“It’s special because the creatures have adapted to deal with the sun (during low tide) but also being fully submerged when it’s high tide,” she said. “It’s like sampling ocean life.”

Li’s fascination with tidepools fed a passion for marine biology, as well as organism-level branches of biology (such as birds and trees) and microbiology. These interests have since made their way into her gardening and cooking endeavors.

Tomatoes and sunflowers are staples in her garden, and she has even grown juicy spiky cucumbers that can’t be found in supermarkets. To optimize her produce, Li has used her knowledge of  N-P-K — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium — ratios in fertilizer.

Inside the kitchen, Li cooks the plants she gardens, using butternut squash in bread one year when she harvested too much. From biology, she knew that butternut squash comprised mostly water and some carbohydrates. From cooking, she knew about “tangzhong,” a mixture of boiling water and flour that pregelatinizes starch in the flour for a moist final product.

“So I was like, ‘OK, well, squash has starch like flour, and it’s mostly water,’” she said. “If I cut the steamed squash, and then I use that in place of tangzhong in bread or baked goods, that in theory should keep the bread similarly moist. And so I did that (and) it was really similar to milk bread.”

Li’s cooking and gardening adventures have developed in conjunction with her curiosity in biology in what she describes as a positive feedback loop. Though Li isn’t sure how her pursuit of biology will look in college and beyond, she hopes for exposure to new flavors of biology.

“Biology is the study of life and living things, and as a living thing, it’s just really cool to try to understand how we work,” she said. 

My first foray into minimalism — keeping only what holds value for me — in eighth grade focused on material things. I tackled my clutter because I wanted to rid myself of the weight of items that bore the burden of a past I no longer identified with. It seemed to be an avenue for growth, an invitation to newness.

I won’t lie and say it was easy. I value economy, and it felt supremely wasteful to throw away all
these things that were still “good to use.” These items, moreover, were rife with my personal history. I thought I could not bear to part with them.

So I negotiated with the selves I had been: the Irene who felt guilty playing with toys because she thought she needed to grow up, the Irene who could not stand Holden’s teen angst, the Irene who was not ready to leave her life in SoCal. In resolving tensions between my past and future selves, I learned about who I was and who I wanted to be. I redefined play as a necessary complement
to work; I empathized more with Holden’s directionlessness. I came to terms with my past by removing things from my life only after conscious evaluation; thus I shaped my present and took control of my future.

Much of my present has been formed this way, as I’ve extended minimalism to all areas of my life. One of the hardest decisions I made in high school was quitting competition karate sophomore year, which I’d invested hours a day into years prior. I loved the friends I trained with, the excitement of learning a new “kata,” the work that went into perfecting the basics. I felt that quitting karate would render the effort I’d put in meaningless. I feared losing the friends I had made, a slow moving apart that would return us to strangers. At the same time, I yearned to write and to grow in my writing-related pursuits in junior year. I chose this growth. And when I gave up karate, it was a subtraction that enriched my life.

So have other simplifications over the past year. I trimmed down my clothes to a capsule
wardrobe, a small collection of pieces that work together seamlessly. I withdrew from a nonfiction composition and reading Foothill class a few months ago to spend more time with friends and family (and to read fiction books instead). I turned off nearly all notifications. Each “no” is in a sense a “yes”: to more time with friends and family, to more mental bandwidth, to more energy on pursuits that matter to me.

Minimalism was how I found balance in high school, a way of asserting control when otherwise I felt in danger of drowning. It became a way to dissect my life, from the things I kept to the commitments I accepted to the way I spent my time. In the chaos of each day, I reached for simplicity. The sum is lightness and joy.

Gallery • 1 Photos

Photo courtesy of Brandon Seow

A Taser alarm: It may sound slightly odd, but it’s what sophomore Brandon Seow spent six weeks of his summer on.

Following a weeklong family vacation to French Polynesia, Seow took two engineering classes in hopes of creating a portfolio before applying to the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, or COSMOS, next summer. It was in his first class, a six-week course on engineering fundamentals at West Valley College, that he and his groupmates decided to create an alarm that stunned its user prior to going off.

The proposal was initially a joke, according to Seow. “It was right in the beginning (of the course) when we were supposed to shout out ideas to the group,” he said. “One of my peers shouted out ‘Taser alarm,’ which sounded funny at first, but somehow the teacher accepted it.”

During the class, Seow and his groupmates created a design, ordered the necessary parts — including electrode patches and wires to hook to phones — and then assembled the contraption. Though Seow’s work mainly involved writing code, he also aided with the physical engineering.

With limited supplies and an unavailable teammate, alongside a slew of bugs typical of an engineering project, Seow’s group faced its fair share of troubles. “We waited for a while longer than we should have to start building (the alarm) in real life — putting the parts together — because we had to do a lot of prior research,” he said. “Our project was one of the harder ones out of all the groups’.”

Still, the team was able to troubleshoot and ended up finishing on time. Beyond engineering skills, Seow also gained friendships from the course. “It’s fun because I get to meet students of all ages,” he said. “I have friends there who are in college, past college and going to be a junior (in high school) next year. So being able to talk with them and relate to them is nice.”

Overall, Seow appreciated the versatility of the class, which always kept him interested: From circuit building to coding Arduino, there was always something new to learn. “Every day is just a little different,” he said.

Rishay Jain: Astrophysics internship

Gallery • 1 Photos

Photo courtesy of Rishay Jain

Senior Rishay Jain’s work touched the stars at his Lockheed Martin internship this summer, where he studied solar flares: explosions of electromagnetic radiation or plasma from the sun that can travel up to 3,000 kilometers a second. “If, by chance, this plume of material hits the Earth, and is able to penetrate Earth’s protective magnetic field, we could be severely impacted,” he wrote in an interview follow-up note. “Astronauts would be in extreme danger, air force/military operations could be interrupted, and civilians could experience power and communications blackouts.”

Through working in the Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center, Jain is developing an application that helps scientists track solar flares and their evolution. His tool analyzes photos of the sun’s surface to detect where, when and how often flares occur, with the goal of predicting them more accurately.

Jain’s application builds on the work of previous Gunn interns at Lockheed Martin. They, like him, were part of the decadeslong joint program that sends a few rising seniors from Gunn to intern at the company during their junior-to-senior-year summer. “While I’ve learned a lot of new concepts for my projects at Lockheed, I have to apply nearly everything I’ve learned in the rigorous math, science and engineering courses I’ve taken at Gunn, using everything from vector math from Analysis to electromagnetic waves from chemistry and physics, and even computer-vision/-programming techniques from GRT (Gunn Robotics Team),” Jain wrote.

At networking events, Jain has been able to learn from the people who work at Lockheed. During the 10-year-anniversary celebration of the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, a NASA sun imager, he heard about the project’s challenges and highlights firsthand. “There’s more than just engineering,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that go into these projects, and there’s a lot of collaboration and teamwork spirit.”

Jain will continue to add more features to his application to analyze different types of data over the next eight months of his internship. “There are real-world impacts to the kind of work that happens over there,” he said.

Beverly Lamis: Circus camp counselor and lifeguard

Gallery • 1 Photos

Photos courtesy of Beverly Lamis

Junior Beverly Lamis juggled the demands of two jobs and walked the tightrope of responsibility this past summer. A counselor at 888 Monkeys Circus Camp and a lifeguard at Greenmeadow Pool and Community Center, Lamis both taught and supervised children, learning new skills along the way.

Lamis and her twin brother, Jack Lamis, made a last-minute decision to become counselors at the camp after hearing about the opportunity from stage tech teacher Jennifer Ellington, who is also one of the directors of the camp. At the camp, the twins taught circus arts — trapeze, juggling, acrobatics, stilts and more — to kids aged 5 to 14.

As a counselor, Lamis ran stations that students rotated through, each focusing on a different skill. “We’re teaching the kids how to do it and pushing them further than what they think they can do,” she said. “For the (skills that require balance), it’s a lot of just spotting the kids because they’re pretty young.”

At performances, Lamis got to see her teaching and the students’ hard work pay off. “By the end of the week, most kids are able to do whichever (skills) they really tried hard at,” she said. “Usually, at the end of the week, we show all of the skills that they learned to the parents.”

The stories her boss told and the specialists the camp brought in gave Lamis a newfound understanding of circus life. “It’s been a surreal experience,” she said. “My boss, he’s part of the circus, so it’s opened my eyes to a whole different volume of life living (as) part of the circus and having to be on the go all the time.”

Apart from her full-day job as a camp counselor, Lamis set aside time to complete summer homework in preparation for classes, go to the gym and work at the Greenmeadow Community Center, where she watched over swimmers as a lifeguard and did maintenance work around the pool and bathrooms.

Despite younger students’ temper tantrums and unruliness, Lamis loved working with them. “It’s really fun to teach them how to do something and then watch them succeed and build on it,” she said. “They always just love to show you the littlest things, and it’s so fulfilling seeing the joy on their faces after they’ll get one trick, and they’ll start to get it over and over again.”

Gunn English classes vary greatly in the ways and extents to which they cover grammar and usage. Only some classes feature it prominently in their curriculum, leading to a disparity in these key skills. Since the correct employment of grammar and mechanics and understanding of usage is foundational to good writing, students could benefit from broader and more consistent instruction on grammar and mechanics.

Incorrect grammar can profoundly change the meaning of a sentence. Take, for example, the often-used comparison of “let’s eat Grandma” and “let’s eat, Grandma.” One proposes eating Grandma while the other invites her to mealtime. Correct grammar and mechanics go beyond creating sensical sentences: Knowing how best to order words and when to use certain punctuation marks allows students to get their ideas across in the most effective way possible. Substituting a period for a semicolon, for example, allows students to relate two ideas more closely; using a colon conveys a sense of drama and anticipation. Even the absence of a hyphen can change the meaning of a phrase, turning the orange-juice seller (who sells orange juice) into an orange juice seller (who is orange and sells juice of an undetermined variety).

These details empower a piece of writing. They give it nuance. They help readers interpret students’ writing the way it was intended. And despite the proliferation of grammar-checking tools available, these resources are not always reliable and may suggest edits not in line with students’ intentions. The use of these tools also represents a form of outsourcing in which students replace learning grammar with using external tools.

Correct grammar and mechanics becomes ever more crucial when the difference is a question of credibility. A cover letter with glaring grammatical errors, for instance, significantly undermines the perceived ability of the applicant. Students can be much more confident in their work outside of school—application materials, resumes, reports—when they are certain it adheres to basic English conventions, focusing their attention on polishing the content instead.

Another factor that could bolster students’ confidence in writing is more instruction on how best to structure arguments. Students should learn how to organize their thoughts so that they follow in the most logical order, and how to reason their way through an argument. Sometimes, this necessitates writing within a more natural organizational structure, as opposed to the five-paragraph essay (which is rarely, if ever, used in post-secondary education or in writing-heavy jobs). Shifting the emphasis from five-paragraph essays, which provide a useful but restrictive breakdown, could better prepare students to tackle college and real-life writing.

One reason for this limited grammatical and organizational instruction is that class time is often spent on discussions breaking down reading or student perspectives, helping students build their critical-analysis skills. While these skills matter, their utility is limited by what students can express on paper. Students analyze ideas and literary works to be able to share those thoughts with others. Without being able to order their thoughts clearly and choose the right words with style—both of which require a handle on grammar and mechanics—students communicate their thoughts less precisely and effectively. Their intended meaning may be lost to readers.

Along with more detailed writing instruction, English teachers can incorporate more opportunities to practice writing. Given the reduced number of times each class meets per week, where teachers could have assigned four to five assessments per semester on the older schedule, they now can only assign an average of two to three, along with smaller assignments. Limited by the three-classes-a-week schedule and by the new homework policies’ preventing teachers from assigning homework due on Monday, teachers often hesitate to assign writing practice, instead sticking to reading and discussion preparation.

Still, teachers can dedicate more class time to short writing exercises—separate from work time for assessments—or assign prompts graded on completion to bolster students’ writing practices. With more frequent, sustained practice, students are more likely to be confident in their writing and to develop style, going beyond simple, conventional English to a “distinction, excellence, originality and character in any form of artistic or literary expression,” according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary. Confidence and style are closely linked skills: With practice and experimentation in different ways of expressing the same thought, students grow to be more confident in their writing choices and develop a stronger voice. That voice is what makes writing compelling.

The current curriculum does support students’ English skills in important ways. Its flexibility, giving teachers extensive agency over content and teaching methods, allows students to learn varied skills, engage in wide-ranging activities and examine topics through diametric lenses. The focus on discussions, in large or small groups, puts students in control of their learning and in personal connection with the topic—they develop an original interpretation by synthesizing their lived experiences with their own and others’ insights from the source material. Most of all, teachers are passionate about what they teach and ready to dedicate time to help students individually, promoting a love of English literature and writing. Still, according to a survey from The Oracle with 104 responses, only 26.0% of students felt prepared or very prepared for college writing, while 39.4% of students felt the same levels of preparedness for college mathematics.

These numbers may point to an overemphasis on STEM classes, but more importantly, they should nudge the English curriculum toward small but meaningful changes: more complex analysis of grammar and conventional usage, more instruction on advancing a cogent argument in a less restrictive structure and more opportunities to write and develop style. These are the paths to elevate writing confidence.

At 1:20 p.m., power went out throughout campus. Around this time, administration received a report that a large tree branch had fallen on a power line in the parking lot, causing a large spark. Principal Wendy Stratton and other administrators called emergency services and oversaw the immediate response. “We heard that (a tree branch) was down so we moved to a shelter in place for the campus before we could assess it,” she said. “We assessed it and saw that the wire was fine. The power outage was another thing that was happening at the same time. (The two events) are not necessarily linked.”

Because of the power outage, the school-wide intercom was disabled. Administrators emailed all teachers at 1:30 p.m. to enforce a shelter-in-place order while they could determine whether it was safe for students to proceed to their next class. “We were just taking precautions,” Stratton said. “We did not think anyone was at risk.” 

Teachers without access to their school email on their phones (or who were not connected to Wi-Fi via hotspot) may not have been able to receive directives from the administration. Without knowledge of the shelter-in-place order, some classes were let outside. Students who were off-campus during PRIME may also have been unaware of the situation on campus, too. 

Physics teacher James Lincoln updated his CAASPP testing classroom on the current situation. “This is a significant hazard, so we are sheltering in place,” he said. Since the black-out was unexpected, there was no contingency plan in place, according to Lincoln. 

Juniors working on the English Language Arts Computer Adaptive Test portion of the assessment were told they could complete it at a later time, possibly during Wednesday’s testing session. “It looks like we’re going to have to look at the CAASPP testing schedule because they had no access to the Wi-Fi to finish,” Stratton said.

Junior Sophia Turean was distressed by the prospect of having to finish the test on another day. “I feel a little upset because I want to finish my CAASPP test,” she said. “I don’t want to have to redo it because it didn’t save. I don’t want to do the rest of school in the dark (either).” 

Junior Aeron Man was surprised by the situation. “I think the current wind trends and situation led me to believe that it would be problematic, but I didn’t expect it to be during CAASPP testing, which is the worst situation,” he said. 

At 2:00 p.m., students were released to their second-period classes. Campus supervisors directed students to remain under overhangs and avoid all trees. 

Due to the recent increase in strong winds, the administrators have taken safety precautions toward falling debris, especially as this is the second report of large objects falling on campus in a week. “MOT (Maintenance, Operations and Transportation) has come between last week and this week and they actually assessed all the trees and cut down some limbs that looked fragile,” Stratton said. “There have definitely been efforts made to ensure that if we see something, we do something about it, (but) we can’t anticipate everything.” 

According to the National Weather Service, the winds were due to the atmospheric river currently impacting the San Francisco Bay Area. The NWS has issued a severe high wind warning and moderate flood watch until 11 p.m. on Tuesday, March 14.

The winds resulted in a fallen tree by the library near Arastradero Road, which has since been cordoned off. The severe conditions also caused a decorative metal panel on the P-building to fall on a student who was walking beneath it. 

Buildings on the northern end of campus—including the P-building, N-building and Village—experienced a power and WiFi outage toward the end of second period, with power being restored at the start of lunch. Sophomore Laura Cheunkarndee was in the S-building during the outage. “We were playing in orchestra and all of a sudden, the lights (went) out,” she said. “We just kept playing because we could (still) read the music.” The sudden outage also resulted in the cancellation of the High School Musical sneak peek of “Status Quo.” 

Before lunch, Assistant Principal Harvey Newland sent out a Schoology update advising students of the extreme weather conditions. “Due to high winds, we have asked staff to keep their classrooms open during lunch if possible,” it stated. “We recommend that you find a place to eat indoors to avoid flying debris and broken trees.” At 11:52 a.m., teachers were instructed to open their classrooms to students during lunch to provide shelter from falling debris. 

At the end of lunch, administrators broadcasted a schoolwide announcement. “All students and staff should remain where they are and not go to class until further notice,” it stated. A few minutes later, a follow-up announcement ensued. “We are no longer transitioning to third period at this time,” it stated. 

Budget Manager Silvia Griswold communicated with administrators to secure areas on campus. “The winds were very strong and it was unsafe to be outside because trees and other things can dislodge,” she said. “(The administrators) wanted to make sure that everyone was safe and asked students to shelter inside until further notice. All the administrators went outside at lunch to make sure students were sheltering in place.”

The outages elicited mixed reactions from students. Sophomore Melinda Huang noted the unprecedented nature of the outage. “The winds have been super strong,” she said. “It’s been scary having to take cover because (this) has never happened to me before.” Others, such as freshman Tom Scheib, were more relaxed. “It was windy, but there are people in charge to make sure that the problems don’t get too big,” he said. 

At 1:11 p.m., administrators announced that students should go to class immediately, and that they would not be allowed out unless for emergency bathroom breaks. “Students should go directly to third period and avoid any areas with trees and only using open walkways,” they said. 

At 1:15 p.m., power went out for the southern end of campus, which had not lost power during the previous outage.

Gallery • 5 Photos

Photo courtesy of E O'Connell

A deciduous tree falls down under the force of the winds near the F-Building

Contextualizing grade discussions

According to senior Justin Hou, students discuss grades beyond those given for major assessments. “Sometimes it happens for assignments, especially group projects,” he said. While some disclose specific scores, others give a more qualitative indication on how they did. In Hou’s friend group, these kinds of terms are more common than official, numeric scores. “There’s a sense of respect and community in that we support each other, and if you don’t want to share that information, there’s no urgency to do so,” he said.

Reluctance to share grades can cause students to be vague about their scores. Junior Lauren Kane prefers to keep her scores to herself but will share them with peers if asked. “I try not to get too involved in the conversation, and I don’t go too in depth when describing my grades,” she said. She avoids discussing grades with close friends, explaining that it has increasingly become a source of uncomfortable conversations and stress among them.

On the other hand, freshman Eman Ebrat’s closeness with her friend group encourages her to discuss grades in more detail. “I feel like I can be more personal with them,” she said.

In tricky situations when a peer has a lower grade, students navigate them with supportive words and attitudes. For instance, Ebrat adopts an empathetic stance, telling the classmate that their effort and hard work is enough. Similarly, Kane redirects the conversation to the peer’s strengths rather than focusing on the score. “Usually I’ll counteract with something else I did badly in and they did better in,” she said.

Though conversations about grades typically start with one or two people, they can snowball as other students join in. “Usually when I talk about grades, other people start talking about it first, so then I’ll join in the conversation,” junior Analiesse Schoenen said.

Students’ motivations, hesitations

Sometimes, simple curiosity can prompt students to ask about each other’s grades, but often, more complicated intentions motivate these conversations.

Comparison is one factor for students to ascertain whether they did better than or as well as others. Desire for validation of their hard work can drive students to ask their peers about scores. “At Gunn, especially among certain groups of people, there’s a lot of comparison for people to validate themselves,” Schoenen said. “People like hearing when other people did badly on something, and they also like knowing that they did better than other people.”

Students may also discuss grades to seek a sense of security built on knowing how they stand in relation to the class. Especially for harder tests, knowing that the whole class performed poorly can dispel anxiety over lower grades by providing a frame of reference. “I feel more comforted knowing that I’m not a failure, and that it was just a hard test,” Kane said.

In the face of unsatisfactory grades, students can discuss them to commiserate with each other and acknowledge common challenges, such as difficult questions, unfair grading or ineffective teaching methods. “Usually if I’m talking about grades, I’m complaining about it,” Schoenen said.

Of course, students have reservations when it comes to sharing grades, including not wanting to contribute to a toxic culture of competition. “I typically try not to discuss grades, just because I don’t want to feed that kind of environment,” senior Wyatt Pedersen said.

Kane recognizes that conversations about grades always involve risk, given how straight-cut grade comparisons are. “At least one person is going to leave the conversation hurt,” she said.

Weighing consequences

Dangers to discussing grades, including lowered self-esteem, worsened health and a stressful school environment, exist alongside less visible benefits.

Conversations about grades can cause students to equate their worth with their grade, creating perspectives that—regardless of score—are harmful, according to Kane. “If I do better than someone, then I get too overconfident and a little bit cocky,” she said. “But if I do worse than someone, I get really unmotivated. I feel really, really hopeless. I feel a lot of pressure.”

Low grades, which can ultimately be insignificant in the long term, wield outsized impact when compared to others’ grades. “Sometimes I’ll get caught up in one or two grades and then feel bad about myself for doing bad on a small portion of a big class,” Schoenen said.

To catch up with other people’s grades, students may prioritize academic achievement over their mental and physical wellbeing, a repercussion reflected in Pedersen’s experience. “Learning about others’ grades makes it standardized or glorified to work past your limit and to go far into the night doing homework, as if that’s normal, when it obviously should not be,” he said.

Over time, these pressures can solidify into more serious problems. “It’s a hidden injury,” a junior responded to the survey. “After time it develops into eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. But you never know what’s inside you that’s deteriorating.”

Grade discussions create a culture of stress for some, especially for those without the appropriate mental support helping them put the importance of grades into perspective. “If you don’t have a supportive community or feel more self-conscious about your abilities, it definitely can be harmful in creating a stress culture in which you feel like you’re only more worthy if you work harder,” Hou said.

Consequences aside, students’ asking each other about their grades can reveal unhealthy friendship boundaries. According to chemistry teacher Casey O’Connell, students may feel forced to share their grades in order to avoid the awkwardness of refusing to answer. He asks students to consider whether enthusiastic consent to these conversations was given. “Is your consent just presumed as the default?” he said. “Are your boundaries being violated? Would you prefer that people didn’t ask you about your grade?”

Meanwhile, grade comparisons can be constructive in helping students gauge whether their effort levels are high enough, according to Hou. Talking about grades helped him realize he could do better in tests, such as with a chemistry test he had earlier in the year. “I felt like I prepared for it, but it was at the last minute, and I didn’t do as well as a result,” he said. “So for the next test, I improved my study habits by spacing my study sessions and studying more consistently.”

Discussing grades also simplifies employing the help of peers who grasp the content more clearly or have better study strategies. Sharing grades has helped Ebrat find students who can explain how to answer questions she missed, as she did when she once got a low score on a biology test. “We worked together a little during lunch and before school,” she said. “On the next test, that allowed me to understand the material better since I had a close friend helping me.”

Regardless of whether teachers prohibit grade discussions, math teacher Gopi Tantod believes that students will inevitably continue to discuss their grades. “Everyone discusses grades—it’s not something you’re going to be able to stop,” she said.

In that light, distinguishing between productive and harmful conversations about grades becomes more important. The line is drawn, according to O’Connell, depending on how grades and the surrounding conversations are used. “If grades are just there as a helpful measurement and indicator of how prepared you were, then the conversation turns to behaviors that can be helped and changed,” he said.

Yet when percentages eclipse learning, when grades define a student’s worth, these conversations quickly turn dangerous. “Grades become a value on somebody, and instead of empowering, they become judgmental,” O’Connell said. “A grade as a label on somebody is a judgment. A grade as a descriptor of how you did can be a good measurement of what needs to change, or it can be a measurement of how far you’ve come.”

Sandilya credits his achievements to hard work and dedication: He spends 14 to 15 hours on ice hockey each week—comprising practice, off-ice workouts and travel time to tournaments—and has been playing hockey since he was six and a half years old. Sandilya practices nearly year round. “Summer is usually the off-season, but there’s always something going on,” he said. “There’s spring hockey, and there are summer clinics. There’s usually never a break longer than three weeks.”

Practices usually start with a workout and move into passing and skill work drills in the rink for warm-up. “Then we’ll get into more specific stuff based on what we need to work on,” he said. “Sometimes [that means] special teams, which is the case when one team has one more player than another when [a player is out] serving a penalty. At the end [of practice], we’ll simulate a live game.”

Because there is no hockey team at Gunn, Sandilya plays for the Palo Alto High School team as well as the Golden State Elite Hockey club team. Between his club team and Monday-night tournaments in San Jose for his school team, he participates in 30 to 40 games a season, traveling as far as Michigan and Minnesota to play.

It’s not just Sandilya’s love of competing and the health benefits from playing hockey that keep him invested—he appreciates the community he’s built through the sport. “Most of my teammates, I’ve known for four or five years,” he said. “I’m really close to them, and they’re like my brothers.”

According to Sandilya, living in California does not hinder playing ice hockey because the facilities his teams use are well maintained. The hockey culture, however, is different from that of the East Coast. “Last year, we played in a tournament that was predominantly East Coast teams,” Sandilya said. “We weren’t used to that style of play, which is a lot more physical with a lot more hitting, but that’s just how hockey changes from area to area.”

Generally, the announcement is a cause for celebration. “My team usually gets a decent place—we’ve gone to a lot of previous international competitions in the past,” Chan said. “So we look up, they announce our score and we’re all celebrating because we got a good score.”

Yang and Chan are both part of the San Francisco Ice Theatre’s 24-member junior team, which they joined in seventh and ninth grade respectively for a total of 10 years of skating each. Chan described their shared sport as “ballet on ice.”

As part of the San Francisco Ice Theater’s junior team, Yang and Chan have accumulated noteworthy achievements. Their team has qualified for the National Theatre on Ice Competition each year, winning third place in 2022. They have also qualified for international competitions held every other year by being one of three top teams in the U.S.. They will attend the next international Nations’ Cup in Boston this year.

Along with team competitions, Yang competes individually. According to Yang, the difference between individual and team figure skating extends beyond separate competitions, with more opportunities for individual skaters to compete. “Individual skating is more technical, so there are more jumps and more spins that you have to do in a program,” she said. “But for team skating, we just have to keep formations and keep in sync.”

Yang and Chan practice year round—usually individually before school on weekdays and with their team on weekends—but compete only in the winter. Chan trains with private instructors to work on her jumps, spins and individual program. In team practices, they warm up with their team before splitting up into different groups to run through general exercises. “I go [to practice] before school most of the time, and I skate for two or three hours on the weekends,” Yang said.

Programs are developed with music that frames the overall concept chosen first, according to Yang. Yang and Chan’s coaches then choreograph the program, weaving in jumps, spins and edges (Chan described these as the skating in between jumps and spins).

According to Chan, the team practices and performs two programs throughout the entire season: a three-minute short program called the “choreographic exercise” and a five to six minute long program called the “free skate.”

For instance, the San Francisco Ice Theatre’s free skate program last year involved a puppet theme, complete with hair, makeup and costumes. “There was a puppet leader and a rogue puppet, and they took over the group of everyone else, who were normal puppets [in the performance],” Chan said.

A key challenge with choreographing programs is accounting for the difference in skill levels between all 24 skaters. “It’s hard to find 24 skaters who can all do this jump and this spin,” Chan said. “So sometimes the coaches will have everyone doing one specific element, but if that can’t happen, they might have half of the skaters do an element in the center while the other skaters do something else on the outside.”

When it comes to actually performing, hiding fatigue can be a challenge, according to Yang. “Most of it is just being elegant when you’re actually really tired,” she said.

What Yang enjoys the most about figure skating is also what she finds the most challenging: jumps. Yang is currently working on a triple Salchow (three rotations in the air), a far cry from her first successful axel jump in eighth grade—a moment that stands out to Yang in her skating career—after a series of falls and under-rotations. “An axel is a jump where I rotate one-and-a-half times in the air,” she said. “I’d been working on that jump for almost a year, and it felt really good to finally land it.”

On the other hand, Chan loves the community aspect of team figure skating. “It’s not just about the competition, although that’s a large part and that’s fun too,” Chan said. “You get to make friends, and sometimes we have team-bonding [activities], which are really fun.”

Despite living in California, where Yang explained that figure skating is not particularly popular, ice rinks are air conditioned and open all year, and she faces few other skating-specific challenges. “[Nothing else] besides getting cold and having your toes freeze off,” Yang joked.