My first memory of learning was when I was in kinder probably. My mom bought me this book called “Coquito” which is a book legend in Peru, all parents buy this book if they want their kids to learn how to read and write. I loved this book so much because it had had fun small stories about this little kid called “Coquito” and his friends. This book also had a section where it taught you how to write, words were in fainted lines where I had to retrace over to find out the word.
I also remember my learning process during elementary school. Teachers always started with a story, now I understand why that is. I also remember studying for exams with my mom. We will sit next to our house window (watching people and cars pass by, I am not sure why this was not on a table, maybe because it was boring?). Remembering these times is nostalgic to be honest, but I remember my mom would have my notebook with all my notes and she used to read it to me and sometimes she would make a story about it, so I could remember and tell her everything back.
These memories shaped my way of learning, since then I have been studying that way (reading over the material and repeating everything back to my cat ). I usually do this for courses that require memorization, for example: a few semesters back for my immunology class I had to memorize a bunch of things that included pathways. I used to read the book, take notes for both book and in class and then I used to put everything together on a word file that I will study religiously later. Now that I am in graduate school, I don’t have many classes that require memorization, most of them are based on reading peer-review articles and try to process what they did in the paper.
As I mentioned before in one of my posts, I recently had to present a peer review article about the specificity of influenza virus hemagglutinin (HA) stalk-reactive antibodies in humans. I am not a virologist and I have never taken a virology class before but my understanding in immunology and the desire to learn more about influenza pushed me to completely understand this subject (or at least the basics?). So, how did I learn? To start, I read the entire article section by section. The intro helped me a lot but there were still some terms I needed to understand so I used my friend Google. I also had to be able to present the methods that they used so I had to use my other friend YouTube to be able to visualize the methods. Thanks to this, I was able to stand confident in front of my peers to answer their questions.
This time, the internet helped me learn. As of now, there are so many sources one can use to learn basically anything. You just have to be proactive and find what works best for you to learn.
