<p>You asked why with my training in Astronomy I did not go into Aeronautical engineering or finance rather than something as unrelated as medical school. After getting my MD I did my residency in Nuclear Medicine which is my specialty. In Nuclear Medicine radio-isotopes are injected into the patient which collect in diseased tissue and give off gamma rays. By imaging these gamma rays a Nuclear Medicine physician can learn about the nature of something by studying the radiation it gives off rather than directly sampling it. This is exactly what astronomers do.</p>
<p>Memorization isn’t a skill. Although there are a few savants, for everyone else it’s merely a reflection of time commitment. And yes, biology is memorization. There’s no need to be insecure about it; it is what it is.</p>
<p>what’s worse is how the biology department will dumb down its math and physics classes to accomodate premeds, which aren’t accepted by engineering or physical sciences departments. that means students are trapped in bio. I was fortunate enough to not be, but so many are stuck between liberal arts and bio, its sad.</p>
<p>Luckily, they can’t dumb down o-chem. The best part of ochem was my high grades being boosted by all the failing bio premeds. That’s what they get for taking ochem with the chemists and chemical engineers.</p>
<p>Unethical bio premeds who steal samples, cheat on exams and straight memorize stolen answer keys happen all the time. They’re going to be YOUR future doctors too.</p>
<p>Although I got As in Calculus, Quantum Mechanics, Solid State Physics and Radio Astronomy I barely got Cs in the two semesters of Organic Chemistry I had to take to go to medical school. Quantum Physics and Special Relativity are somewhat counter-intuitive but once you learn the ways in which they are counter to intuition they are difficult but manageable. With Organic Chemistry there seemed to be no logical mechanism to it and I never really understood what it was about. My father recieved his college degree in Chemistry and worked in industry and taught Chemistry before retiring and he was always amazed at how I could do so well in Astronomy and Physics and not comprehend Organic Chemistry. Fortunately, for those premed majors who do get into medical school, one does not really need to know much about Organic Chemistry to get through medical school.</p>
<p>Sure, if you don’t actually like biology, you can just memorize definitions for the test and do well, and then forget them a week later.</p>
<p>But I love learning biology. I love understanding how the different body systems all affect each other, how genes are expressed, why different angiosperms flower in particular seasons.</p>
<p>Hasn’t anyone that’s been through high school realized that memorization gets you nowhere? I have. I memorize conjugations for Spanish all the time. I take the test, ace it, and then forget them a week later. I do the same thing with history. I acknowledge that I’m not actually learning that way. I’m not going to bash Spanish and History majors and tell them their passion is just memorization. They’re the ones who aren’t memorizing something because they have to, they’re learning it because they want to. I admire that.</p>
<p>I’m sure when I get to college there will be biology majors who are in it because, in their minds, it’s the easiest way to get to Med School. But I’m planning on majoring in biology because I love it; it’d be great if people who prefer mathematics, chem, or psychics and claim that “biology is just memorization” would respect that. </p>
<p>And why are we undermining a field of study by trying to prove that other fields provide more opportunities to make a difference in the world and help people? Why shouldn’t we pursue learning something simply because it interests us?</p>
<p>“I swear Biology isn’t even a test of how intelligent or how smart you are; it’s a test of how much you can remember and how much you can spit out on exam days.”</p>
<p>I don’t know if you guys realize this but without mathematics, computer science or engineering or physics or chemistry, biology would still be moving incredibly slow. Nowadays, i’m pretty sure biology is done with computers (bioinformatics i think). They’re gaining gigabytes of data and need data miners to make sense of the data. Biology nowadays is heavily dependent on all the other sciences.</p>
<p>Memorization actually fits under one of the talents that can result in a gifted child. Look it up, it was in Scientific American (doesn’t make it right, but still).</p>
<p>Using memorization isn’t exactly the most efficient way to learn anything. You can cram and memorize something for a test, but then you’ll be lucky if you can remember that information at the end of the week, nevertheless the next day. In order to truly learn the information and retain it, you must immerse yourself in it. Do you think that doctors just memorize information and attempt to “spit it back out”? I believe doing this is just a sign of laziness, because you actually have to work hard to retain long term information.</p>