they proceed along the pipeline to college.
Biology major Samantha Hoffman ’13 walks into the seminar room for her Computational and Mathematical Engineering (CME) class at Stanford University. What strikes her as odd is the composition of teaching assistants for the class.
“For both my CME classes, 100 percent of the TAs were male,” she said.
Hoffman, who plans to add a sub-concentration in neurobiology and a minor in creative writing, views the TA imbalance as an important issue to fix, due to female mentorship’s importance in encouraging female participation in STEM fields.
“The biggest problem is getting mentors, because without mentors, you can’t really get your advice. You can’t really get those connections to help you move forward in the industry,” Hoffman said.
As former upper school math department chair and middle school division head, as well as a math teacher at other public and private schools, Gargano stresses the importance of teachers as role models and guides. Throughout her study of math education during college, she was encouraged by professors who assumed she would go on to earn a master’s degree, even before she had planned to.
“It’s the teachers who really have so much power in terms of turning students onto a course that they thought they may not have interest in, or keep them loving a subject, too,” she said. “I think it’s all about the teachers.”
But finding a mentor for women in the worlds of academia can prove challenging on campuses like Stanford, where only three out of 54 of the CS department’s full-time faculty members are women, as Wingspan discovered by counting the department’s faculty on its website directory.
College and beyond: moving to the big league
Females who earn STEM degrees are faced with job placement as the next, and often most difficult, hurdle. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s 2011 Executive Summary of Women in STEM, females held only 24 percent of all working positions in STEM fields, even though females hold 48 percent of all jobs.
The disparity leads to disparagement, according to Tess Rinearson, a software engineer at blogging platform Medium in San Francisco and an attendee at Battle
of the Hacks 2014 at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, a programming invitational representative of over 50 events promoting innovation for college students.
“It’s something that people don’t want to talk about. It’s kind of the elephant in the room,” Rinearson said as one of five females out of 27 hackathon attendees in the room. “I’ve had lots of miscellaneous experiences where [I think,] ‘God, I wish there were more women in tech, because this behavior is unacceptable.’”
A Seattle native, Rinearson graduated from Lakeside High School and took classes at the University of Pennsylvania and Carnegie Mellon before leaving college after a year to pursue a job at Medium.
Her experience as a 21-year-old female in the tech world has led her to describe the industry’s culture of microaggressions as “death by a thousand papercuts.”
Sometimes, the sexism can be much more direct. Last year, Rinearson experienced a more in-your-face example.
“I was supposed to be judging this hackathon. I talked to this team one-on-one, and I was really enthusiastic about this team’s hack,” she said. “As I walked away I heard one of them say, ‘She wants the d—,’ which is totally inappropriate.”
For women in careers that require an online presence, microaggressions often occur in the form of Internet harassment. Planetary geologist Emily Lakdawalla, who currently works as an editor and evangelist for The Planetary Society, an organization involved in advancing space exploration, discusses and promotes science through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
“When you’re on the Internet and you’re a female, you know it,” she said in a Skype interview. “It makes a difference. You get creepy comments. Initially I blew them all off, and over time it starts to get heavier and heavier, and you just don’t want to deal with them anymore.”
Writer and former physics student Eileen Pollack said combatting microaggressions that females bear while in a male-dominated field will help increase the number of women in tech. Pollack, who in 1978 became one of the first two women to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in physics at Yale, published “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” in The New York Times Magazine in 2013. Later this year, she will publish her memoir, “The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club.”
“There are studies that say that women leave voluntarily because they want ‘people fields,’ and to this, I say, ‘There are no people in engineering?’” she said in a phone interview. “Engineers and chemists and computer scientists work in teams. There’s an idea that women walk away from the fields voluntarily, and that’s nonsense. [They are] already struggling under so many burdens every day where they feel they don’t belong.”
Females leaving or being unable to enter tech positions is not just an issue of social fairness but also an issue that impacts earning potential over a lifetime. According to Forbes, the highest paying jobs for college graduates are in engineering, with a median starting pay of $53,400. Even in the workplace, females earn less than their male counterparts; a 2012 American Association of University Women report stated that on average, a female in engineering makes 88 percent of what a male does when both are one year out of college.
Valuations of startup companies are at an all-time high, according to Forbes, with nearly 40 startups worth more than $1 billion in 2013. However, according to a 2013 report from Pitchbook, a data provider for venture capitalist markets, only 13 percent of venture capital deals had at least one female co-founder.
Seed accelerators like Y Combinator in Mountain View provide seed funding in exchange for an equity share in a prospective startup. Company partner Kat Manalac said Y Combinator received 5,000 applications last year, but only around one in four of the companies had a female founder. In response, Y Combinator launched its first Female Founders Conference last March with 450 attendees, involving a host of female founders sharing their stories. Another was slated for February.
“The big focus should be on how to get more women and people of color hired and in leadership positions at tech companies,” Manalac said in an email interview. “I’m encouraged because I’ve started to see a lot of smart people devoting their time to building solutions. The emphasis should be on action.”
Steps ahead
Mani and Mohindra both see themselves moving forward in the male-dominated field, confident that things will change by the time they are in graduate school.
“I think that the only way to break the gender gap is to get in when you’re the minority gender,” Mani said. “I feel fine, because there are going to be enough women around me. By the time that I get a Ph.D., there will be a lot of women with me, because I think it’s changing.”
As a senior next year, Mohindra plans to take Harker’s CS advanced topics courses Expert Systems and Computer Architecture, as well as the advanced mathematics topics courses Differential Equations 2 and Signals and Systems.
“I think within a decade, we’ll definitely have a lot more women in higher positions in STEM, and having those leaders as examples will provide yet another push for women to enter the fields,” she said.
Female alumnae have gone on to success in STEM fields. Forbes’ 2014 “30 Under 30” list in science and health care featured Surbhi Sarna ’03, who founded nVision Medical, a technology intended to improve ovarian cancer detection. Currently, several of the most prominent Bay Area tech companies are led by female chief executive officers such as Susan Wojcicki of YouTube, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo! and Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, and Mayer declined an interview with Wingspan.
At Harker, Gargano says she has explored some of the existing opportunities or initiative organizations that the upper school currently has in order to improve any imbalance, including WiSTEM (Women in STEM). Improvement, according to her, is still on the agenda moving forward.
“I think we have a lot of really accomplished females in those areas. Why wouldn’t we want to push forward those efforts?” Gargano said. “We can do better, and we should do better.”
Females already in the industry see hope for the future. Ruchi Sanghvi, who became the first female engineer at Facebook in 2005, helped develop the Newsfeed and Facebook Platform. She offers advice for females planning to enter tech fields to stand their ground but be ready for challenges.
“Don’t be afraid to voice your opinion. Don’t be afraid to ask for opportunities – raise your hand and ask for those opportunities,” she said. “When you’re offered a seat on a rocketship, don’t ask which one, just take it.”
Ten members of the new-last-year Technology Student Association (TSA) club traveled to Bakersfield for the TSA State Conference and came home with plenty to talk about!
At the conference, students competed in a variety of individual and team events, all incorporating future technology. The competitive event topics range from essay writing to architecture and fashion design to teaching. This year, despite being the smallest group attending – one school brought 60 students – Harker students were awarded five first-place medals, two second-place medals and two third-place medals. Some students competed in more than one event.
In the end, every student came home with at least one medal, and club president, Sophia Luo, grade 11, earned multiple first place awards. In addition, Karen Qi, grade 11, was elected as a state officer.
This is especially impressive because until now, the founding California TSA school (Diamond Bar High School near Los Angeles) had held all state positions. “All in all, a remarkable achievement,” said advisor and upper school math teacher Tony Silk. “Last year we cracked open the TSA door; this year, we have it wide open.”
Based on their achievements, all 10 students qualified for the National TSA Conference, which takes place this summer in Dallas. If you see any of these students, be sure to congratulate them! Participants were Eric Cheung, Craig Neubieser, Eric Wang, all grade 12; Cynthia Hao, Kevin Ke, Sophia Luo, Karen Qi, Belinda Yan, all grade 11; Adrian Chu, Randy Zhao, both grade 9.
This past weekend six Harker students participated in the ninth United States Invitational Young Physicists Tournament held at the Woodberry Forest School in Woodberry Forest, Va., and finished first, ahead of eight other teams from three continents.
The competition is the culmination of yearlong research into four problems spanning many aspects of classical physics including mechanics, fluid dynamics, experimental measurement, optics, wave behavior, magnetism, electrical circuits, etc.
The problems for the 2015 tournament were: 1) measure the Avogadro constant as precisely and accurately as possible; 2) build, analyze and optimize a Gauss rifle; 3) investigate and analyze the problem of the parametric resonance of a mass oscillating on the end of a spring; and 4) investigate and analyze the problem of the “teapot effect,” in which water clings to the underside of a surface as the water flows across the surface.
The tournament this year was the largest in its short history, with nine schools from three continents competing, including two schools from China, one school from Tunisia, and six schools from the United States.
The team from The Harker School came out on top, earning their third victory at the competition in the past five years. The members of the team were Vivek Bharadwaj, grade 11; Nitya Mani, grade 12; Elina Sendonaris, grade 11; Manan Shah, grade 10; Tong Wu, grade 11; and Jessica Zhu, grade 11. These students were supported by Alice Wu and Naman Jindal, both grade 11, in their research efforts leading up to the tournament. Dr. Mark Brada helped prepare the team and accompanied them on the trip.