It’s the night before a super important AP U.S. History test and you are stressing because you don’t understand any of the information you need to know. You scramble through your notes the night before, hoping to take in all the important details. None of the facts stick as you rush through reading the chapters. Nothing is working and you feel defeated and tell yourself you are going to accept the bad grade. 

But then you remember something: the Social Science Simplified YouTube channel.

Social Science Simplified, currently run by Miramonte juniors Thomas Quinnild  and Arhan Misra, is an educational YouTube channel designed to provide high school students with review videos, tips and tricks for school, and other help. There are videos for AP U.S. History (APUSH), AP Psychology, and the students plan on focusing on AP Human Geography next. 

The two took over the channel in spring 2020 from Miramonte alumni Daniel Ginsburg and Shawn Honaryar. Ginsburg and Honaryar started the channel in 2014, their junior year of high school, and have now graduated college. 

“Daniel and I got super excited about history our freshman year when we had Frippiat for World History, and when we took APUSH our junior year we thought creating a YouTube channel to help others would be a great idea,” Honaryar said. “We wanted the channel to continue on after we graduated college and wanted to give Miramonte students the same experience we had.” 

When Quinnild and Misra first took over the channel, it had 11,000 subscribers, and now, less than a year later, it has grown to an impressive 16,100. 

“When we first got the channel, we really underestimated how much time goes into making AP videos,” Misra said. When the students created their first video, it took 10 hours just to film a 20-minute video. Now, they can create a video in two to three hours because they have gotten used to the process and adapted along the way. The two also have to study the content they are teaching their audience about because neither of them are currently taking any of the classes that they are producing content for. 

“It was cool to start working on a channel that already had subscribers because you have the opportunity to learn with an audience,” Misra said. 

“We would love to diversify our content and make our videos a lot more personal in the future,” Quinnild said. 

The two students are hoping to move away from AP videos after they finish their AP Human Geography series, and move towards what they call, “one-off” videos, which are videos with a looser structure that can be about anything. 

For example, the students would love to come out with a video about studying and managing time effectively in the near future. Another change they are trying to make is leaving behind their old filming methods and creating more personal ways to interact with their audience. In the past, all of the Social Science Simplified videos have been created with a Google Slides format, but now the students are working toward filming each other and editing the information onto the screen. 

So, if after reading this story you are back to where you started — unprepared for an AP U.S. History test — instead of spending hours trying to take in information by re-reading your notes that you know you will forget as soon as you fall asleep, you now have a better resource to go to: Miramonte’s own Social Science Simplified YouTube channel. Thanks to Quinnild and Misra, you will be prepared for your exam and confident you will ace your test!