SARATOGA — When Priscilla Chan left her fourth-grade science students at The Harker School seven years ago to go to medical school — then later marry Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — she was so beloved that students hoped she would come back as their school nurse.
Instead, Chan returned as their commencement speaker Thursday evening, having not only become a pediatrician and philanthropist, but founder and CEO of an East Palo Alto school for low-income students who have few of the privileges most Harker kids enjoy.
At the Mountain Winery amphitheater in front of 187 students and their families, including some of the students from the same class she taught seven years ago, Chan encouraged the graduates to chart their own course, live by their values and lead a life of service.
“Go out into the world with pride and strength knowing the values that will guide you live within you,” she said.
Chan, a new mother of a 5-month-old daughter, choked up in the midst of her address, joking, “Oh God, it’s not even my own kid!”
Zuckerberg, sitting almost unnoticed nine rows up in the midst of the crowd, welled up, too. He wiped his tears on his bluejeans.
The students from the Class of 2016 may not have been Chan’s own children, but she gave them credit on the windy Thursday evening for shaping her and “the way I feel about education, to make sure every child has the chance to learn and reach their potential.”
The private Harker School is renowned for its science and technology curriculum, with many of Silicon Valley’s engineers, who hail from around the globe, sending their children there. Over the past decade, 66 students have become semifinalists in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search competition, with three finalists last year.
This is a school where students learn anatomy on a life-size digital cadaver, where they have access to endowment funds to travel for original research projects in Washington, D.C., where kindergartners are introduced to digital microscopes to study the integumentary system and seniors can take classes in “neural networks” and “game theory.” Last year, students launched their own scientific research journal.
It’s a different world from The Primary School that Chan founded last fall in East Palo Alto. There, making sure the children have access to basic health care is integrated into the education environment so the children have the fundamentals to succeed.
Chan grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees. She was the first in her family to attend college, graduating from Harvard, where she met her husband.
“My goal is to empower children to learn and live their lives to their full potential,” she said. “I always took what I thought was the most interesting and challenging step to reach my goals. From each vantage point, I had no idea where I would land next.”
She told the graduates that it’s not important to know what job title they wanted now, “the world changes too fast for that.”
Instead, she said, “focus on the change you want to see in the world. Take risks, ask for help, believe in yourself.”
Known to the graduates as “Miss Chan,” she was a favorite of Naomi Molin, who remembers learning physics from Chan by making a giant roller coaster out of K’NEX pieces and rolling marbles down the tracks.
“She wanted us to understand concepts, not just be tested on them,” said Molin, who will be attending Chapman University in the fall. “She didn’t talk to us like we were children. We had a good mutual respect going.”
Students liked Chan so much, Molin said, that when Chan was on recess duty, “we would run up to her and cling on to her legs and not let her go for the whole recess. If it annoyed her, she never let on. She was just a really fun person to be around.”
The kids knew she was dating “some guy named Mark, but I don’t think we knew or cared who Mark Zuckerberg was because we loved Miss Chan so much,” Molin said.
Namitha Vellian remembers Chan as “young and vibrant” and in charge of the fourth- and fifth-grade service club.
“That shows a lot,” said Vellian, who will be attending a six-year pharmacy program at Butler University. “Now she’s super into helping anybody. She was always encouraging us to join.”
Shortly after the birth of their first child in December, the couple established the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for charitable causes, pledging to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares, worth more than $45 billion.
As she ended her address to the graduates, Chan pulled out the 2008 yearbook from her teaching year at Harker. She read handwritten notes in the margins from Vellian — “Good luck. I really, really hope you graduate (you probably will)” — and from Molin: “Too good to be forgotten.”
Although Molin had once hoped Chan would return as school nurse, she’s glad she didn’t.
“She’s done so many important things,” Molin said. “She’ll always be Miss Chan to me.”
Contact Julia Prodis Sulek 408-278-3409 or follow her on Twitter@juliasulek
