<p>According to a close friend at UCSF medical school (for what it’s worth) O-Chem “clicked” for him after understanding the theory behind it. Everything made sense and everything flowed for him. It wasn’t purely regurgitation but everything flowed into place.</p>
<p>Also I’ve never heard the notion that you should study science to get a higher GPA hence a top law school. Humanities in general are easier for people…this is why engineers and scientists (well excluding Bio majors) command higher incomes straight out of undergrad. The exception to this income rule is Business majors (who out of my school anyway command over 50K starting salaries), but business is probably more mid-range difficulty anyway.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong in that I’m advocating my own major. I’m not a hard science major, but this is the general consensus.</p>
<p>It’s possible that I just never got to a click point, but I definitely never reached it. For me, organic was always memorization-based. Maybe that’s what should have happened, and maybe that’s why I did so poorly. Sure, electrons flow from high eletronegativity molecules (or is it to?) but then you have to memorize the electronegativity of all the elements, and you have to remember dozens of exceptions like resonance or lone pairs or what-have-you. I don’t know. Maybe organic is supposed to be conceptual and I just wasn’t bright enough to figure it out.</p>
<p>By reputation, however, it’s a very memorization-heavy course. This is the precise reason why medical school admissions values it so heavily – because even though the material itself is totally irrelevant (well, almost totally), the learning modality in organic is basically identical to the learning modality in medical school: memorize impossible amounts of information.</p>
<p>I agree on its reputation being heavily memorization-based. I think this may be, in part, due to tests that are either too easy or which are passable through rote. </p>
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<p>Electrons tend to “flow” toward higher electronegative molecules. You don’t need to memorize element elctronegativities. Instead, you can “derive” reactions using electric and magnetic force arguments. You can explain the chemistry in terms of collisions, vibrations, rotations, etc. Physics is the fundamental science that all others branch from and there cannot truly be a legitimate and unresolved conflict between any of the sciences because nature dictates the result.</p>
<p>The “softer” sciences that deal on the macro scale may appear to be more memorization. Advanced biology speaks the language of organic chemistry and it is memorization without an understanding of the underlying chemistry. Likewise theoretical chemistry and quantum mechanics are essentially synonymous.</p>
<p>As for as the toughest undergrad course load, I think this is largely set by each individual. Sure, some majors may be less flexible than others, but those with free time have the liberty of taking additional classes or otherwise going beyond the scope of the prerequisite degree minimum.</p>
See, there’s no possible way I’d have been smart enough to work this out on the spot when facing a ten-step synthesis. I’d have been in massive trouble (which I often was) if I hadn’t memorized them beforehand (which I often didn’t).</p>
<p>I think claiming you don’t need to “think or conceptualize” if you’re in the fields of classics, history, law, literature, philosophy, etc. is ridiculous.</p>
<p>You can argue that you may use different methods of thinking in the humanities vs. hard sciences, but you chose to instead make absurdly false generalizations (like saying sciences, unlike humanities, require thinking) . Don’t get huffy when I criticize you for them.</p>
<p>A ten step synthesis is like constructing a wooden frame from carpentry. The different reactions are tools at your disposal–saws, chisels, hammers, sandpaper–and can be grouped by function, each having their own nuances. There are hundreds of tools that are analogs of a few. The physics is like the instructions manual for how each tool works and the chemistry is the application of the tools in creation and manipulation. </p>
<p>Perhaps there is some beauty in science if it can be looked at this way.</p>
<p>I don’t get what you’re saying here. Thinking was in quotes once because I was quoting you, something quotes can come in handy for.</p>
<p>The second time I mentioned thinking, without quotes, was when I was writing about “methods of thinking”, a distinction you didn’t make. I think saying “English doesn’t require thinking” (what you implied in your first post) is quite different from saying “English requires a different method of thinking from math” unless those two sentences mean the same thing to you.</p>
<p>I was being facetious–something that isn’t relayed too well via the internet–or in other words labeling the contrasting methods of thinking used in the humanities vs. the hard sciences.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the same type of thinking that, based on your own definition, has been necessary in every well-taught humanities course I’ve ever taken. I agree that there are important differences between the humanities and the sciences, but they’re not the ones you’re citing.</p>
<p>What’s important is that if the OP is asking this to make a decision for himself, then we can generalize as much as we want, but the answer will still boil down to “it depends” (and the discussion here supports that).</p>
<p>Although I’m not sure if my major is humanities (it depends on who you ask, although it’s not particularly writing-intensive and we use math) I have taken my fair share of humanities courses during college. In these classes I memorized facts and regurgitated them in essay and short answer formats on exams and wrote papers by perusing books, inserting quotes, and formulating a thesis. The questions on the exams were straightforward and everything was lecture-based. </p>
<p>However in the non-humanities courses I have taken you often get problems where you apply a theory or concept that you learned in class to solve it, but you have never seen the same problem before. They never used examples they use in lecture whereas in humanities classes they did. This is what I mean by applying concepts and theory to solving problems whereas in my experience humanities course were more straightforward.</p>
What you have described is the exactly opposite of reality. Almost every detail here is not just wrong, but actually the direct inverse of what is correct. Pretty much everything but high-level coursework in the sciences is rote memorization, with the hope that students will comprehend why what they are memorizing is true.</p>
<p>I’m not bitter about organic; plenty of kids did very well in that course through a combination of studying and intelligence. It just seemed to me like the only way I could have done better would have been by adding rote memorization, not by sitting back and understanding concepts. That’s not a complaint; that’s how organic is run and I went in fully warned.</p>
<p>Analogously, I don’t think anybody can really construct a chair from wood and nails and hammers in twenty minutes unless they’ve already memorized what they’re going to do. Now imagine that you’ve had to memorize two hundred types of chairs – everything from futons to sofas – in order to be sure to cover six of the ten they’re going to ask you about.</p>
<p>Maybe some carpenters really are talented enough to pull it off. I wasn’t, and I don’t think most kids are.</p>
<p>(The short answer: I know that at some level, organic is founded on primary principles. But in a time-packed situation, there’s just no way to deal with the quantities of analysis that would have to be done to make it happen – you just have to memorize it.)</p>
<p>I don’t know about this. For example, Physics majors (those who are actually good at it) don’t memorize. They understand and grasp concepts. The people who memorize Physics problems for exams fail because they can’t apply concepts to problems they have never seen.</p>
The first few years of any hard science major is memorization, and you know this. What you described as a humanities class and the regurgitation of facts sounds like a 7th grade US history class.
Thank you for this update. Please be sure to keep me posted on what your opinions are on other topics in the future.</p>
<p>College lasts only 4 years. Physics may have “memorization” intensive intro classes, but starting at your 2nd or 3rd class it’s pretty much conceptual. </p>
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<p>No, they were upper division university history classes at the #2 History Department in America. (I believe it is ranked #2 overall, some of its concentrations are #1.</p>
<p>I think we can all agree that the easiest engineering or science curriculum is harder than the easiest history or English curriculum, but when we start getting into the upper-levels and when students start being prompted to do a tremendous amount of work if they care for A’s the lines become blurred. There are plenty of reasons to mock the humanities–I do it all the time. Then again, it’s not overly difficult to mock engineers, either.</p>
<p>If you know English, you can get through majors without a technical barrier–this is absolutely true, and it is the reason why even a bad science or engineering program would be more difficult than a bad humanities program. Once you get past that, though, the dynamics change. It’s not indicative of the upper echelons of anything, just like the crappy computer science students who don’t understand recursion after 4 years of schooling aren’t indicative of what the best programmers look like.</p>
<p>“Upper-levels” sure, PhD programs maybe. PhD programs are difficult regardless of the subject material and maybe the difficulty of subjects is less clear and less hierarchical. Then again, graduate programs are more lenient with grades than undergrad (so getting an A is statistically more likely), but it is at least twice as much work. </p>
<p>On the undergrad level upper division humanities are easier than upper division science classes. This is why there are no prerequisites to take upper div humanities classes, and why I was allowed to take them despite not being in the major.</p>