Short post today, but as I’ve tried to teach things to people I’ve found the best way for them to learn is to just use the knowledge. We work with amino acids in our lab (the 20 building blocks of all proteins), and many new lab members have come up to me asking how I know so much about amino acids and how they can learn. What class did I take, what class should they take, is there a book I studied? The honest question is I learned by doing. When I studied the amino acids I was told to learn their shapes by drawing a protein which would spell out my name, but since half the letters in my name don’t have a corresponding amino acid I dropped that idea pretty quickly. For the rest of the semester I vaguely knew just enough to do well on the test but couldn’t exactly list the amino acids off with any fluency. Once I began working in a biochemistry lab though, it all fell into place. Suddenly, having to remember every day that Lysine and Arginine are positively charged helped me remember their structures, and eventually I could remember the side chains of most amino acids with little difficulty. This never would have happened if I had only studied them in a class, I had to learn by using.