Annual TEDxHarkerSchool event takes place tomorrow at upper school

TedX+members+Jeton+Gutierrez-Bujari+%2815%29+and+Shannon+Hong+%2812%29+introduce+the+speaker+series+from+two+years+ago.+The+TEDx+event+will+take+place+tomorrow+at+the+upper+school.+

Courtesy of the Office of Communications

TedX members Jeton Gutierrez-Bujari (’15) and Shannon Hong (12) introduce the speaker series from two years ago. The TEDx event will take place tomorrow at the upper school.

The annual TEDxHarkerSchool event hosted by the Harker Business and Entrepreneurship Program, which features speakers for high school and college students, will take place on Saturday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Nichols Auditorium.

This year’s speakers include Michael Snyder, a geneticist from Stanford, Puragra GuhaThakurta, an astrophysicist from UC Santa Clara, Neel Chatterjee, an intellectual property attorney, Kaity Gee, a Harker senior, Andy Fang the CTO of DoorDash and Leila Janah, the founder and CEO of Sama Group.

TEDx is organized mainly by a group of students, curators, or people who choose the content, and Chris Thompson and Juston Glass, the co-advisors of the Business and Entrepreneurship program.

“As curators, we sort of direct the whole operation to see like what do we want the actual schedule to be, what speakers, booths, or mentors that we want, and then how we want to organize it,” curator Shannon Hong (12) said.

Smriti Koodanjeri, a chemistry teacher at the Harker Upper School, is also speaking at the forum.

“I’m hoping to reach a lot more of the students towards this idea, the idea of time management,” Dr. Koodanjeri said.

Dr. Koodanjeri has worked with 20-25 individual students on time management in the past, but hopes to influence more at the conference.

Alexis Gauba (11) looks forward to hearing from Andy Fang, the cofounder and CTO of DoorDash and a Harker alumnus.

“The talk I’m looking forward to most is from the CTO of DoorDash,” Gauba said. “Since he is a Harker alumni, and I’d like to see how he took his ideas and skill set from Harker and transformed them into an actual company, which is thriving now,” Gauba said.

Another aspect of the event is the mentor luncheon, in which students and faculty can meet and interact with different people working in a variety of fields.

“I look forward to seeing 175 students in the seats listening to interesting ideas.” Thompson said. “But I also look forward to the mentor luncheon, where all of the attendees get a chance to meet with a Harker parent who’s a business person that they can build a relationship with.”

In addition to speakers and the luncheon, TEDx also has interactive, corporate booths where ten companies get to display their products.

“We have a lot of really cool booths this year, like we have a mind controlled helicopter drone thing,” Aashika Balaji (11), member of the TEDx team, said.

The Business and Entrepreneurship Program holds these TEDxHarkerSchool events annually.