Gunn’s jazz bands include two courses — Jazz Band and Jazz Ensemble Honors — taught by Gunn Jazz Director Shawn McGinn and Gunn Band Director Todd Summers.

According to McGinn, the festival was an important opportunity for his students to grow musically and experience the city in which jazz music originated. 

“The festival is a chance to perform for an audience,” he said. “In that audience, there are professional players and teachers who give you feedback on your performance to help make you a better group. New Orleans is very important to the history of jazz music in particular because the original types of jazz came together in New Orleans.”

Percussionist sophomore Brandon Seow was excited when he learned that he had the opportunity to go to New Orleans.

“My initial reaction was coming to terms with the fact that we were actually going to New Orleans,” Seow said. “The place has such a mystical vibe to it, so actually being able to go to the area where jazz started was insane.”

Besides performing for hundreds of audience members, Gunn’s jazz bands were able to tour parts of the city. To McGinn, the most exciting part of the trip was experiencing the daily culture of New Orleans.

 “You’ll hear performers playing in all the large cities in the U.S., but none playing jazz music on every corner throughout like in New Orleans,” he said. “It’s very special in that way. You walk down the street and there is live music surrounding you. That’s the kind of world that I want to live (in).”

According to Seow, each day in New Orleans was packed with performances and activities.

“For me, it was an early start every single day, so it was exhausting, but in a good way,” he said. “Some of the highlights, besides being able to explore a beautiful city with my friends, included playing at Loyola University, as well as attending two concerts in Preservation Hall, a very historically rich place, where we were able to listen to and watch some of the best jazz musicians in New Orleans.”

While alto saxophonist sophomore Margaret Beery agrees that touring the city was rewarding, she also appreciated building stronger connections with bandmates.

“My favorite moments outside of performing were ones spent with my friends, whether that was hanging out at the hotel, eating meals or talking on the bus,” she said. “Generally, just getting to know my bandmates better as people.”

Still, there were some setbacks on the travel back. According to Beery, the flight plan back to California was changed due to bad weather. The bands ultimately flew from Louisiana to Orlando, Florida, and then to Las Vegas for an overnight stay before flying home the morning of March 4, a day later than planned. 

“It wasn’t very fun in the moment, but I think those little hardships that we had together bonded our group really well,” McGinn said.

According to McGinn, the most important part of the experience was gaining a new perspective both on music and the world.

“(Immersing) yourself in a culture of music that is different than your own is super important to do, because when you engage in the other you get a new perspective,” he said. “Once you understand more than just your little bubble, you see how another way to live might feel.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the jazz bands’ travel delays. The jazz bands’ flight from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Orlando, Florida, was delayed due to incumbent weather. The bands then flew to Las Vegas, Nevada, taking two more flights to Orange County and Oakland. Their bags, however, remained in Las Vegas and were shipped to SFO before being delivered to Gunn on March 5. 

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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

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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

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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.”