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.

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.