Sergia Hay is an Instructor in Philosophy and Religious Studies. She published a book on Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in 2020, and first came to Andover during the 2023-2024 school year. Hay directs Outdoor Pursuits in Winter hiking, has been skiing since age three, and is an avid pizza-maker outside of the classroom.
Do Andover students have free will?
Yes. I think they do. I think many of them feel pressure that they either accept or don’t have to accept.
What’s your teaching philosophy for teaching philosophy?
Unfortunately, philosophy suffers from many negative stereotypes, I would say maybe even more so than any other discipline. A lot of people think it’s all written by dead people, by people of privilege, all dusty and boring and irrelevant. Of course, I’m biased, but I don’t think that there is any more relevant subject than philosophy. It really has to do with what’s going on in our life, how we can think about our lives, how we should treat other people, how we should treat the environment, and how we should treat ourselves. It helps situate us in the world in really essential, reflective, and important ways… I really think that philosophy, for different periods of its life, has lost its way from its Socratic roots. Socrates was really interested in talking to everybody, and in asking questions that mattered in people’s lives. There are some branches of philosophy that get into very esoteric things, and that can be totally fun to play with, those ideas where it’s very narrow and very focused, but philosophy also has the breadth available to it that helps anybody come in. All of us, to the extent that we consider ourselves thinkers or reflective in some capacity, are doing philosophy. A lot of [teaching philosophy] is just awakening that recognition in people.
You had your first experience away from home during your sophomore year, could you expand on that?
When I was in tenth grade, I was a student at Blake School in Minneapolis, which is a private day school, and that school is one of the founding sponsors of a program called Swiss Semester. The program started in 1986 and I was in the second year’s cohort, so in 1987. I spent my fall semester in Zermatt, Switzerland, which is where the Matterhorn is, and that was my first experience really being away from home, except for camp that was like a week-long, so it was my first encounter with homesickness. It was my first encounter of living with a roommate and being in a place that was very different from home. But it was one of the most transformative experiences of my life in that it opened me up to traveling and living in the world in different places. I got really jazzed up about art history and geology, because we were doing a lot of things on glaciers with rocks, and it was a beautiful experience that really changed my view of education and the course of my life.
Andover and many other private schools have a Philosophy and Religious Studies Requirement. What do you think about that?
I had a weird class in high school called “The Challenge of Change” that was taught by two faculty members, one who taught social studies, and the other one was the head of the school, and this was kind of their pet project. It was crazy. We were reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Persig, and we were also doing experiments on light to determine whether it was a wave or a particle. It was the weirdest class, I don’t think it fit in any disciplinary category. I just knew that there was something going on in that class that was really exciting, and when I got to college, I realized what we were doing was philosophy. I really believe that philosophy hits best for some students, like Andover students, who are very intellectually curious and open in a way that is very special and unique. The opportunity to be exposed to philosophy prior to your college years is such an amazing opportunity. It’s such a game changer in many ways. I am just thrilled to be here, to be able to do it, because I really think that the work is important and exciting. It’s fun.
What works of Kiekegaard’s would you recommend to students interested in him?
There are a lot of fun things to read that make you realize what an unusual author he is. For those kinds of entry points, I would say “Either Or” or “Fear and Trembling,” just because as literary works, they’re so fascinating and they really capture the imagination. My favorite book is “Sickness unto Death,” because I feel like it really encapsulates some of the major ideas that he gave around questions that are most interesting to me… “Sickness unto Death” is about how all of us are in despair, and that the deeper we go into despair, the closer we are to its solution, but we will never arrive at a solution. So the trick is to go deeper into despair. That sounds awful, but the main thing is that, in getting to know ourselves, we recognize what a complex, paradoxical, mysterious creature we are, and that the more we dive into that, the deeper our understanding of our self is, but also the more complex our experience becomes.
How did you get into pizza making?
It was really a pandemic thing. I’ve always liked pizza. So has my husband. Our daughters, maybe not as much as us, but we really like trying pizza places and stuff. We decided, rather than going out all of the time, let’s have this be our own science experiment in terms of perfecting dough and fermenting it, and figuring out the right canned tomatoes for sauce, and the perfect combination of toppings and stuff like that. So it ended up being like an ongoing experiment, and we would do it every Friday… When we started adding fig jam to the top, we went to the next level.
Do you like listening to music while reading philosophy?
Just to stay true to my theme of silence, I really don’t like to read when I’m distracted, so I stay away from all tech and all sound. In order to focus, I really need a quiet space. Oftentimes that can be my car or a small room. I was talking with a student the other day about café culture, that can also be a silent space, when there’s a hum around you and some activity, you can also be really focused in on things. So that’s where I read. I would like to be able to listen to music while I do other things, but I find that I concentrate on the music too much, especially if it’s good, and there’s so much good music… I will listen to things to get hyped up. I love to dance in my house. It’s just going to depend on what it is. I really like live music as well. Shout out to Ethan Liu [’26] and his performance last Friday.
What’s the story behind bringing clementines to Outdoor Pursuits (OP)?
Last winter was my first year at Andover, and it was my first experience in OP. We did winter hiking, skiing, and stuff like that. There is something that I learned from one of my best friends, who’s Norwegian, is that in her backpack for cross country skiing, she would always bring citrus and chocolate, which is an amazing combination outside in wintry air. And just, clementines are in season in the winter, and they’re portable, they smell so good in the fresh air, and so I would always bring them on hikes. Kids got used to having them on hikes.
How did you get into skiing?
I grew up in Minnesota. Lindsay Vonn, who’s a very famous skier, she and I have one thing in common, namely, that we both learned how to ski on Buck Hill, which is, I want to say, maybe 200 feet altitude. It’s really a tiny thing, so we would fondly call it Buck bump. It actually has a divot at the bottom, and that was one way to give it extra altitude, to actually not build it up, but to carve out the bottom. I learned on little red plastic skis when I was three years old. Because winter is such a thing in Minnesota, my parents wanted to be outside, and being on skis was the way that you did it. So we did cross country and downhill [skiing].
Any departing thoughts or messages you’d like to share?
I just want to say, I’m really glad to be here. It’s really exciting working with Andover students. They’re such a unique, and wonderful, and fun, and goofy, and serious, and constantly impressive population of people to be around. I really feel like it’s an honor to be here.
