Prospect ST (Sophia Tian)

Hi practical reasoners! I'm Sophia, and I debated for Prospect High School from 2020 to 2024. I obsessively stalked the older debater pages on here and also wrote some articles on my own (Cap K, Intro to Theory, Particularism, etc.), so I thought it'd be cool if I threw my prep here. If you've ever read any articles on phil from this library, chances are that I, Zach, or Ben wrote it, so I hope you enjoy!

As you can tell, I did (do?) a lot of phil debate. It was the easiest option available to me at the time, and being online for my first two years, I wasn't too hindered by the west coast policy-style debate (I'm a bullet biter -- I'd rather wake up at 5 AM to compete at Valley than touch the west coast... shudder).

My freshman year, I started off wiki-stealing and reading phil articles that were far too complicated for me to understand -- in general, I was pretty confused argument-wise. I began to get things together my sophomore year after learning more about Kant, and pretty much exclusively only ran Kant, with a bit of virtue ethics, friv theory, and the Cap K. I regret not being more flexible, since it heavily stunted my pref sheet and also caused me to lose a fair share of rounds. My junior year, I became a lot more flex and ran pretty much everything except the K, and experimented with substance-heavy phil to adapt to west coast judges. I'm probably going to troll my senior year -- I'll update this page with what happens in a year, I guess.

I get some questions asking me how I learned and got better at phil debate being on the west coast and without a phil coach, so I figured I'd answer them here.