In one moment, Keren Eisenberg (’25) sits at the potter’s wheel alone, carefully attuned to the work-in-progress in front of her. In the next, she leads her team with maturity and care in the chaotic pool. Keren adapts to each one of these vastly different outlets with ease and ambition, seamlessly carrying both competition and creativity with her. 

Keren began playing club water polo for San Jose Express (SJX) in fourth grade, continuing throughout middle and high school, ultimately joining Harker’s varsity girls water polo team in frosh year. She recalled one of Harker’s away games against Palo Alto High School during her time as an underclassman, with Palo Alto steadily leading at halftime. 

“It was such a crazy moment for me because I never understood until then the power of teamwork to motivate yourself,” Keren said. “With club, you know the girls and everything, but these are players that I see every day and I sit with at lunch and then we all come together. That was really moving for me personally.”

Being team captain in both her junior and senior years, Keren formed invaluable connections with both her teammates and coach, oftentimes serving as a middle ground between the two. Despite the increase in responsibility, she appreciates the opportunity for streamlined communication with the rest of her team.

“I had an input, but at the same time, I had to listen to feedback,” Keren said. “My coach would ask if we need a rest day and you have to not just say ‘No, it’s go, go, go’ and really take into account that there are other players on the team and there’s a lot of nuances that the coach will never understand.”

However, leading as a captain also came with its own challenges, especially when discussing strategy and motivation before and after games. Keren often relies on a more community-centric approach to allow input from teammates.

“I found it very difficult to give speeches to the team because I heard myself sound so cliche — it was super out of my comfort zone,” Keren said. “It made the experience a lot more enjoyable for everyone to have everyone inputting something, and I really like that kind of collaborative aspect of being captain.”

Close friend Summer Adler (’25), who played with Keren on both the club and Harker teams, admires Keren’s ability to be both serious and personable as a teammate and later co-captain, as well as outside the pool. 

“We both know the game very well, so it was nice to have someone who knew what they were talking about to also lead,” Summer said. “It was nice to have someone who I was close with outside of water polo because it was easy to talk and bring up things, and we pretty much agreed on almost everything throughout the season.”

Although Keren stepped away from the sport after her senior year fall season, she nevertheless cherishes the countless hours she dedicated to the sport, keeping her determination to pursue her passions close to her. 

“The most important thing for me to realize from water polo is that I was able to commit to something that was so challenging,” Keren said. “And it made me so anxious and so frustrated at times, but I have the ability to push through that and then enjoy the game as somebody who loves playing sports.”

Her passion did not stop inside sports, though. Since a young age, Keren has also been involved in art. In her frosh year, she took the Study of Visual Arts, progressing all the way to the Honors Directed Portfolio in her senior year. Creating different types of art with a wide range of tools and materials, Keren ultimately found a special affinity for working with clay. 

“I had a lot of clay embedded in my artworks, but I also did some woodwork, as well as different paper techniques,” Keren said. “But to me, clay was really important because it’s very one-to-one: you do something and you see it. That is something you don’t get out of a lot of other mediums.”

For her AP 3D Art portfolio, Keren investigated part of her culture and identity by representing objects and symbols from the Korean culture, like apricots, which correspond to loyalty and fidelity. 

“I wanted to create a piece that was like, ‘I’m not forgetting that part of me and I’m always going to come back to it,’” Keren said. “Creating pieces that have that deep significance was very challenging for me because I was very used to just making art based on aesthetics and functionality.”

Keren connected with members of her extended family throughout the process, growing closer to the culture that her first-generation immigrant mother was once shielded from.

“A lot of the artworks required me to FaceTime my grandmother, and I recreated some of her artwork as well,” Keren said. “The hours that we had talked together, and then going back to visit her a couple of times, was really influential for me. Because she lives on the East coast, it’s difficult to kind of have that presence with her, and the art really bridged the gap that we had.”

Visual arts teacher Brian Caponi, who taught Keren in the Study of Visual Arts, Ceramics and AP 3D Art classes, saw her character and connection to art grow over the years. He admires her thoughtful and open-minded approach to every piece she works on. 

“I really appreciate that she listens,” Caponi said. “She’s listening and digesting, and really thinking about what she wants to do. She takes feedback or suggestions and she’s willing to think about things in a lot of different ways and not a lot of students are like that.”

Close friend Bahar Sodeifi (’25), who first met Keren in lower school, notices similar characteristics in Keren and echoed her care and awareness to the people around her.  

“Keren is very generous,” Bahar said. “I’ve never seen Keren not willing to give something or do something — she’s very thoughtful in that manner.”

Honors Directed Portfolio allowed Keren to specifically hone in on the idea of process over product. She made clay pots but only glazed them halfway with different historical designs, touching upon the ever-evolving nature of art. 

“It was very difficult for me to come out of my comfort zone and to not always know what my final idea is going to be,” Keren said. “That’s a perfect example of how by working through it and making these mistakes you really have a polished kind of product.”

Similar to finding her voice on the water polo team, Keren needed to find her own ground within the pieces she created. As she progressed through Harker’s art program, she found confidence within herself, de-emphasizing the finality of her work and rather forming a more fluid connection with her art.

“It’s hard for me to say that this is something I want everyone to see,” Keren said. “In the back of my mind, I’ll always be ‘Well, no one has to see it. I’ll just put it in my room or I’ll just make it for myself.’ But to put myself out there and say that I created something that people should look at is definitely something I had to grow into.”

Whether its playing her best in the pool around her team or showing people a part of herself through her art, Keren strives to focus on the intricate process of re-trys and re-runs that eventually lead to something that she feels proud of. 

“Perfection shouldn’t be the goal,” Keren said. “It’s important to focus on the current process and to understand how things are made, or what makes you who you are and your experiences, rather than the end goal.”