Eighth and ninth grade students dash across the San Jose Public Library’s community room, racing to write down the next line of code in a series. Cheering in excitement, each team aims to complete their task faster than the other three, striving to win the candy that comes with first place. Eventually, they finish the activity and return to other projects in their programming class. Seated in Manzanita, Vibha Arramreddy (12) smiles as she describes this moment in detail.

During the summer after sophomore year, Vibha worked with two girls she’d met at AI4ALL, a summer camp at Princeton University, to form AI Imagination, a nonprofit where they teach workshops about coding. After completing the copious amounts of paperwork required to start a nonprofit, they began teaching both afternoon camps and programs that lasted multiple weeks.

Due to her own interest in programming, Vibha hoped to share her interests, especially regarding the intersection of STEM and humanities, and provide participants with opportunities they may not have in school to study computer science.

“The camps that I specifically teach are more focused on AI with art or humanities and starting to get them to understand that you can make a connection in STEM fields and humanities fields and realize that you don’t have to do one thing or the other,” she said.

While attending AI4ALL, where she studied artificial intelligence, Vibha learned from a professor about an initiative that involved using survey data collected from families throughout their lives to determine their child’s future, which began to spark her interest in the connections between sociology and artificial intelligence. Through research and discussions with her friends, she aims to relate this connection to her own life.

“The way the world’s working right now and the way technology is advancing, it’s really important to connect [technology] to social issues, especially with the ubiquitous use…nowadays,” Vibha said. “If you don’t connect [technology] to social studies such as psychology or sociology, you miss out on a big impact to change the world or improve the world.”

Beyond a specific connection between these two fields, Vibha emphasizes studying topics from different angles in order to better understand them and encourages others to do so.

“Especially [at Harker], we focus more on STEM and viewing things from a STEM perspective, and I think a lot can be gained by viewing different topics, whether it be political [or] social, from a different perspective that we are not used to,” she said. 

In sixth grade, Vibha began participating in debate. Through time spent researching various debate topics, she began to consider alternate viewpoints subconsciously on each issue she discusses.

“Debate has really helped me because during the topic discussions for specific resolutions you have to argue both sides and see the different causes and effects. That really helped me analyze more thoroughly,” she said.

Rashmi Iyer (12), Vibha’s neighbor and friend since kindergarten, commended Vibha’s hardworking nature, which she applies to everything from academics to their skiing trips.

“She’s the type of person who, if she takes up something or commits to something, she will put in all of her effort to make sure she does it as best as she can,” Rashmi said. “She always perseveres no matter what.”

Vibha’s twin brother, Datha Arramreddy (12) has also admired her time management skills and how they’ve improved throughout high school, especially considering the range of activities in which she participates.

“I still don’t know how she manages everything that she does because in sophomore year she was playing basketball, and she started up her own nonprofit,” he said. “I don’t know how she makes time for things she’s done, but she’s really good at time management and she does a lot of things that she believes in.” 

Aditi Khanna (12), Vibha’s close friend since fourth grade, noted the changes to Vibha’s personality over the time that they’ve known each other.

“I noticed in sophomore and then junior year, she really built herself up from the ground, academically but also in the ways she acted in front of people, and that is a really phenomenal thing,” Aditi said.