Harker Hospital was open for business in Larissa Weaver’s first grade math class to help students learn about graphs. Weaver invited pediatrician and Harker parent Dr. Shefali Shete (Allie and Sasha, both grade 1) to come in and show students how she uses graphs to measure a baby’s progress. The students had a great time measuring the babies!
Fresh off of winning eight awards in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, junior Jacqueline He was named the first place winner in the high school poetry division of the 2017 Writing Contest, sponsored by the Writing Conference Inc. As a winner, He is now eligible to be published in the Writing Conference’s online publication, the Writers’ Slate. She also has been invited to the 2017 Literature Festival, to be held in October at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan.
The Writing Conference Inc. has offered services to young writers since 1980 with the goal of improving the skills of aspiring writers.
In mid-February, celebrity vocal coach Lisa Popeil held a special workshop for Harker Conservatory students in music teacher Susan Nace’s classroom. Widely recognized as one of America’s top singing experts, Los Angeles-based Popeil has performed with artists including Frank Zappa and “Weird Al” Yankovic and has long been an in-demand vocal instructor among professional singers, actors, managers and record producers.
Nace noticed Popeil’s work two years ago while attending a San Francisco workshop and organized the Harker workshop as part of the Harker Conservatory’s certificate program. Popeil demonstrated breathing and singing techniques in a wide variety of vocal styles, including pop, rock, rhythm and blues, musical theater and opera. “Lisa is very good at teaching concepts clearly and efficiently as she has worked with all the major international voice researchers in their labs,” said Nace.
The Harker Red Cross club held its annual blood drive at the Nichols Hall atrium earlier this month, collecting 21 donations. The drive was held at Nichols Hall, rather than its usual location at the upper school gym, due to the ongoing construction on campus. See Harker Aquila’s coverage of the event for more details.
Middle school cellist Angeline Kiang, grade 7, recently won first prize in the second edition of the Enkor International Music Competition, in the strings category for musicians ages 11-15. A member of the Grades 7-8 Orchestra, Kiang scored a stellar 94.37 from the jury, which comprises more than 500 members.
In 2015, Kiang finished in first place in the United States International Music Competition, hosted by the Chinese Music Teachers’ Association of Northern California.
The annual Jump Rope for Heart event took place at the lower school campus in early March, as students jumped rope and participated in other activities to raise money for the American Heart Association.
Students collected donations in the weeks leading up to the event, during which they jumped rope in the gym and shot hoops at the basketball court. These and other activities are meant to commemorate those suffering from heart problems, as well as bring awareness to healthy lifestyle habits.
This year’s drive raised more than $13,000 for the American Heart Association, surpassing last year’s amount by more than $3,000. Since 2000, the effort has raised nearly $180,000.
Lower, middle and upper school vocalists performed together at this year’s United Voices concert, held March 16 at the Blackford Theater. The groups featured included the grades 4-5 Bucknall Choir, the grade 6 choir Dynamics, the grades 7-8 choir Vivace and the upper school’s show choir Downbeat. As in previous years, all participants appeared on stage for the finale, a performance of Rollo Dilworth’s “Everlasting Melody.”
Last week, 150 dancers lit up the stage at the Blackford Theater for the middle school performing arts department’s annual Dance Jamz production. Directed by Gail Palmer, who also acted as a choreographer along with Kimberley Teodoro, Kento Vo, Jessalyn Espiritu, Alexandra Venter, Rachelle Haun and Brianna Alday, the show featured 18 routines performed to songs by Ciara, Imagine Dragons, David Guetta and The Black Eyed Peas. Check out the accompanying photos for a look at the excitement!
Upper school Shakespeare enthusiasts made their way to the gym in late January for a competition in which participants performed monologues from Shakespeare plays. One of these students, senior Zahra Budhwani, was chosen as the best of the 16 performers by a panel of judges that included Harker English teachers Pauline Paskali, Christopher Hurshman and Charles Shuttleworth, as well as drama teacher Jeff Draper. After guidance and support from Draper, Budhwani went on to compete at the regional round of the National Shakespeare Competition, organized by the English-Speaking Union of the United States, where she performed a monologue and a sonnet. Though she did not win the regional event, Budhwani “performed admirably in representing our school,” Shuttleworth said.
Members of Harker’s Technology Student Association visited California State University Bakersfield March 24-26 to participate in the TSA California State Conference, where students placed highly in several categories.
The team of Gary Tsai, Markus Wong, David Wen, Aadith Srinivasan, Kevin Tzeng and Neil Bai, all grade 11, took first place in architectural design. Junior Adrian Chu won first place in extemporaneous speech. In promotional design, Andrew Chang, grade 10, placed first and junior Derek Kuo took second. First place in scientific visualization went to Catherine Zhao, Eileen Li and Jackie Yang, all grade 9. The team of juniors Derek Yen and Sumer Kohli and sophomore Alexander Young earned first place in Technology Bowl, where the team of Gary Tsai, David Wen and Adrian Chu took second. Finally, the team of juniors Sharon Yan, Julia Huang and Ashley Jiang and sophomore Anna Wang took second place in fashion design.
Founded in 1978, the Technology Student Association provides development opportunities for K-12 students in technological disciplines. It has 250,000 student members nationwide, according to its website.
An impressive 46 teams showed up to participate in this year’s Harker Programming Invitational, which took place March 19 at the upper school campus. Open to all Bay Area high schools, the event featured both advanced and novice divisions and had teams solve coding problems designed by officers in the Harker Programming Club, who organized the event.
“This year, our contest ran very smoothly as we planned the problem set development and contest details well in advance of the competition itself,” said club co-president Manan Shah, grade 12. “Each member of our team contributed significantly to the success of the competition, whether it be in writing the problems, setting up our contest server, talking to our sponsors or managing the completion of designated tasks.”
Club members also had the task of attracting event sponsors, which included IBM, the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, Star League, Make School and ACEprep.
In addition to the competition, the event also featured talks by Stanford University professor Chris Manning, and Angie Krackeler of IBM’s Watson team, both experts in artificial intelligence.
More info about this year’s HPI can be found in Harker Aquila’s coverage of the event.
Late March was a special time for the students in the Harker School Orchestra, who headed to New York City to perform at the famous Carnegie Hall. The March 28 performance consisted of pieces by Modest Mussorgsky, Dmitry Kabalevsky and John Williams. The orchestra also had the distinct honor of debuting a piece by composer John Carnahan titled “Les Bourgeon Du Printemps.” The momentous occasion prompted dozens of Harker parents and several alumni to attend the concert. Students also had the pleasure of attending a clinic conducted by Carnahan, who is the director of bands and a professor of conducting at California State University Long Beach’s Bob Cole Conservatory of Music.
Under the direction of upper school music teacher Chris Florio, the orchestra spent months preparing for trip, which Florio had been organizing for two years. Luckily, there was also time to enjoy some of the many sights the big city had on offer. Outings during the trip included a visit to the Statue of Liberty and attending a performance of “Anastasia” on Broadway.
Head on over to Harker Aquila for the full story! Audio recordings of the Carnegie Hall performance are available via Soundcloud.
Grade 1 students conducted their annual drive for the Humane Society of Silicon Valley in mid-March, raising $556 in addition to collecting about 50 bags of supplies, toys, food, treats and other goods from the lower school community. The students made many of the items they donated. For example, Grace Wallace’s class made dog toys and Cindy Proctor’s students made cat blankets. Proctor reported that the folks at HSSV were “thrilled and very appreciative” of the donations.
Harker’s large community of science enthusiasts gathered Saturday, April 15, at the upper school campus for the 2017 Harker Research Symposium. Early arrivals packed Nichols Auditorium for a talk by leading artificial intelligence expert Fei-Fei Li, who spoke about advancements in developing visual intelligence for computers.
Attendees then filled the Nichols Hall atrium, examining the many corporate exhibits on display, courtesy of companies such as Google, IBM, Xilinx, Nvidia and Titanium Falcon. They later made their way to the quad for the lunchtime chemistry magic show, staged by Andrew Irvine, who awed the crowd with several spectacular chemical reactions.
This year’s alumni speaker was Evan Maynard ’09, who now works at Blue Origin as a propulsion development engineer. Maynard covered his current work in making spaceflight more affordable as well as the development of reusable rockets.
Throughout the day, Harker students presented their work at breakout sessions, detailing research they had done in a variety of scientific fields, including astronomy, medicine and climatology. At the upper school gym, visitors listened attentively to the many middle school students who gave poster presentations.
The afternoon keynote was delivered by Dr. Achin Bhowmik, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Perceptual Computing group. His talk covered technological advancements that have enabled machines to more closely sense and interact with the world around them.
This year’s symposium also included three very special student formal talks by Regeneron Science Talent Search finalists Evani Radiya-Dixit, Arjun Subramaniam and Manan Shah, all grade 12. Each of the students shared specifics of the research that earned them their impressive accolades.
Following their presentations, the finalists were part of a panel discussion that included science department chair Anita Chetty, physics teacher Chris Spenner, juniors Amy Jin and Rajiv Movva and senior Sandip Nirmal. The panelists discussed Harker’s many opportunities for science research, before bringing the event to a close.
The annual grade 2 production of the Ogre Awards took place in late March at the Bucknall Theater, where this year’s cast traveled “Around the World in 80 Pages.” Students portrayed characters from stories originating from places including Hawaii, Ghana, Russia and Vietnam.
During the preceding months, the students heard stories from various cultures (told by lower school librarian Kathy Clark) and had lengthy discussions about each story’s characters and the different archetypes they represented. They later voted on which characters would win awards in various categories. Students then played these characters in the Ogre Awards show, where they were presented with the awards.
The theme for the show was based on the classic Jules Verne novel “Around the World in 80 Days,” and rose out of an amusing wager between Clark and fellow lower school librarian Judy Atterholt.
“Ms. Atterholt and I bet on the fastest way to get around the world in stories: through nonfiction like atlases and geography textbooks, or through fiction and folklore,” said Clark.
Lower school technical theater teacher Danny Dunn provided considerable help by tracking down variations of “It’s a Small World (After All)” that were based on musical traditions from the cultures represented in the show.
As has become tradition in the 20-plus-year history of the Ogre Awards, a special Ogre Award was bestowed upon a Harker staff member for his or her support of Harker’s libraries. This year’s recipient was none other than Dan Hudkins, director of information technology service and support. “Mr. Hudkins has always been a library advocate, even before he was a founding member of the school’s Information Literacy Committee,” Clark said.
A team of Harker students won the first Stanford Pre-Collegiate Economics Competition, held Sat., April 15 at Stanford University. The team of Adriano Hernandez, Alan Jiang, Jacob Ohana, Derek Yen and Randy Zhao, all grade 11, narrowly defeated teams from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and the Bishop’s School in San Diego. During the competition, Harker’s team gave a presentation on the federal response to the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis. The competition also included a multiple-choice exam. As a bonus, the students also had the opportunity to attend a talk by influential macroeconomist John Taylor, who is currently a professor at Stanford.
The literary success continues for Jacqueline He, grade 11, who was recently awarded second place in the fiction portion of the Bennington College Young Writers Awards. More than 2,000 students from across the world entered this year’s contest, held by Vermont’s Bennington College, whose alumni have included Pulitzer Prize winners, US poet laureates and a MacArthur Fellow.
Earlier this year, He received four Gold Keys and four Silver Keys in the 2017 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and took first place in the high school poetry category in Writing Conference Inc.’s 2017 Writing Contest. In December, she was named a national finalist in the 2017 YoungArts Competition.
April 21, 2017:
Earlier this week, seniors Manan Shah and Meilan Steimle were named semifinalists in the 2017 U.S. Presidential Scholars Program. Their applications will be reviewed by the Commission on Presidential Scholars to determine this year’s Presidential Scholars.
Congratulations and good luck!
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Last month, the U.S. Department of Education announced this year’s candidates for the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program, and 19 Harker seniors were among them. Mission San Jose topped the local charts with 31. As many as 161 of the more than 5,000 candidates will be chosen as scholars.
The Presidential Scholars Program, launched in 1964, recognizes high school seniors of distinguished achievement in a variety of disciplines. It is recognized as one of the highest honors awarded to high school students.
Harker’s Presidential Scholar candidates for 2017 are:
Kai-Siang Ang
Steven Cao
Aditya Dhar
Davis Dunaway
Ria Gandhi
Andrew Gu
Zhuoying Huang
Lauren Liu
Sanjana Marce
Sandip Nirmel
Evani Radiya-Dixit
Divya Rajasekharan
Andrew Rule
Venkat Sankar
Manan Shah
Meilan Steimle
Arjun Subramaniam
Andrew Tierno
Michael Tseitlin
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Harker has the highest number of candidates from a school in California. Mission San Jose High School has 31 presidential scholar candidates, making it the California school with the most candidates. We apologize for the error.
On April 11, Kumi Matsui’s Japanese language students embarked on a field trip to Hakone Gardens in Saratoga, where they put their Japanese skills into practice and learned more about Japanese culture.
The first stop on the trip was a local Japanese eatery called Tomi Sushi. “The staff of this restaurant usually speaks native Japanese and they serve authentic Japanese dishes,” said Matsui. “The students had the opportunity to order dishes only in Japanese.”
Upon reaching Hakone Gardens, the students took an opportunity to learn more about Japanese culture by participating in a tea ceremony, after which they enjoyed a walk through the famously lush gardens, stopping for a moment at a pond to feed fish and turtles.
Earlier this month, Harker took first place at the 2017 Northern California State Championship quiz bowl tournament, organized by National Academic Quiz Tournaments. The Harker A team of senior Nikhil Manglik, juniors Swapnil Garg and Edgar Lin, and freshman Kyle Li went 10-1 overall in the event, which took place April 15 at U.C. Berkeley. In a format similar to game shows, players were asked questions on a wide variety of topics and had to “buzz in” to answer the question before the opposing team.
The Harker A team — minus Garg, due to a schedule conflict — will be competing at the national championship in Atlanta in May, as will another team from Harker made up of ninth graders Arun Sundaresan, Jeffrey Fung and Rohan Cherukuri. Best of luck!
