One may know her as the president of the robotics club, an avid volunteer in class, a tutor for kids eager about robotics or just a good friend who gives beneficial advice. To many Harker students, it is clear that Chloe Affaki (12) is a leader.

As a lifer at Harker, Chloe views the school as a second home. Many of her attributes and qualities stem from Harker’s values, such as her friendliness and leadership. In return, Chloe has given back to Harker using those same skills that the school has fostered in her over the years.

“Creating new friendships and a sense of community [is important to me],” Chloe said. “Especially in high school, everything gets segmented up into different communities, and it’s hard to find a way to fit in. But through robotics and through speech and through my typical friendships, I’m able to find meaning through things I’m interested in and connect to other people who are interested in those things as well.” 

Chloe has and continues to inspire and impress the people around her with her initiative and welcoming attitude. Whether it is encouraging people to talk in a Zoom breakout room during class or setting up an assembly to talk about Harker Robotics, Chloe strives to promote a strong sense of community.

“Each grade has a set of people without which the class would be incomplete,” Anoushka Buch (12), one of Chloe’s closest friends, said. “Chloe is one of those people.” 

When Chloe chooses to pursue an activity, she always ensures that it is something that will help expand her skills. Entering high school, her first club fair opened her eyes to robotics, a club where she is now an irreplaceable member of. Originally, she planned to search for medical clubs, due to the lineage of doctors in her family. While exploring Harker’s variety of medicine-related clubs, the medical robot that Harker Robotics was presenting caught her eye. Intrigued, she signed up, and once build season started, began to dedicate time to robotics. In that period of time, she fell in love with everything mechanical and for many projects and years afterwards, would work with her clubmates. 

“Through robotics, I’ve definitely learned how to become a better leader because a leader isn’t just leading people. It’s also helping foster an environment where other people can become leaders. When you’re in charge of something, you do need to step back and allow other people to shine,” Chloe said.

Robotics was not the only activity that helped her develop leadership. Speech and debate, where she also happened to meet close friends, helped her become an admirable public speaker by enabling her to immerse herself in a diverse community of members and converse with people about global issues. Through this and informing herself about the problems around her, Chloe was inspired to assess how she can make a difference.

“The cool thing about speech is that everyone who does speech also does …  at least one other thing,” Chloe said. “[In] speech and debate, you put in as much time as you want. You can go to one tournament a year, you can go to 15, you can go to zero. Because of that, there are so many different people on the team that do so many different things that everyone supports each other.”

Chloe takes even the smallest opportunities to help someone or to learn about various topics, and she strives to succeed in the hobbies she loves. Whether it’s robotics, volunteering or speech and debate, when Chloe puts her mind to something, she gives it her all. Something Chloe values is kindness, so when speech and debate teacher Scott Odekirk told her that his daughter was interested in robotics, Chloe took it upon herself to provide her with resources to explore the world of robotics.

“When I think of Chloe, her most defining quality is her sheer kindness,” Odekirk said. “She is so utterly empathetic towards other people and really cares about how they’re doing and is willing to put in work to make sure other people feel welcomed and respected and comforted in hard times, and I don’t know if I ever taught a more kind student.”

When Chloe became a big part of the robotics club, she would go to mentor the middle school robotics club too. Through this, she realized she enjoyed helping others learn about the things she loved. She wanted to give others the ability to succeed in robotics, no matter who they were and how much they knew. Over the summer, she was offered to teach under-privilaged girls robotics; Chloe knew the opportunity to help others by doing something she loved was impassable.

“I like helping people with information that I find interesting. The class that I taught was with middle school girls who don’t have access to robotics teams in their schools … because of the course, they’d be able to go out and find public teams across the Bay Area that they could join if they wanted to,” Chloe said.

Even outside of her official roles as a leader, such as being president of Harker Robotics, Chloe strives to tackle every dilemma she faces and turn it into a learning opportunity. 

“Chloe is one of the most motivated people [I know], and she really … knows what she wants. She is always working really hard to accomplish her goals,” close friend Hari Bhimaraju (12) said. “A lot of people are hard-working, but not a lot of people know how to best utilize their time to really optimize their life. And I think Chloe does that.”

Juggling so many activities at once can prove to be difficult, but Chloe rises to the top through her meticulous organization, with her backpack tidily filled and her days planned down to the hour. She dedicates most of her time to participating in activities that help her genuinely thrive, ranging from politics to volunteering to psychology. Such interests often stem from her desire to support her community, such as their mental health, for she wants everyone to feel comfortable and to be there for them. 

“A lot of my friends struggle [with mental illness, and] some parts of my family, too. But even if no one I knew struggled with mental health, it’s something that everyone should know about,” Chloe said.

Through her many passions, Chloe has been able to strengthen and foster many memorable friendships, something that she is thankful for. The compassion she exudes when spending time with her friends and the leadership she shows continuously impress the people around her. 

 “[Chloe] really gives her all to everyone … she’s very inspiring to me because she’s extremely organized and she’s such a good leader and she really knows how to manage her time and be responsible,” Hari said. “I definitely look up to her for that as a friend.” 

Moving forward, Chloe wants to expand her reach and begin to help and inspire everyone she can with what she loves most: robotics.