Two Harker teams placed among the top ten finishers in the 2009 national J8 competition. All together, 32 Harker students in eight teams of four students each submitted applications to this year’s J8 contest – the winners of which are invited to attend the annual G8 Summit with world leaders, to be held in Italy this year.

Applications included nine separate essays, three of which address global issues discussed at the G8 Summit. Over 50 applications were submitted from 14 states. Harker earned the distinction of having the greatest number of applications and of being the only school to advance more than one team to the final round, including one group that was named second runner up to the winning Nor th Miami Beach High School team.

Team Paritas et Pax was awarded third place and included juniors Connie Lu, Brandon Araki, Vishesh Jain and Andrew Zhou. Making the top ten was Team 2.2 Billion, composed of juniors Shefali Netke, Elaine Song, Curran Kaushik and Carissa Jansen. Other participants included freshmen Rohan Bopardikar, Jaya Chandra, Frederic Enea and Katie Marcus Reker; sophomores Appu Bhaskar, Jacob Chappell, Tyler Koteskey, Justine Liu, Kristi Liu, Isaac Madan, Shreya Nathan and Olivia Zhu; and juniors Ankur Ahuja, Namrata Anand, Nathaniel Edwards, Kelsey Hilbrich, Andrea Lincoln, Arjun Mody, Kendra Moss and Haran Sivakumar. Carol Zink, history teacher, and Lauri Vaughan, librarian, acted as co-facilitators for the students.

In 2007, a team of eight Harker students won the event and attended the G8 Summit in Wismar, Germany, as U.S. representatives. Significant portions of all eight applications have been posted on the GEO Club’s Web site and are available for your reading pleasure at http://web.harker.org/geo/j8/j8.html.