This two-week trip with her husband fulfilled a long-time bucket list item, and with restaurant recommendations from retired Gunn math teacher Chris Karas — who now lives in Greece — one highlight of the couple’s vacation was tasting a varied spread of the traditional cuisine.

“The food was actually one of the reasons I wanted to go,” Congress said. “We went to these tiny little restaurants that aren’t really well known and off the beaten path where somebody’s grandma would be cooking in the kitchen making homemade recipes.”

For Congress, a highlight was Greece’s balance of modern and historical life. Famous ruins such as the Acropolis, Hadrian’s Library and Lyceum displayed glimpses of ancient Greece and the history of philosophy and mathematics.

“Everything is so close to each other so you can just walk a few blocks and stumble on to a historical site,” she said. “The history is just so integrated — you can see it’s getting absorbed into the newer construction.”

Other than exploring the mainland, Congress spent a week on a cruise ship to visit the nearby islands such as Santorini and Mykonos. Not only was it a more cost effective method of travel, there were many on-board activities such as karaoke and trivia contests to keep the couple occupied in their spare time.

“The nice thing about the vacation and the cruise was that it required less planning on our side than we’ve done for trips before,” she said. “Just being able to walk around and decide what you want to do without pre-planning or making a schedule is really nice. It felt really luxurious and it definitely felt like it lowered my stress level a lot.”

During this one-week family trip in June, Tsien’s main pursuit was visiting Taipei 101, a popular architectural tourist attraction. He and his family took a 37-second elevator ride up to the observation deck on the 89th floor of the skyscraper.

“It was really cool to see the city from (so high
up),” he said. “The weather was really bad — it would just start raining randomly — but when we went, the view was good.”

Tsien last visited Taiwan when he was five, so he didn’t remember much about the country. However, having not been in such a long time allowed him to explore the city anew.

“This was basically my first time (in Taiwan),” he said. “My parents like traveling and they planned everything out, so I didn’t really know what we were doing until it happened.”

The street markets lined with food stalls and crowded with locals turned out to be the perfect place for Tsien to experience the country’s vibrant culture.

“We could barely walk through (the alleys), but the food was good,” he said. “I had some really good steak.”

For Tsien, this trip was more than just tourism. He also used this opportunity to connect with the Taiwanese half of his identity by meeting with relatives he rarely sees and visiting the apartment complex his father grew up in.

“(My dad) told me it used to be the tallest building in
the city, but now it’s just a massage parlor,” he said. “It was interesting to see because it’s different from where I grew up.”

The first two alarms were set off by some kind of smoke — potentially from foods like popcorn that have activated the sensors in the past — while the cause of the third alarm remains unknown. According to Assistant Principal of Safety Dr. Mycal Hixon, the new fire panel — which was installed over the summer to provide a safety upgrade to the previous out-of-date system — is being investigated as the potential cause.

“We’re trying to work with the fire department to see if this is either a faulty alarm, a box that’s going off or if there was an actual pull,” he said. “Unlike the other days, we weren’t able to identify smoke (on Thursday), so we’re really trying to figure it out.”

These interruptions, even with the adjusted bell schedule accommodations on Thursday, impacted both student agenda and instruction time. According to history teacher Laurel Howard, she’s had to adapt to the incident in order to ensure her periods learn the same amount of content at the same time.

“(The fire alarms are) impacting my class periods in different ways,” she said. “If I’m trying to keep my classes on track with each other and one has a 20-minute evacuation, then I have to make adjustments so (the delayed class) doesn’t fall too far behind.”

Although a definitive reason for the three alarms this week is still under investigation, administration is considering whether they may be due to a potential smoking problem on campus. Hixon explained that possible administration responses may include increased student resources, increased campus security and utilizing camera footage.

“We want to make sure that we can accurately identify what the problem is so we can accurately work together collaboratively to come up with solutions,” he said. “If it’s going off because somebody’s intentionally smoking in the bathroom, that’s one thing. If there’s somebody actually doing something, we want to find what support we can provide them to help them understand that (it) is not okay.”

For English teacher Diane Ichikawa, the ambiguity of the faulty fire alarms’ has added to the confusion that undermines the trustworthiness of the campus’s safety systems.

“Because we get so many (fire alarms) that end up being either false or people perceive them to be false, they don’t take an actual emergency (seriously),” she said. “It’s kind of a ‘boy-cried-wolf’ situation.”

In response to the lack of information available, Hixon highlighted the administration’s efforts to rectify these issues.

“We will work with the company that installed the fire alarms to ensure we are trained on everything it does and why,” he wrote in an email. “We will also be more alert to our surroundings, making sure that if we see something, we say something so that we can safely get things taken care of. We will also be getting an updated security camera system.”

However, despite the disturbances these fire alarms have caused, Science Instructional Lead Dr. Heather Mellows emphasized the importance of taking evacuation seriously.

“(Evacuating) is still important because we don’t know which alarms are real,” Mellows said. “And as a science teacher, I know that sometimes the fire alarm is because of what happens in my room, and I need it to be real when that happens.”

Currently, the evacuation drill scheduled for Thursday, August 29 will continue as planned.

“I am sure students have done a great job, but just in case, there are still a few things that we need to work on and (the drill) gives us that opportunity to do it,” Hixon said.

—Written by Kaylee Cheng, Anne Dong, Sylvie Nguyen and Ya-An Xue. Additional reporting by Gwen Domine.

Ren has been involved in coding for seven years, beginning his journey with the First Lego League, an international robotics competition for elementary and middle school students. Although FLL included some coding, he only began competing in USACO two years ago.

“Competitive programming is a pretty niche part of coding, so I got into it relatively recently,” he said. “A lot of it doesn’t have to do with anything else in coding.”

This type of coding may be less known, but Ren isn’t the only one at Gunn participating in the competition. With two years of coding experience prior to his introduction to USACO, junior Agastya Goel began competitively coding in sixth grade, an endeavor propelled by his existing interest and family influence.

“My dad does a lot of computer science and my sister had also done competitive programming, so I decided to try it out and see what there was,” he said. “I found out very quickly that it was a lot of fun, so I continued.”

While Goel has participated in many coding competitions, USACO is the largest and most popular, with the organization holding four monthly competitions a season from December to March. Participants are divided into four divisions — Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum — depending on their compiled scores from each round. Each round lasts four or five hours and consists of three problems contestants must solve from scratch, which are then run against different test cases. The more test cases the program passes, the higher the contestant’s score.

“The great thing (about USACO) is that once you reach a certain division, you’re there permanently,” Goel said. “So, for most people, they aren’t worrying about joining the camp, but just to progress to the next division by scoring well. It’s like you’re competing against yourself.”

Not only is USACO accessible because participants can sign up online and participate from home, but online coding resources are also widely available. While preparing for the competitions, Goel focused on individual studying, including reading free blogs on Codeforces, a platform with over 20,000 community members, to learn new techniques and algorithms.

Goel noted that while his previous coding experience helped him at the beginning, the content he’s learned from most coding classes differs from the competition-style prompts in USACO.

“You have a math problem, but now you have a computer to help you solve it,” he said. “Instead of building something like a website, what you’re doing in competitive programming is you’re given (a) math problem with different constraints and variables and you need to write a computer program that’s going to solve the math problem given to you.”

Therefore, Ren’s practice approach prioritized building the experience and mindset to think about new problems instead of only cramming techniques.

“I learned a couple of more basic common techniques, but a lot of the problems and how USACO is trying to move in general, is to be more about problem-solving rather than (about memorizing) a bunch of techniques and throwing them at the problem.”

Something else that differentiates USACO from traditional coding are the requirements in coding language. While the competition accepts any language in the lower divisions — most popularly C++, Java and Python — if chosen for the camp, participants must use C++, a general-purpose coding language used by many competitive programmers for its fast speed and well-developed Standard Template Library, which is used to find common algorithms.

Out of the 24 candidates selected for the training camp, only eight students — four for the girls team and four for the boys team — are chosen to represent the US at the International Olympiad in Informatic, the most prestigious computer science competition for high school students. Last year, Goel traveled with the IOI team to Hungary, where he received a gold medal.

“We got to meet lots of people from other countries, we were able to try out local Hungarian food and it was a lot of
fun,” he said.

Nonetheless, Goel’s journey to IOI hasn’t always been easy. During the six years that he has been competing, mental blocks have been a major obstacle for him to overcome.

“I think that the biggest challenge for me was the initial four divisions because sometimes it seemed impossible to get to the next division,” he said. “I think that USACO does a really good job of breaking up the process to IOI into many stages, but even with that, when I was in the Gold division, reaching the Platinum division seemed almost insurmountable. I very seriously considered giving up.”

As Goel’s experience and passion forcoding grew, he was able to push past these challenges.“At the beginning, it felt like I spent four hours coding when I was really only coding for 90 minutes,” he said. “Now, it feels like every minute I spend coding is really worth that time, so I think that when you enjoy something, you get much more value out of doing that thing.”

Having achieved his goal of competing internationally, Goel hopes to continue fostering his passion while spreading it to students at Gunn as co-president of the Competitive Programming Club.

“We ran a very successful coding competition this year,” he said. “It was the Bay Area programming competition with 80 or 90 in-person participants. That was a great experience, and we’re just trying to make coding accessible to everyone who wants to learn it.”

Although Ren has met a few fellow USACO participants, he is not active in the online or Gunn competitive programming community. Instead, similarly to Goel, Ren attributes his success to his personal interest.

“Follow your interests and do what you think is fun,” he said. “Don’t do anything for college because it doesn’t really work out.”

While USACO is competitive, Goel hopes to highlight the supportive camaraderie.

“It does feel like every competitive programmer is on the same team,” he said. “I think this is clearly seen in the camp, where after a very long and exhausting five hour contest, everyone just gathers downstairs in the dorm and starts playing games, or on the last day of camp, everyone stays up super late chatting or coding.”

This year’s election marked a shift from approval voting, in which students can select multiple candidates, to ranked-choice voting, in which students can still select multiple choices, but ranked in order of preference. SEC also implemented a new vote-tallying system, changed the location and time of the assembly and altered the candidate speech format.

Six current SEC officers, all seniors, planned and coordinated the elections process: Associated Student Body President Nathan Levy, ASB Vice President Jazmin Rodrigo, School Board Representative Chris Lee (who is also a managing editor for The Oracle), ASB Treasurer Leo Yao, Green Commissioner Angelina Rosh and Wellness Commissioner Daniel van Schewick.

According to Levy, the ranked-choice voting system is more representative because it selects the most universally liked candidate. When tabulating votes for contests with more than two candidates, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their second-choice votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on the ballot rankings until one candidate reaches a majority. As such, the election winner may be most people’s second choice if no candidate has a majority of first-choice votes. Levy noted that this voting method encourages candidates to reach out to more people: They can still benefit from convincing students to place them in a higher position, even if it is not first.

Sophomore Asha Iyer-Schulz, however, pointed out some flaws of the new system.

“In some ways, it’s good that there’s more choice, but it’s a lot easier and takes less time to just choose one candidate,” she said. “I don’t think it mattered much on the results because there weren’t many candidates for each race and it felt like it was just popularity.”

Alongside the new voting system was a new vote-tallying system. In the past, SEC paid for TallySpace, an online vote-tallying service. This year, however, they began using Google Forms and a free online tally counter. According to Student Activities Director Lisa Hall, Schewick and Web/Tech Commissioner senior Dylan Lu also wrote code to eliminate those who voted multiple times or voted for a different class’s officers.

Unlike last year, in which the assembly was held during study hall/SELF in Titan Gym, this year’s election was held twice during a double second period in Spangenberg Theater. Seniors, who were not eligible to vote, had study hall.

During the assembly, rather than giving a speech, each candidate introduced themselves briefly before SEC officers asked them one to three questions specific to the position they were running for. Candidates running unopposed only gave speeches.

According to Levy, all answers were timed strictly so that the assembly would not run over time. Candidates rotated the order that they answered in order to ensure fairness.

Current Freshman Class Vice President and Sophomore Class Vice President-elect Sara Su appreciated this year’s friendly competition.

“It was a lot smaller and there were less materials last year,” she said. “It’s cool to see everyone go all out this year like making posters, giving out handouts or making silly campaign videos.”

According to Hall, around 50% of eligible students participate in schoolwide elections every year. She encourages students to exercise their right to vote, especially for classwide elections, which have lower voter participation rates.

“These people put themselves forward, and it’s important for the student body to get to know the candidates, find out what they really stand for and what they think that they can accomplish in the role — understanding that it’s a job,” she said. “Your vote does count, and sometimes these races do come down to just a few votes. Even though we don’t reveal those exact counts, I can assure you that they do matter.”

Although Schnyder wanted to pursue a culinary career as a teenager, she attended university to study history, French and international relations after pushback from her family. Afterward, she entered careers in teaching and foreign journalism.

Her interest in baking and cooking, however, never stopped. After both of her children graduated from high school, Schnyder brought her childhood dream to life, opening a chocolate store to pay homage to where she grew up.

“At that time, I felt I was not young enough to go into a full-fledged career in the kitchen, so I decided to focus on a small area,” she said. “At first, I thought of opening a Swiss bakery, but then I decided to go even more refined into just chocolate because chocolate is such a big part of the Swiss food scene and my childhood.”

In preparation for launching her business, Schnyder attended a professional pastry school for one year in the U.S. before returning to Switzerland to train specifically in Swiss chocolate. Back in the States, she began making chocolates in her home kitchen, curating confections that combined creativity and tradition.

“A lot of these pieces are actually my own, inspired by flavors that I knew as a child or what they are doing in Switzerland now,” she said. “It was very important for me to create a product that people would recognize over time as Sweet55, in packaging and the chocolates.”

Schnyder opened her first location in 2016 in Half Moon Bay and a second in 2022 in Palo Alto’s Town and Country Village. According to Schnyder, the name of her business originated from wordplay on the phrase “Sweet 16,” replacing the numbers with her age when she started. The name now reflects the message of her brand: finding joy in any age.

“My daughter encouraged me to bring that into the brand — that what we sell is sweet and also that it’s okay to start something new later in your life and make it sweet,” she said. “When I said that I’m 55, some people are a little embarrassed because in America, you don’t talk about age. Whenever you’re on social media, everybody is young, but I want to bring the age factor into my business because it can encourage other people, other women especially, who may be tired of their other careers and have the desire to start something new.”

The federal government first recognized Native American Heritage Month in 1990. Since 1994, presidents have issued
proclamations each November to recognize the month. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed a resolution establishing the day after Thanksgiving as Native American Heritage Day.

According to history teacher Chris Johnson, in the 26 years he has been teaching, minority representation has always been on the state’s social studies standards. In practice, however, it varies from teacher to teacher.

“It was often at the discretion of the teacher as to how much material they brought in regarding minority groups,” he said. “I always try to include as many different ethnic groups as possible within the amount of time we have to cover everything.”

Johnson, who has taken multiple Native American studies classes at Foothill College, believes that through investigating U.S. policy regarding indigenous people, the destruction of their cultures and the influence of these communities on colonists and the modern world, students gain a better understanding of American history.

“I think that what a lot of white people don’t often realize is that even what’s considered to be American culture has been so heavily influenced by all the different types of people who have been here — that not everything is just based upon Anglo culture,” Johnson said.

Last year, history teacher David Bisbee introduced Native American Heritage Month projects to both his World History and U.S. Government classes. Each student is tasked with researching and presenting about the history of and an important figure from a federally recognized indigenous community. Bisbee hopes that these projects will increase students’ awareness and appreciation of other cultures.

“The U.S. puts out a number of heritage months, and some will get more attention than others,” he said. “That’s why I believe it’s important to look at what the state says is being recognized, and I’m doing my part to make sure these communities are being recognized in class.”

Still, Gunn alumnus Thomas Li noted areas of instructional weakness in a 2021 Advanced Authentic Research paper on indigenous representation in PAUSD K-12 curricula. Among these flaws were a lack of contemporary Native American history and the use of narratives that exclusively emphasize on disparity rather than celebrate the resilience and strength of Native Americans.

To improve the curriculum, Li proposed highlighting ongoing Native American events, bringing in guest speakers of indigenous heritage and engaging in conversation about underrepresented groups in the district.

“We don’t have to single these students out, but I think we can make an effort to promote their stories and provide a more balanced representation,” Li said.