Swiping his membership card over the sensor on the door into the TechShop, Vedaad Shakib (12), carrying his backpack on his back, steps into the brightly lit, equipment-filled workshop –– his second home, where he can finally isolate himself from the outside world and delve into an entirely different universe of Java and code.

“Robotics is an application of programming where you can actually see what your code does, so for me, it’s always been interesting to do robotics because you can build something that actually does something in the principal world, [and] it’s not just constrained to your laptop,” Vedaad said.

From being first introduced to programming in seventh grade to taking Advanced Topics classes in his junior and senior years, Vedaad’s passion for programming has only grown over the years.

“To me, [programming] feels like a huge sandbox where you can do anything you want to fit any function and it’s only constrained by your own imagination,” he said. “It’s also a pretty challenging and intellectually stimulating activity. It feels to me like a huge intricate puzzle that you have to scope out all the parts to and integrate everything together perfectly so it’s both efficient and fits the thing you want to accomplish.”

Andrew Tierno (12), Vedaad’s friend since eighth grade, has witnessed the evolution of Vedaad’s interests from Python to robotics to machine learning.

“He’s really ridiculously smart and it’s pretty interesting to be working with him sometimes because he makes some connections that you would never really think about,” Andrew said. “We were working on a project over the summer for a course we were taking, [and] everything was obfuscated, so it was difficult to determine exactly what corresponded to what, but [Vedaad] saw a pattern in the data. In the end, our program was one of the top performing algorithms.”

Vedaad’s father, who has supported him in his passions and served as a mentor to him, has been a huge role model for him since his childhood.

“My dad [has] just been everything that I aspire to adhere to. He’s just someone who has always been successful at the same time he’s kept hold of his beginnings,” Vedaad said. “He’s not pretentious or aggressive; it’s kind of like a quiet form of success.”

Aside from taking on multiple programming projects, Vedaad also spends his summers doing science research internships.

“[Two summers ago], I went to China for a STEM internship, and the environment was just so different from what it was here that it really made an impact on me, seeing the different aspects of life and how people do things on a daily basis,” he said. “All the cultural aspects of China [were] really memorable because all my life, I’ve been confined in this space in the Silicon Valley.”

Apart from his close friends, the community at Harker helps to foster Vedaad’s STEM interests.

“I think the environment here at Harker is both competitive and collaborative, and the combination of those two has really propelled me forward,” Vedaad said. “Seeing the success of my peers has inspired me to go forward in the fields that I’m passionate about and just having people around me who are as passionate and as driven as I am is really a huge factor in my pursuit of STEM.”