Catching Up with Calder Hansen

Contributor Maddy Manning-Bi (’22) interviews Calder Hansen (’19), an OHS alum currently studying at Brown University.

Tell us a little about yourself, including your interests and anything else. 

I’m from Richmond, California (in the Bay Area, near Berkeley). In my free time, I like making things: designing fonts, making systems of visuals, explaining concepts in animated videos, taking pictures, programming abstract art, and other things. As for academics, I love learning anything that’s taught well although I’ve tended to be drawn a bit toward STEM subjects as well as art and design.

Why did you choose to attend OHS?

I was homeschooled from sixth grade, which meant I was taking courses from lots of different providers. I chose to take classes from OHS because I was looking for a source of good science and humanities classes, and because it sounded like it had a good community. I stayed at OHS — and kept taking more OHS courses, to the point that I was full-time in my senior year — not only because those things were indeed great, but also because the Core classes were fantastic, my peers made for the best class experiences I’d had anywhere, the teachers were amazing, and I made good friends there.

Can you describe your personal experience at OHS? 

I generally tended to make my schoolwork take up all the available time, either by trying to put in my absolute best work into everything or by wasting my time with distractions. This probably wasn’t the best for maintaining a balanced life, but at least the work was for classes I enjoyed!

For my first three years, I never had Skype open, so I missed out on having much of a social life outside of classes. As a junior, my social life consisted of talking to some friends in Dr. Drogalis’s office hours twice a week. It was only as a senior that I actually did all the things I kept hearing people talk about — late night Skype calls, messaging with friends every day, making friends with people I had never met in person before. Even then, all that started with the friends that I made at S@S: I’m not sure I would have been able to build a good online social life purely from scratch, without any physical connection to start it off.

I kept taking more OHS classes because the discussions I had, as well as my teachers and peers, were all some of the best I’d ever had. I got the sense that, in general, the students wanted to learn and the teachers wanted to help us learn as well as they could, which made for a nice learning environment. I didn’t intend this going in, but I ended up taking all four high school Core courses even though I wasn’t required to. Because of these courses — especially History and Philosophy of Science (HSC), which I nearly didn’t take — I discovered an interest in philosophy which I didn’t know I had.

As I took more classes and got closer to the community, I got interested in doing more for the community. By the end of my time here, I was peer tutoring ~5 classes, leading the Salon (which should be coming back in the spring!), and doing a bunch of things for the class of 2019 — sweatshirt design, S@S senior video, and a bunch of spreadsheets to organize stuff. I feel like I ended up being about as involved as an OHS student can be without actually graduating from OHS or being part of student government.

What have you been up to since graduating?

I spent a lot of my summer cramming through two self-paced courses I thought I would do during the school year but put off, finishing the last term of a type design course I was in (my final project: typewest2019.com/rinca/), and traveling to visit family while working on those other things. After starting college, some of my OHS friends who were previously in other countries or states suddenly became a lot closer to me, so I’ve traveled to the Boston area a few times to meet up with them. This fall at Brown, there is a semester-long program on illustrating mathematics and bringing together mathematicians, artists, and makers, which I have been involved with a bit.

Reflecting on your social experiences at OHS, how has that changed at Brown?

OHS seems to have a high concentration of a particular type of intellectually curious, considerate person, which meant I could be friends with a relatively high portion of people at OHS. In college, I feel that portion is lower — there are more people who might not fit me as well — but there are so many more people, and so many more interactions, that it has not been hard to find friends similar to me.

I am also better prepared to stay in touch with my high school friends than most people at Brown. Because of OHS, my friends and I are already used to communicating online, so it’s been easy to keep talking with them regularly after starting college. People from brick and mortar schools have to get used to a whole new medium of interaction, while the only things that change for OHSers are the specifics of our schedules and time zones.

Can you give us a look at what a typical day looks like for you at Brown?

It depends on what the day is. On Monday/Wednesday/Friday I get up around 8, get ready for the day, and walk ~7 minutes to my CS class at 9. (Just enough distance to be an enjoyable walk without being too inconvenient.) Then breakfast at the dining hall, followed by two more classes, and lunch with some friends from that last class. Then I usually study in the library, and switch to studying in my dorm after dinner. On Tuesday/Thursday I could technically spend the whole day without leaving a building, since my dorm is connected to another dorm that has my only class as well as a dining hall. However, I usually end up going to study at a library after my class, and I’ll eat one or two meals somewhere else. My weekends are usually split about half and half between doing things with friends and doing coursework. Every week I Skype call with OHS friends sometime around the weekend, and on Sunday night I play Uno, Avalon, and other games with Brown friends.

Do you have any tips for current OHS students and/or OHS seniors who are about to enter their first year at college? Is there anything you would change from your own experience?

Since OHS students so rarely see each other in person, I think there is a tendency to try to squeeze as much socialization as we can out of the times we do get to see each other (e.g. S@S and Grad Weekend). But that’s not true in college! You will have months and years with the people you meet here. So, there is no need to feel like you need to be maximizing every moment. If you feel like going off and doing something by yourself, do it — you’re not sacrificing scarce socialization time. This was something I had to remind myself a bit at the beginning.

If you want to stay in touch with OHS friends, something that has been very effective for me and a lot of other Class of 2019 people is to have weekly Skype calls, using a Doodle poll every week to find what time works best.

Also, for college apps: I started writing my application essays in the summer, which I ended up being very grateful for. During the school year, I went to Writing Center appointments nearly every week to talk about my essays, which improved them a lot. This was an especially valuable resource for me, since I did not graduate from OHS and so I did not have much access to OHS college counselors.

What are your plans for the future?

I don’t really know! I am studying CS not because I have a particular path in mind but because I know that I’d like to have good programming skills whatever I end up doing. At college I am planning to try out a lot of things, both subjects and activities I know I’m interested in and new things I’d like to try. Next year, I’ll see if I can do an independent study with a RISD type design professor. Beyond college, an ideal career would probably involve some combination of design, programming, and communicating ideas, but that’s pretty vague.

What’s one thing about you not many people know?

Even though it didn’t matter, I always wrote typographically correct apostrophes and quotes in Adobe Connect.