Casey Finnerty's List: Learning Resources

• Bruck’s promising career as a scientist would have seemed unlikely to some of his teachers in grade school. He contended with undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder until the sixth grade,
• With the help of behavioral interventions, medication, and a helpful special education teacher, Bruck started to turn around his school performance in seventh grade. He convinced teachers that they should give him a fresh start — “I was able to re-brand myself,” he says. By the time he entered high school, he began getting nothing but As in his classes.
• “Sometimes they’ll say, ‘I can’t do this, I have a learning disability,’” Bruck says. “And I’ll say, ‘You just told that to the wrong person.’”

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• Basically, orgo examines how molecules containing carbon interact, but it doesn’t require equations or math, as in physics. Instead, you learn how electrons flow around and between molecules, and you draw little curved arrows showing where they go. This “arrow pushing” is the heart and soul of orgo
• Learning how to interpret the hieroglyphics is pretty easy. The hard part is learning where to draw the little arrows.
• You can’t memorize all the possible answers — you have to rely on intuition, generalizing from specific examples. This skill, far more than the details of every reaction, may actually be useful for medicine.
• “It seems a lot like diagnosis,” said Logan McCarty, Harvard’s director of physical sciences education, who taught the second semester. “That cognitive skill — inductive generalization from specific cases to something you’ve never seen before — that’s something you learn in orgo.”
• To develop orgo intuition, you solve problems and draw arrow-pushing mechanisms again and again, until they become instinctive. This takes a huge amount of time, for me 20 to 30 hours a week.
• This is one thing that orgo is testing: whether you have the time and desire to do the work.

• The day after the final, a physician friend gave me a celebratory gift: a stethoscope. I told her about the exam, and she nodded. “That’s a terrible feeling,” she agreed. “It’s kind of how you feel when you lose your first patient.”

   Of course, bombing a test isn’t the same as watching someone die. But what’s similar is that dreadful realization of your own limits, that terrible moment when you stop controlling the situation and start mitigating the damage. I expect that’s an all-too-common feeling in medicine. I often felt that way in orgo, but kept going back for more. That’s what orgo is testing, I think: resilience. And humility.

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• “I would spend four hours a day going in circles and trying to perfect the compulsory figures, and no one ever saw those but the judges,” Hamill told me.
• some of the most successful athletes aren’t necessarily the strongest or fastest, but simply the ones who are best at staying motivated.
• 1. Talk yourself through the stress
• “Listen, if I want to skate, I have to skate, I have to do it for myself,”
• 2. Love—or at least accept—the grind
• “The women that I’ve worked with that medal are the ones that really enjoy the process,”
• 3. Be optimistic
• “Everyone’s gonna fail or get beat or get injured or whatever, but [successful athletes] figure out how to reframe it so that it can be a positive thing instead of a negative thing,” McKeever said. “Failure and setbacks and struggles are where all the good stuff happens, if you can take that approach.”
• 4. Anticipate things before they occur
• Becoming a Navy SEAL requires swimming for 50 meters without taking a breath. One trainer realized that the SEAL-aspirants who are most likely to have trouble with this task are the ones who get intimidated by it before they even try.
• 6. Try mindfulness
• 7. Think about your next big event
• “The few times that I was so sick and tired of it and I really considered not wanting to keep up with it, I'd go in the rink and put in my hours, but my brain wasn't there,” she said. “Ultimately, I'd think ahead. I'd think, ‘Oh, what about that the competition in a few months.’ Okay, there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and then things start to get better.”

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• He also did something else that few MOOC students take on: He produced his own lecture videos, in Mongolian, to help his classmates. “I developed my own technique to do mini-lectures by myself,” he explains.
• One point he stressed was the need for better ways for students to teach one another, like he did with his homemade lecture videos, and discuss course content. “He was very into the community piece of it,” she added.