Square one

I just want a place to document my progress as a student/human.

[akautomatics]

Amino acids chart, handy for any biochem major

[biomedicool]

[nerdybeartale]

2/27/21

So something I really struggled with when I started as a full time student again was getting back into studying. It was really hard and I was really really hard on myself. I thought about giving up a-lot.

One thing I was confused about was figuring out how to study. I saw all these videos on youtube showing study methods and no matter how hard I tried, it wasn’t working for me. This seems super silly but in my case, I realized that I didn’t even have the basics down to apply those methods.

I didn’t understand the lectures even though I’d skimmed over my text book before class. I even tried reading through the chapters and nothing made sense to me.

It had been so long since I took the intro classes, so trying to take my major classes were impossible.

I’ve started making progress by applying these methods that probably a lot of students don’t even realize they’re doing or already have this down.

1) Read the title of the chapter. What does this title tell you about? what can you gather from it? what do you think you’re going to learn about.

2) Go to the summary and go through the vocabulary? what do you not know? focus on ONLY the vocabulary you don’t know.

*Now that you have the vocabulary for that chapter down you can understand what the chapter is trying to teach you. 

4) start identifying one concept to start with. Find practice problems to work on after you skim that section.

5) you’ll find that you get stuck. If not move on to the next concept. If you do get stuck this is where you go back and read until you understand.

6) repeat method 4.

I hope anyone who’s had this struggle realizes that what might be natural to others might not be for you. That doesn’t mean you’re not smart because everyone is different and I like to believe everyone has the ability to learn and improve.

[nerdybeartale]

2/24/21

It’s a new start. It’s clear that we all have our struggles and we struggle oftentimes in silence. I’ve learned that it’s okay to reach out and ask for help and that it’s okay to not be the best at something, but to be the best version of yourself. I think that comes with forgiveness and accepting personal failures and mistakes.

We’re often told that we’re on our own timelines but sometimes it’s not easy to understand what that means in practice. I am going back to square one. I’ve been at square one for the past three/four years and I’ve been resisting that one lesson that life has been trying to teach me. I need to be more patient and have faith that it’s all part of the process.