The Importance of the Big Picture and the question WHY

As you move onto 3rd year and beyond, you’ll encounter a lot of profs telling you to always look at the bigger picture. Quite simply, a lot of people don’t realize the power of this – to see everything from a bird’s eye view. In business schools everywhere, profs always ask their students what the “bottom line” is after a detailed discussion of some idea or concept. And a lot of times, most of the class sits there flabbergasted in silence without an answer. You have the few who see the big picture right away and as a result summarize all the details into one clear statement that everyone can understand as soon as they hear it. I’m sure all of you have experienced this before sitting in your classes whether they be business or science courses. At that very moment, you realize the power of reducing everything down to its most core and basic principle – a straightforward rule that anyone can grasp. And this is what sets those who score 90%+ in courses as opposed to everyone else. Anyone can study hard and get themselves all prepped up for their exam, but few can elevate their understanding beyond the superficial memorization and understanding of doing problems.

Seeing the big picture also goes hand-in-hand with knowing WHY something is. And I don’t just mean understanding WHY the concept is the way it is or why you do that problem like that. I mean WHY the hell are you learning this in the first place in this course. These are two very different things. To put it in perspective for all of you, let’s take an example to show you what I mean. BIOL 201. Why are there that many extra ATP made going through the TCA cycle? Next question you should ask: Why are we even bother learning the TCA cycle? I always constantly ask myself this question when I’m studying. WHY, WHY, WHY am I learning this? To give you some urgency on this matter, most of us only have about 21,170 days to live (if average life expectancy is 80 and most of us are in our early 20s). Life is precious and finite. If we are using up our life to learn something, it better be for a good reason and I better know why exactly I’m learning this stuff. As normal human beings, we’re always asking why to our friend’s facebook status says “John is feeling sad” or why to buying something when we’re making a purchase with our own money. But as students, we have been so accustomed to rote learning and exam mentality that has killed our interest in learning and always asking WHY we have to learn this. The A+ student always realizes the PURPOSE of learning something. Once you have reduced everything down to its core idea and knows its purpose, you can quite easily create a mental map of the entire course in your head and connect all the dots.

Tips to Improve your studying habits for CHEM 233 and beyond

1. Never leave CHEM 233 for last minute if you want to do well. This is not one of those courses where you just keep attending lectures all term, and then finally decide to put in some effort before the midterm and final. Speed and accuracy is part of the game when midterms come. And speed and accuracy can only be achieved with practice and time until you reach a level you’re comfortable with.
2. Spend less time in the SUB sippin’ on Starbucks and chatting with your friends and do some practice problems instead. As President Obama says, ‘we can’t get something for nothing. We all gotta’ sacrifice a bit.’
3. When you’re studying, always think BIG PICTURE.
4. In the winter session as opposed to the summer session, you got time on your side. So that means you can actually crack open that thick text book of yours. My advice to you, DO NOT study the text book fully. No one has time to do this unless they live on campus and seclude themselves from all social life. ONLY use the text book when you’re in desperation of guidance as you’re studying/reviewing/doing problems, if you want to clarify something in your class notes or your prof speaks in Hebrew. My notes are usually messy, so a text book really helps because the reactions are drawn and laid out so neatly.
5. Form study groups. This is not my personal style, but some people says this works, so I’ll say it too. I believe study groups only work in certain contexts.
6. If you start out with a negative attitude towards organic chem, you’re going to hate it all throughout the term. You’ll never be great at something if you have a genuine displeasure in doing it. So I say, even if you detest CHEM 233 with every nerve in your body, pretend you like it and SMILE.
7. On the previous note, if you force yourself to smile as you’re studying and doing practice problems, you’ll actually psychologically accustom your brain to liking and associating CHEM 233 with happy wonderful things in your life. Contrary to what you think, according to the book BLINK by Malcom Gladwell, scientific studies have shown that the process of being happy doesn’t start from an external stimulus that then translates into a smile on your face, it is rather the physical action of smiling that tells the brain you’re happy. People who force themselves to smile more for no reason are happier and less depressed. WIERD!
8. And of course, in promotion of my tutoring program, if you need help or you want to stay ahead of the game, e-mail me at tsangt@interchange.ubc.ca and SIGN ON UP!

So what`s this business about a ToolBox Method?

So I was sitting around with my friend’s really young daughter one day. And of course, I asked her who her favourite cartoon character was. She gave me two answers: Dora the Explorer and Bob the Builder. These are two very popular kids shows among our youngest children. For those of you who don’t know who Bob the Builder is, he’s just a friendly cartoon character named Bob and he builds things. But what I remember about Bob the Builder the most is that he always carried with him a tool box full of useful tools.And that is where I drew my inspiration for the highly revered teaching concept I dubbed the “ToolBox Method.” My students always ask me why I found CHEM 233 easy and how did I do well in it. Well, to tell you the truth, I never found it easy. I can only say it was easy now that I’m done with it and I succeeded, but I had to struggle thru it just like anybody else had to back then. So, I sat down one day and thought about exactly what was going through my mind in 2nd year when I was studying this course in particular. And I actually came up with something that anyone could use. You’d be surprised that you don’t need to be a genius to make this work for you. The ToolBox method is a pretty systematic and universal approach that most students can master and use to their advantage. One of my students said he could make his own tool box and doubted what I was doing was anything different, but after he attended my lesson (I usually wrap up everything with the final lesson on this ToolBox Method), he realized it was well worth his time to listen in on my mentality. So of course, I’m not going to give it away here. If you want to see the ToolBox method in action for yourself, register yourself for the CHEM 233 Continuous Tutoring Program!

WHY is CHEM 233 so hard?

Here’s my take on why students find CHEM 233 so hard and impenetrable. Personally, I think that UBC Organic Chem is one of the 2nd year courses that reflects the difficulty level of a 3rd year course in the sciences. Of course, Organic Chem is a very different from other courses content-wise, but the same general principles that dictate the “toughness” of the course still rings true. Remember how in first year, some of your profs told you that in order to be successful, you cannot rely on memorization alone anymore to achieve that high mark, but rather you need a complete and total understanding of the course and all the concepts as well (a.k.a. critical thinking). I majored in Microbiology so my 3rd year level courses cannot speak for everyone, but I saw a transition from 1st and 2nd year where you need less memorization and more critical thinking to 3rd and 4th year where you need BOTH memorization and critical thinking at extreme levels in order to succeed. And that’s why so many 2nd year students are caught off guard in CHEM 233. They treat it like any other 2nd year course where memorization can be relied on still quite heavily. For the first time in University - especially students with all their AP high school prep who developed a complacent stance on University courses having seen things before they were taught - they meet something totally new and challenging. This course is called a “weeder course” for a reason. They use it as an indicator of who has what it takes to thrive in science at least in this limited context. Who has developed a mature awareness and outlook on how one should properly attack a course in University? Just think of it as UBC doing you a favour - giving you a heads up on future years to come. And who doesn’t like a challenge sometimes? BRING IT!

I find a lot of students memorizing for the wrong reasons. You shouldn’t memorize for the sake of knowing how to do a question on the exam that you had encountered before in your practice questions. In upper year level courses, you memorize for the sake of learning a new language and becoming totally comfortable in conversing with it so when you’re sitting at your final exam, you actually know what the question is asking. I tell a lot of my students, really spend some time memorizing and getting to know the “organic chem language” as you’re doing your homework and studying throughout the term. This will make life a lot easier and you’ll be more intelligent in your conversations about organic chem between your classmates, profs and tutors. It makes for more efficient learning when you at least know the terms down well and have a decent understanding and picture in your head of what a word represents physically (ie. you know that a cube means a 3-D box with sides of all equal length, so why can’t you tell me what a alpha beta unsaturated enone is after you learn it?) My tip for you - translate words into physical meaning that you yourself can see in your head.

Putting you in the know

Despite what rumours you have heard about organic chemistry, if you look at the grade distribution trends from 2002 to 2008 (I only went back as far as 2002 because pre-2002 CHEM 233 was originally comprised of CHEM 231 and 232 taken over 2 terms), I think that you have less to worry about failing than achieving a low disappointing mark in the end. Here, I have spent some time looking at past grade distributions for this course and compiled some simple stats about CHEM 233 so you don't have to go through the trouble yourself of looking through it all. I am by no means a STATS expert, but I'd like to share these interesting finds with you.


FYI, the average mark for every year is taken from averaging all the sections of CHEM 233 in that year combined (there's about 1200 students taking CHEM 233/year). As you can see with the graph above, there is clearly a steady and strong rise towards a higher overall average in CHEM 233. Students in recent years are doing better than they were a few years back. However, the average still seems low at its best of 66% last year. This rise is a good sign and can be attributed to profs realizing how to better teach the course, the trimming down of course content (what you have to learn now is only a fraction of what students had to know in 2002), more students being aware of the perils of CHEM 233 and perhaps pre-studying before the term starts, or the one we would like to believe which is that students of younger generations are increasingly becoming smarter and smarter. I didn't show the standard deviation error bars, but just to tell you, the deviations of grades around the means have remained quite constant at around +/-15% from the reported yearly averages. The grades overall are improving, however, we still have the problem of too great a spread in marks from 0% all the way to 100%. Hopefully, this great spread will be reduced over the years as students take on better personal studying habits and profs become better at teaching the course. Now let's look below at the failure rate trends from 2002-2008.

FYI, the failure rate was calculated by taking the total number of people who failed divided by the total number of students enrolled in that year. As you can see, the failure rate was at its highest at about 30%. Last year, the failure rate had been significantly reduced to only 14%. So despite what you heard from rumours, there isn't really a massacre of students' dreams and hopes. What's true is that a lot of students fail their midterm(s), but once it's all settled, most students pass. The biggest problem in reality is that you end up with a lot of students who pass but are extremely disappointed at their marks because a CHEM 233 mark is usually lower with respect to other course grades. I can help you correct that.

Despite what you think, UBC does NOT want you to fail. It'll actually cost UBC more to fail you in terms of cost efficiency in student turnover. More students failing means more empty spots in upper year courses. UBC makes less money by having a prof teach below the maximum capacity a classroom can hold at a given time. With the 2010 Winter Olympics around the corner, UBC is undergoing massive proliferation in construction and renovations and that's going to cost lots of moolah. UBC needs more students passing and more tuition revenue. This notion that UBC doesn't want you to fail may be totally false, but heh, who cares? I love rumours!