Harvard University Pre-College Course

Hills Grammar student Idhant has just returned from a 2-week pre-college course at Harvard University. Entry into the program was highly selective and we are proud of Idhant’s achievement in gaining a place. Idhant is a subject accelerant, currently working on the Preliminary HSC course in Extension 1 Mathematics, and shared the Dux of Year 9 in 2018. Read Idhant’s thoughts on his time at Harvard below.

My time at Harvard has been some of the best and most eventful moments of my life. I spent two weeks doing a pre-college Programming course with Professor David J. Malan, who teaches the most popular course at Harvard (CS50). We covered many topics and programming languages such as Python and JavaScript. Our course was a compressed version of the actual CS50 college course, and we were assigned projects that were usually given to college students.

Initially, I was surprised at the amount of independence we were given outside of class. We were treated like college students and it was up to us to manage our time and complete our homework. During my spare time, I usually explored the enormous campus with friends, which had incredible facilities. I was mostly impressed by Widener Library, which has 3.5 million books. I also got to see a quantum computer, which I thought was pretty cool!

To sum up my experiences, I met a lot of people from different parts of the world, like Egypt, Austria and Malaysia and I learnt a lot more about different cultures. It has been an incredible learning experience for me, both academically and culturally, and I would definitely recommend this program to anyone who is interested in it. Thank you to the School for supporting my application!