Seniors become graduates at 2022 ceremony

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The Class of 2022 took their final steps as Harker seniors at last night’s Graduation Ceremony, held at the Mountain Winery. Accompanied by The Harker Chamber Orchestra, this year’s graduating seniors made their way to their seats as the ceremony began. The 2022 Graduation Chorus, directed by Jennifer Sandusky, then sang music teacher Susan Nace’s arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Upper school head Butch Keller introduced 2022 valedictorian Rohan Thakur, who spoke on the resilience displayed by his fellow graduates in the face of the massive changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This resilience, he said, will be important to face the rapidly changing world he and his classmates will be entering after high school. “It is imperative that we use the resilience we have acquired to defend what we know is right in our hearts,” he said. “It is imperative that we take the ethics we have learned during our time at Harker and apply them in the real world.”

Thakur stressed that in addition to meeting oncoming challenges, resilience will be necessary to pursue goals important to them: “It takes courage to not only find what we love, but pursue it wholeheartedly even when other paths seem simpler.”

Last night’s graduation keynote address was delivered by Andy Fang ’10, co-founder and CTO of DoorDash, the popular food delivery platform that he co-founded in 2013 while attending Stanford University. Fang offered the students some insights from his own experience building a company. One lesson was to learn how to identify growth potential, something he learned early on at Stanford. “Our first year at DoorDash, we hired someone from a military background with no prior tech industry experience,” he said. “Today, he runs a multi-billion dollar business at DoorDash.” He also spoke on the importance of being self-aware and self-motivated. “If you can set your mind on something with self-awareness and drive, there’s not much that can get in your way,” he said.

Fang’s final lesson was “believing in yourself,” again using his own experience as an example. Early in DoorDash’s life, there was not much enthusiasm about the company from investors and peers. “In those early months, we knew that there were people who loved our products, customers who appreciated the restaurant selection and convenience, merchants who appreciated increased sales and dashers who appreciated flexible income,” he said. This knowledge helped company leadership through these and more obstacles, and by 2019 DoorDash had become “the largest delivery player in America. Don’t let your confidence be diminished by the opinions of others.”

Following the Graduation Chorus’ performance of “The Harker School Song,” head of school Brian Yager delivered this year’s farewell speech. He began with the account of the 27-man expedition of the Endurance, a ship that was trapped in an ice pack in 1915 and eventually sank. All of her crew survived and were eventually rescued after a daring series of attempts. Reading this story, Yager said, brought to mind the various ways the Harker community endured over the last two years. This in turn led him to contemplate the effects human achievements have over longer periods of time, quoting Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” an allegory written “with the goal of capturing the impermanence of empires,” he said, a theme in a poem he quoted by Harker rising sophomore Iris Cai.

“These poems paint a doleful picture, I realize, and suggest that those things which we create, those things which we do cannot reasonably endure, and that to believe otherwise is folly,” he said. “Yet behind the somber sentiment, there is a seed of hope implied, which is that while neither we nor our deeds can with the inevitable shifting sand of time, they can change the way those sands will shift.”

Following his address, each of the graduates walked to the stage to receive their diplomas, with the names being announced by the 2022 class dean, upper school English teacher Chris Hurshman. Per tradition, the graduates then shifted the tassels on their caps, which were then celebratorily tossed in the air. A flock of doves was then released into the air to put the finishing touch on the occasion. Congratulations to the Class of 2022!

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