Category: School

My posts get more and more boring, eh? But I’m determined to post consistently this semester.  This is NOT an advice post because I’m not qualified to give study advice. This is more me reflecting on how my study experimenting has been going – what I liked and didn’t like. This is also a poorly written post. I really should take this post done and wait until I make it nice and pretty. BUT I know I might not get around it for here’s my messy collection of thoughts for you to giggle at.

The point of those of us part of the UBC Blog Squad is to show you what the real life of a UBC student looks like. Part of it is being very unexciting during midterm season and not written eloquent sentences because you’re too used to written in point form.

Is group studying a good idea?

• It is if you’re with the right people who are focused and can explain what you don’t know and ask you good quiz questions.
• You feel happy because you’re not lonely trapped in some cold library cubicle.
• Not everyone is a good study partner for you. Be warned
• Keep the group small.

Where to study?

• Quiet
• Quiet
• Quiet
• Not Ladha’s Silent Study Space. I studied there yesterday and morning. For a silent study space, it is surprisingly not very silent (haha)
• If I’m trying to memorize, then I have to study in isolation.

Music or no music?

• I’m still doing both.
• Not to do: avoid more distracting types of music while memorizing. for me, no Martin Garrix or Mamamoo or BlackPink while memorizing
• Yes do: pump up the fun high tempo music while doing practice problems
• Yes do for reading lectures notes and other learning phase: Piano music in the background can help focus! I swear piano music has been my study companion while studying for a long time.

Night before morning midterm?

• Review everything briefly. Well my Sociology and Psychology midterms are tomorrow morning. I don’t usually review all my notes but since I have no practice questions, I went through ALL the lectures slides for both classes.
• Have a hard cutoff is nice e.g. all the slides. No rereading the same 5 pages 10 times if you already got it. Chill
• Go home early. Eat dinner
• I had a nice long phone call with one of my long-time best friends from across the continent. Lovely treat for focused studying today.
• Work on club stuff – SUPER excited about our Diversity Fair coming up in March!!!!!!!! If you’re a UBC student, come drop by!

Share practice questions, flashcards, pdfs of whatever?

• Sharing is caring. Collaborate not compete. Be kind and help when you can.

Cool electives?

• Psychology!
• Sociology!
• Physics!! Yes physics is my elective
• If this is not required for your major, I’m enjoying biochemistry.
• Microbiology and immunology was one of my favourite electives
• Physiology is super fun too

Time to stop rambling and get some sleep.

Have a good week!

I’m cringing right now after spending $35 to purchase the Anki mobile app. I’m a digital flashcard fanatic and I started to use flashcards to do the bulk of my studying for particular classes such as microbiology and immunology, and pharmacology. Flashcards don’t work for studying physics or chemistry unfortunately.

I’ve been using Quizlet since high school. I’m actually a beta tester for Quizlet – yes, I’m such an obsessed Quizlet user. Quizlet’s been making some much-needed updates to flashcard review that are not available to the general public. I’ve testing these new releases and have to say I like them. Even without the new features, Quizlet itself is easy to use and has great options such as creating practice tests. However, the spaced repetition is still far from what I would like so I’m splurging on the mobile app for Anki.

While using Quizlet all along, I’ve tested out other flashcards including memrise, memorang, ankiapp (different from AnkiMobile), studyblue, flashcards +, and others that I tried so long ago that I don’t remember their names. I have to say I found memrise really helpful for learning Chinese vocabulary, especially since I’m a pretty visual learner. I can’t remember why I didn’t use memrise for other subjects but there is probably some reason. I also really love how memorang coverts your flashcards into multiple choice questions easily. Memorang does not function without internet connection so I only used to study for our anesthesia unit and then stopped using it.

I’ve chosen to purchase Anki after a lot of internet research and agonizing over whether I want to spend that much money. I’m justifying my purchase like this: if buying a new MCAT review book can cost $54.99, spending $35 on Anki which I plan to use for multiple courses in school and for the MCAT is worth it because I could be saving on study time. I already anticipate that I’m going to miss the audio play function of Quizlet so it is possible that I’ll return to Quizlet in the future.

I plan to use Anki as my exclusive study tool for my Psychology class. I hope I’ll have a positive review of Anki to write for you all in the future.

Anyways, if you haven’t tried digital flashcards yet and want to, I highly recommend Quizlet as a free platform to start out (**I do NOT get paid to promote Quizlet **). Anki desktop is free as well if you start your Anki adventure along with me.

Now you tell me: Do you use flashcards, digital or paper? If so, what platforms do you recommend? Does anyone have any Anki advice for me?

Happy studying!

Shanna

I prefer understanding over pure memorization but I have to memorize my amino acids. Let’s make little bios for 20 amino acids! wooooo science wooo being a nerd to the max. Seriously thought, before I wrote this post, I was passively redrawing the amino acids in hopes that I would remember. Making up these weird stories helps me remember the amino acids a bit more.

 

First, let’s talk about the nonpolar aliphatic group.

• Nonpolar aa are not fans of water. They’re too chic for water – they only drink organic mountain goat fat. nonpolar – fats, water hating.
• Aliphathic compounds are non-aromatic. They don’t like their perfume. It makes them sneeze
• hydrophobic chains like to cluster together. they befriend each other to eat organic fat.
• often in the centre/core of proteins, as far way from water as possible
• usually not reactive.

Glycine, Gly, G

• the smallest baby protein
• Its R group is H
• fun fact: it’s the only achiral molecule that there is a plane of symmetry
• the h group is so small that glycine isn’t really hydrophobic. (baby glycine is not a fan of that organic mountain goat fat)

Alanine

• The CH3 = methyl group
• Ala, A. It’s A. It’s as simple as ABC. Don’t overthink Alanine. It’s just a good ol’ CH3 group

Valine

• Val, V
• Vaaaalllineee nothing witty to say. It’s got two CH3 groups so it looks like a V. Whoever named Valine was kind to future biochemistry students. CH3 CH3 CH NH3CO=

Leucine, Leu, L

• CH2 CH CH3 CH3
• Leucine is valine with Ch2 extension. think leucine has CH inch heels. or leucine has CH neck extension and still has ch ch3 ch3 at the end

Isoleucine, Ile, I

• It’s weird. add ch3 to one side of the valine and boom, isoleucine. some social inequality going on because one side is longer than the other. how could you make isoleucine like this. uncool!
• has TWO chiral centres. that’s right TWO ! TWO! Two!

Proline, Pro, P

• ring structure ITS A PENTAGON. I like pentagons. Pros hang out in pentagons -> are boxing rings
• the end of the r group is bonded to the nitrogen

Methionine

• THIOETHER.  SO SPECIAL.  Ch3-S -ch2-ch2.   the end is ch3, S (YAY) and two peaks
• I like methionine. It’s so special. I like S. sorrynotsorry

 

AROMATIC RINGS

• aromatic means has phenyl ring
• anticipate hydrophobic interactions

Phenylalanine, Phe, F

• It’s F because proline already took P. sorry phenylalanine.
• hydrophobic phneyl ring
• NOTE: there is one peak before phenyl ring

tyrosine, tyr, Y

• note Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y yyyyyyyy is this not T? Threonine has T so tyrosine had to be y
• still hydrophobic due to the phenyl ring
• but it’s also polar due to the OH at the tip of the phenyl ring
• Less hydrophobic than phenylalanine
• NOTE: there is one peak before the phenyl ring

Tryptophan, Trp, W

• So I don’t know Trp has to Trp instead of try. Someone tripped and spilled ink so the y became P. must be. so now trp is trp.
• W. tryptophan is found in turkey meat – W wobble wobble.
• Trp, W
• It has TWO rings. both are aromatic. the closer ring has nitrogen, the other is all carbon. There are 5 visible double bond
• Note there is ch2 neck extension before the two rings aka one peak

 

BASIC (positively charged)

• higher pKa
• long chain with ionizable gropus
  • amino group in Lys
  • guanidinium gropu Arg

Lysine, lys, K

• It’s lying down which why we got 4 ch2 and nh3+ end.
• Nh3+ end is important. NH3+ so there is are two Nh3+ in lysine’
• Lysine is two-faced ? a liar -< lysine? the two face is both the two peaks, and the double nh3+

Arginine, Arg, R

• argggg – think pirates.
• nh3 nh2 nh2 and two peaks
• the nh3 nh2 nh2 looks pretty cool. A pirate flag instead of skull, has the nitrogen

Histidine, His, H

• Draw one peak, then ring with two nitrogens, double bonds
• pka close to 7 so it switches back and forth.
• If asked to try at ph 7, draw its neutral form. the neutral form is dominant at pH 7
• imidazole ring
• uncharged or charged, depending on its location
• often in active site of enzymes

ACIDIC aa (negatively charged aa)

• ate indicates coo- gropu
• found on surface of proteins. generally, acidic and basic aa are found on the surfaces because they have favourable interactions with water

ASPARTATE, Asp, D

• contains carboxylic acid in r gropu
• negatively charged at ph 7 because its pka is less than 4
• one neck extension, coo-

GLUTAMATE, glu, E

• glu is the bigger sister of D so its E
• ch2 ch2 – TWO neck extension. coo-

POLAR AA

• not charged but these can hydrogen bond ( hydrophilic)
• ser and thr contain aliphatic hydroxyl groups
• OH often gets phosphorylated in proteins
• Cys contains thiol. SH is polar group.

SERINE

• Serine is interesting. I think of Serine as Lilin. In the story, Lilin and the other runaways lived by a river at the bottom of a mountain -> one CH2 Peak with OH
• The OH group makes serine polar

threonine

 

• Threonine is Lala, Lilin’s younger sister. Lala survived longer than Lilian did. The main difference between Lala (threonine) and Serine is the Threonine stands up for herself and has an extra CH3 spike at the top of the CH peak.
• Remember the threonine is the one that comes after serine
• The OH makes Thr polar

Cysteine, Cys, C

• thiol group (SH) -> cysteine is the quiet one shhhh
• polar
• can weakly hydrogen bond, reactive
• two cysteine residues form disulfide bonds to link 2 seperate chains together

Asparagine, Asn, N

• Ch2 neck, C=O, NH2 ending
• This looks the same as aspartate but inside of o-, nh2 –
• “N” possess N.
• Asian New drivers must carry the N and drive while eating asparagus (asparagine, Asn, N)

Glutamine, Glu, Q

• Q – do you have a question about gluttony?
• Is the NH2 equiv of glutamic acid.
• Gln (q) , unlike Glu (E), has NH2. It has two peaks

Remember that the amino groups in N and Q stay uncharged

And that’s 20 amino acids!

 

I love the PHYS 118 lectures given by Dr. Rieger so much because he explains concepts clearly and we spend most of our classes solving problems which is great because I enjoy active learning. The structure of the class is similar to Physics 117 except instead of Learning Catalytics, we use regulars Clickers.

In lecture, I feel super excited to learn about electricity, to solve equations and work out my brain.  THEN today we did some integration which made sense for rods. Then I was totally lost after we moved on to infinite lines of charge, rings of charge, disks of charge…. Yup, I’m lost.

No lie, as fun as learning new things is most of the time, it’s not always fun.

I’ve missed office hours for today but that’s fine because I still want to give more time to figure out things myself. I’m trying but I definitely do battle the temptation to give up. I’ve bribed myself with an Chai Latte so I have to keep going.

I’m trying to tell myself that there is nothing that I can’t learn. I might take me a ton of time because I’m not physics-gifted but I’ll get there eventually.

So if you’re also struggling with a particular course, you can also remind yourself that there is nothing that is impossible to learn. You can do it friend!!!

Good luck!