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![“When I came into high school, I was ready to be a follower. But DECA was a game changer for me. It helped me overcome my fear of public speaking, and it's played such a major role in who I've become today. To be able to successfully lead a chapter of 150 students, an officer team and be one of the upperclassmen I once really admired is something I'm [really] proud of,” Anvitha Tummala ('21) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-25-at-9.50.05-AM-900x594.png)
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![“[Volleyball has] taught me how to fall correctly, and another thing it taught is that you don’t have to be the best at something to be good at it. If you just hit the ball in a smart way, then it still scores points and you’re good at it. You could be a background player and still make a much bigger impact on the team than you would think,” Anya Gert (’20) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AnnaGert_JinTuan_HoHPhotoEdited-600x900.jpeg)
![“I'm not nearly there yet, but [my confidence has] definitely been getting better since I was pretty shy and timid coming into Harker my freshman year. I know that there's a lot of people that are really confident in what they do, and I really admire them. Everyone's so driven and that has really pushed me to kind of try to find my own place in high school and be more confident,” Alyssa Huang (’20) said.](https://harkeraquila.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/AlyssaHuang_EmilyChen_HoHPhoto-900x749.jpeg)
Students participate in 36-hour math competition
Juniors Shaya Zarkesh, Michael Kwan, Kat Tian and Rajiv Movva participate in HSMCiM as a team. The math contest took place for 36 hours on the Saratoga campus.
December 1, 2016
Two teams from the Upper School competed in the annual High School Math Contest in Modeling (HSMCiM) at the Saratoga campus from 8 a.m. on Nov. 19 to 8 p.m. Nov. 20 for 36 hours over Thanksgiving break.
The competition asked students to write a 30-page technical paper that modeled a real-world problem using math in 36 hours.
Michael Kwan (11), Rajiv Movva (11), Katherine “Kat” Tian (10), Shaya Zarkesh (11), Ayush Pancholy (10), Ashwin Rammohan (10), Nishant Ravi (10) and Akshay Ravoor (10) took part in this year’s competition. They prepared for the contest by going through problems and papers from previous years.
Kat, who participated in the contest with teammates Michael Kwan (11), Rajiv Movva (11) and Shaya Zarkesh (11), found the type of problem and length of the submission to be the most challenging aspect of the competition process.
“It’s not like the common math competition that takes usually minutes, or max a few hours. It’s not solving a set of specific problems or proofs or an Olympiad,” Kat explained. “It’s more like a hackathon, because of the structure.”
Over the 36-hour period, the two teams brainstormed ideas, wrote the paper, ran code and constructed graphs. They had meals and took turns taking naps before immediately resuming work.
Members of the school math department, including Department Chair Anthony Silk, and Lauri Vaughan proctored the competition.
“[HSMCiM] gives you this opportunity to try something you have not tried which is ‘how fast can I pull together a paper on a challenging topic that does not have an answer. It’s an open ended question,” Silk said. “Now that’s something that happens in real life, so it’s just sort of preparation for the way things actually work in the real world.”
The results of the competition will be announced in January.
