Expert Tips on HSC: An Interview with OHSC0 Peer Tutors
In this article, SASS interviewed History and Philosophy of Science peer tutors Aditi T. and Kat D. We hope that this article will help current and future HSC students in their academic journey!
Q: What did you enjoy about HSC?
Aditi: I really enjoyed the discussions in this class. We would have really interesting debates about the nature of reality, the meaning of science, or whether it was possible for magic to exist. I learned a lot about different ways I could view the world and beliefs I didn't know I had from this course, and this class was the one I would look forward to most in my day.
Kat: I loved the mixture of science and philosophy, my two favorite subjects. The discussion sections in this class were so much fun and the topics were fairly new to me, so I didnt feel like I was relearning the same things. I also had a great teacher who made the course a lot of fun!
Q: What challenged you the most in this course? How did you overcome those challenges?
Aditi: The writing assignments in this class were pretty challenging to do, and I put a lot of effort into making sure that my arguments were well-formed. I would always try to plan out my writing process to make sure I didn't have too much work to do on any one day, though I can't say I always managed to stick to the plan! At the beginning of the writing assignments, I would go through a brainstorming process of coming up with arguments for both sides of whatever prompt I was answering, and writing down objections that other people might come up with against my ideas.
Kat: What challenged me the most in this course was probably the quizzes and the finals (though I did find the writing assignments quite hard as well!). HSC quizzes are an interesting mixture of philosophy and facts so studying for them can be a bit tricky, especially because you only have a few minutes to spend on each problem. I learned to do well on these quizzes by taking notes in class and going to the quiz review sessions. The finals in HSC were also very hard for me because they require knowing the main concepts of the course, while also having a good grasp on the details of the theories and phenomena that exemplify those topics. I recommend filling out the start of the year handout sheet as you go along in the course, and using the final study guide, as well as going to office hours and asking about anything you are uncertain on.
Q: What tips do you have that could be useful to students taking HSC?
Aditi: Take notes on the readings! I know it's not required, and it's easy to skip out on writing notes, but I found my notes extremely helpful in studying for quizzes and finals, and preparing my writing assignments. In HSC, a lot of the readings can be hard to interpret, so it helps to have a set of notes to reread instead of trying to go back to the actual readings every time. The notes don't have to be super long or detailed, but just jotting down anything you found interesting, important, or even just funny can be helpful. I liked looking closely at specific sentences or phrases I didn't understand from the readings, and then writing down the general idea of that sentence once I am able to figure it out.
Kat: As you go along in the course, be sure to relate the different historical and scientific phenomena to a specific topic (e.g. the theories of X are examples of underdetermination). I also recommend taking notes on basically everything HSC related, so take notes on the readings, discussion sections, review sessions, etc. This class is very note-based and if you don’t have any notes, chances are you’ll be completely lost when it comes to studying for finals. Also, be sure to start the writing assignments early. Trying to answer a philosophical prompt in 5 hours is not a fun situation to be in.
Q: About how much time a week did you spend working on assignments and preparing for discussion sessions in this course?
Aditi: I probably spent around half an hour on each of the readings once I started to get used to the rhythm of the course, but in the beginnings of the semesters, the readings would probably take me around an hour to an hour and a half to complete. I'm not entirely sure how much time I spent on the projects, but I do know that the writing assignments took me about 4 hours to complete, over the course of a week or so.
Kat: I probably spent between a half hour to an hour prepping for each discussion section (i.e. readings and taking notes), about 5-6 hours on each writing assignment, about an hour to two hours prepping for and taking the quizzes and a very long time on the research papers (but you have a bit more than a month to do those so no need to worry).
Q: What was your favorite topic covered in HSC?
Aditi: I really enjoyed the quantum physics unit towards the end of the course. It was probably the first time I learned about those topics in quantum physics, and it was super interesting and weird to think about the fact that the world does not work the way we expect it to work.
Kat: This is a really hard question! I love biology, so I found the unit about biology in the spring, particularly Pascal and Mendel’s work, quite fascinating. However, at the end of the spring semester we went over quantum theory interpretations, which was very mind bending, but extremely interesting! I also loved going over the mind body problem (I wrote my spring research paper on that), but we only briefly touched on that at the end of the course.
Q: What assignments did you enjoy doing in this course?
Aditi: I enjoyed the time project that we had during first semester, because I got to actually build a working machine, which was a really interesting task to complete, and pretty different from most of my other assignments. I also liked the final project at the end of the year, which was a multimedia version of a regular writing assignment, because I decided to make a song and a music video, which was also a really interesting experience to have.
Kat: I think my favorite assignments were the research papers. There is one each semester and you get about a month to research, propose, do more research, write, do even more research and revise your paper. These assignments were so much fun since you got to chose a topic that really interests you and become quite knowledgable about it.
Q: Did you have any experiences with HSC that could encourage those who are uncertain of the course to want to take it?
Aditi: I think it's definitely a mind-opening course. You learn about a lot of interesting aspects of science and the world that is super shocking and contrary to a lot of what you would believe about the universe. It's a great course if you're looking for existential crises or questioning everything you know, and it's a really cool experience in general!
Kat: HSC can be a lot of work at times, but the type of knowledge you gain from it is invaluable. If you are worried that it will be too scientific or philosophical, don’t be. This course was my first philosophy course, and I have very little knowledge of physics, however I never felt like that caused me to be at a disadvantage.
Q: Why do you think HSC is a core course instead of just a normal science, history, government or English course? What academic skills did this course help you improve?
Aditi: This course is definitely not a history course. Despite the readings being rooted in historical scientific discoveries, with the units mapping out a timeline of past scientific achievements, most of what you will do with the course will be focused on your discussion of these topics. In class, you will debate the philosophical impacts of various scientific discoveries and impacts, and it is this same topic that you will focus on in your writing assignments, papers, and finals. In this sense, it focuses more on philosophical debate than historical events.
Kat: HSC is a core class because it takes a subject everyone is familiar with, in this case science, and examines it from a new angle. This course isn’t a science course or a history course, even though it deals with these topics, rather it is a course meant to give students a better understanding of how we gain knowledge. In HSC, you learn to see science for what it truly is and appreciate it even more.
Aditi and Kat can be scheduled as peer tutors through the Stanford OHS Writing and Tutoring Center.
