By Vikki Bowes-Mok

April 2024 brought together nearly 400 Eagle alums. From San Francisco and Los Angeles to Boston and New York and even as far as London, Harker graduates gathered together in community for the first-ever Alumni Month!

This new tradition was a grand success and the school plans to keep it for decades to come. As most Eagles know, October hosts Harker Day and Alumni Reunion Weekend so the addition of Alumni Month in the spring gives alumni more opportunities to stay connected.

“One of the highlights for me was receiving big hugs from alums who I had previously never met!” beamed Karan Lodha ’04, director of alumni relations. “After the isolation and separation that characterized so many of our lives during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, our alumni community seems thrilled to have ways to reconnect with each other and to rebuild old connections – and to form new ones as well.”

The month was brimming with activities, from regional receptions to alums coming back to campus.

• Regional receptions were all teeming with excitement and local appeal. In London, Stephanie Guo ’09 and Natasha Wu ’08 hosted an event at English pub Royal Oak while in Boston they came together at PKL to play pickleball and shuffleboard.
• Namrata Anand ’10 and Alex Iftimie ’03 attended the Harker Research Symposium and discussed the future of AI (read more: Luminaries Discuss “The AI Revolution” At 2024 Research Symposium).
• Earth Week brought Simar Mangat ’13 and Sarai Rojas ’14 back to campus to discuss the importance of addressing climate change.
• The Harker Alumni Podcast featured Raina Kumra ’91 who shared her experience as a student at Harker, her perspective on working in a broad range of industries and roles, and what she’s discovered about herself along the way.

The magic of Harker Alumni Month is that it will happen annually and include alums from all the classes – including those who graduated from the Palo Alto Military Academy, Miss Harker’s School and Harker Academy. San Francisco hosted quite the cross-generational gathering, bringing together alums from the Class of 1979 to the most recent graduates from 2023.

“There is perhaps something to be said about the values and experiences that we take with us after leaving Harker that make connecting and reconnecting with one another so simple,” said Guo after organizing the gathering in London with Wu that brought more than a dozen alums together. “It felt extraordinary that old friends and complete strangers alike could come together and fill an old London pub with hours of laughter as we reminisced on our Harker days and shared stories of our lives since. It really did feel like a small slice of home.”

Vikki Bowes-Mok is a freelance writer and editor.