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This article originally appeared in the summer 2015 Harker Quarterly.
Generous endowments to Harker have made a significant impact in 30 students’ lives over the last five years and, starting this fall, faculty members also will benefit from a Harker family’s generosity.
Harker has two student endowments: the John Near Excellence in History Education Endowment Fund, established in 2009, and the Mitra Family Endowment for the Humanities, established in 2011.
As the funds have matured, more students have been granted funds for research; this past year a record nine seniors were selected as beneficiaries. Now, a new endowment established by Raju and Balu Vegesna (Ramanand and Srivani, both grade 7) allows teachers to apply for special opportunities to expand their professional skills and knowledge.
The inaugural recipients of the Raju & Balu Vegesna Foundation for Teacher Excellence are Ruth Meyer (upper school humanities/history), Susan Nace (upper school performing arts) and Roxana Pianko (upper school humanities/history).
The 2015-16 student scholars, all rising seniors, are:
John Near Excellence in History Education Endowment Fund: Zarek Drozda, Shannon Hong, Jasmine Liu, Sadhika Malladi and Sahana Narayanan.
Mitra Family Endowment for the Humanities: Kaitlyn Gee, Kavya Ramakrishnan, Elisabeth Siegel and Natalie Simonian.
The 2014-15 Near/Mitra scholar papers are on file in the Harker library archive: http://library.harker.org/upperlibrary/nearmitra.
A summary of the 2014-15 papers can be found at Harker News: http://news. harker.org/?p=25923; search on “Endowment” at news.harker.org to find summaries of previous papers.
2014-15 John Near Excellence in History Education Endowment Fund Scholars and Paper Titles
Ayush Midha – “Blackout: The Case for Black Power in 1960s Liberation Politics”
Apoorva Rangan – “The Tet Offensive and the MACV’s Information Defensive: An Analysis of Limitations to Watchdog Journalism in the Vietnam War (1964-68)”
Felix Wu – “Straight Outta Compton: Hip- Hop and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots”
Karnika Pombra – “The United Fruition: A Historical Analysis of the Motives for the 1954 U.S.-Backed Guatemalan Coup”
Vedant Thyagaraj – “Increasing the Efficiency of United States Healthcare: Addressing Adverse Selection in the Health Insurance Market Through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”
2014-15 Mitra Family Endowment for the Humanities Scholars and Paper Titles
Aadyot Bhatnagar – “Using Antimalarial and Insecticide Resistance to Contextualize the Future of Malaria Control in Tanzania”
Maya Nandakumar – “The Enchantment of the Habit”
Agata Sorotokin – “The Truth Beyond Words: A Muisco-Historical Analysis of Selections from Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shotakovich’s Compositions Under the Stalinist Regime”
Stanley Xie – “Understanding Gender Differences in Depression: The Evolution in Our Understanding for Rumination and Co-Rumination in the Midst of the Social Media Revolution”