Students Talk: The Hardest Course

Let’s face it — university isn’t a breeze, and almost everyone has memories of a “nightmare” course (or two). Popular opinion? In the video, our interviewees mention a few of UBC’s especially notorious courses: (ECON 101/102), integral calculus (MATH 101/103/105), organic chemistry (CHEM 233),… you name the rest. For most courses though, difficulty varies by the individual and is subjective. The style in which a course is taught often appeals to certain types of learners, so while lovers of multiple-choice exams may excel in EOSC 114, those who thrive on complex reasoning would probably do better in PHIL 314. Taking your hardest course, then, can tell you a lot about how you learn best — perhaps by a process of elimination of how you learn worst. The upside “Easy” courses might help boost that GPA, but it’s often the courses we find challenging that propel our growth as learners. Your hardest course may have been what you needed in first year to get into “university mode”, the push for you to finally visit office hours, the thing that taught you to think critically, or the training in presentation skills that become indispensable after you graduate. Although you might like to say that your hardest course taught you nothing other than the depth of disdain one could have for a course, you probably can find some value in it upon some honest reflection. “Work hard” One of our interviewees says you “just gotta work hard”. But when it comes to the hardest course where you just don’t get it, working hard may not be enough. You gotta work smart. And that means doing things like accessing the resources available to you — this website being one of them. Find what you need: learning strategies from peer coaches, subject-specific tutoring (free!), hints on writing well,… the resources abound. One (or more) of them may be just what you need to get the upper hand on your hardest course. What about you? What was the hardest course you’ve taken at UBC? What did you learn through the process?