There’s a story from the renowned Richard Feynman that I like quite a bit. It goes something like this: One day, Feynman was on a hike with his father, and during their walk, Feynman’s father pointed out a bird and said, “See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush. In German, it’s called halzenfugel; in Chinese, it’s called a chung ling. Now you know the bird’s name but nothing about the bird itself. You only know what people in different countries call that bird.”

That story, out of everything I’ve read in my lifetime, is probably one of the most impactful ones I’ve ever read. After reading it, you can’t help but ask yourself, “What does that tell us about science?” or more generally, “What does that tell us about the world?” The answer to that is a great deal. I can know the names of about a million different things, but it gives almost no insight into what we discuss.*

Feynman’s story illustrates a profound truth about education, perhaps not fully intentional; it underscores a fundamental goal of university education: fostering deep understanding, not just superficial knowledge.

These are the themes that have resonated with me greatly during my time at the University of Michigan. In a way that I could never do it justice, here’s a quote from my professor, Dr. Brian P. Coppola, that sums these ideas up quite nicely:

The Goals of a University Education are not to merely get a 4.0 GPA and score a position in a high profile PhD or MD or whatever program. These are possible, but the goals of a university education are to gain the abilities you need to inherit, understand, and advance human understanding in whatever and wherever you decide to make your contribution. — BPC (taken from the seventh essay on learning from Dr. Coppola’s eight essays on learning titled — Transformational Learning: Resistance is Futile)**

For my entire academic career, I always saw school as a chore. I took classes out of superficial interest and only really did them as I knew they would hold some value to me in the future. I was learning things, but for what reason? I understood that education was valuable, but that was only due to the lived experiences of my parents. My father’s American dream, achieved through education, and my mother’s return to school for a PhD, instilled in me the importance of education, yet I pursued it without passion. Much of my motivation to excel could boil down to the fact that I was trying to live up to my father’s legacy — a son of farmer parents who climbed to the top by becoming a physician.

This was the mindset I entered my freshman year with, so I was prepared to overcome my first challenge — organic chemistry (Chem 210/215). Amongst all the pre-med classes, organic chemistry is notorious for being arguably the hardest class one will take during their undergraduate training. While I know those statements may be a bit exaggerated, 17-year-old me thought it would be the hardest class I would take. My worries weren’t helped because I remembered nearly nothing from high school chemistry.

Regardless of how prepared I felt, I knew that if I put in enough time, I could get the grade I wanted. GPA, GPA, GPA. I was obsessed. So, I started early. From day 1 of the class, I began reading the material. I began with Appendix Section A: Review of General Chemistry. It was my first time reading a textbook for a class. But as I read more and more, I realized the textbook was nothing like any book I had read before, yet intimately familiar at the same time. There were wonderful sections on the history of the discussed topics and sections labeled “Reflections on Science,” which preceded every chapter in the book. I found myself truly enjoying the book and its material.

As I read more, I realized that there was a study guide that contained all the answers to the book problems. While checking my answers, I read Dr. Coppola’s eight essays on learning. The seventh essay caught my eye: Transformational Learning: Resistance is Futile.

Reading through the paragraph I quoted initially, I began to think. That’s when I asked myself the all-important question that every student has asked themselves at least once: Why am I in school? Why am I learning what I’m learning right now? What’s the point of school? University? An education?

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, and that’s where their beauty lies. But reading that essay, in particular, prompted me to reflect more critically. I realized I was stuck in a rut, fixated on getting an A and reading with the underlying bias of how this would help me achieve that goal.

Gradually, my focus shifted from obsessing over grades to seeking true understanding. Chem 210/215 was instrumental in this transformation. It helped me realize my passion for teaching and mentoring, something I had never recognized in myself before. Reflecting on my first two terms in college, I’ve come to appreciate what it means to truly receive a university education. It’s about more than just the grades — it’s about developing a deep understanding, fostering a love for learning, and discovering how to contribute meaningfully to the world around me.

This newfound perspective on education led me to reflect on my family’s experiences. For my father, a Syrian immigrant from a lineage of farmers, education was a means of escaping poverty and oppression and building a future. For my mother, education is also a means of escape. She gave up everything for me and my three siblings, and now, at 40, she is returning to school to pursue a PhD in psychology.

But as I pondered these reflections, I realized that my understanding of education diverged from theirs. While education is often portrayed as a means to an end, I found myself resonating with a different sentiment. To me, education is not just a pathway to success; it is an end in itself. The journey of learning, the process of discovery, and the joy of understanding are what I value most. In other words, the ends are the means.***

I love learning. It never quite hit me that this process of reading, thinking, and asking questions has a name because it felt so fundamental to me. So, to answer what education means to me, an education is something I would pursue even if it didn’t have a name. I would pursue it no matter how much or how little society values it. I would pursue it even if it’s taboo. Or if it makes as little money as humanely possible. Pursuing an education goes deeper than just learning its value from my parents. It is something integral to my very being. I love learning, and my experience at the University of Michigan has taught me that and so much more about myself.

I’ve always been like this, although I’ve never realized it until now, and hopefully, I will continue to be like this for a long time. Embracing this love for learning, I’ve decided that pursuing academia is my path. Teaching is the best way to deepen my understanding and share my enthusiasm for learning. My professor and many thinkers I’ve read echo this sentiment: teaching is integral to learning. Beyond the many benefits of teaching, the most appealing aspect is the opportunity to share stories about the world. I want to tell these stories to my students, colleagues, friends, family, and anyone eager to listen. So here’s to a lifetime filled with great stories and an even greater audience, continuously learning and growing together.

Notes

*Although a bit tangential, another story illustrates this idea of the relationship between language and reality. In the early history of genetics, when Wilhelm Johansen first coined the word gene to represent Mendel’s units of heredity, he wrote: “Language is not only our servant, but it can also be our master.” Then, the word “gene” was defined by its function; it was simply a carrier of hereditary information. But the “gene” stood for so much more than that. For the gene represented a world of knowledge yet to be discovered. In science, a word is a hypothesis, and it is then effectively our master.

**I wasn’t sure how to elaborate on this further, but I highly recommend reading this essay to any reader who managed to get this far. In the essay, Dr. Coppola references a paper by the educational psychologists Philip Zimbardo and George Slavich, who mention three ways a learner will transform by a proper educational experience. The following is a commentary on each of the three principles.

You will master the concepts of at least one field. What does it mean to an expert? I could memorize a textbook of facts and whatnot, but what use is it when I don’t understand the underlying concepts? Much of our understanding of knowledge can be condensed into knowing where a fact belongs and how to use it. Our knowledge systems can be broken down into mind maps, with the facts we know being the nodes and how they relate to one another being the strings. You create these maps to represent a system or to answer a question. For example, I want to explain how electrophilic additions work. I can start by fitting it under a reaction type, specifically a type of addition reaction, which is one of the four broad reaction types. Now that I’ve contextualized it, I can go deeper: what is an electrophile? I can briefly define it and refine it to be more rigorous. Then, I can connect it to nucleophiles and maybe Frontier Molecular Orbital theory. Going back to electrophilic addition reactions, I can explain the mechanism, stating the overall electron source and destination, and then I can show the formation of the carbonation intermediate, dominated by Markovnikov selectivity. Then, I would present the subsequent capture of the carbonation intermediate. I could then show the potential energy diagram of the overall reaction outcome. this is just one example, and I can confidently say that Chem 210/215 helped me achieve this level of mastery of almost every topic covered in the course.

  1. You will improve your ability to learn.

This is probably the most valuable skill I got out of 210/215, improving my ability to understand and implement the knowledge I’ve learned through practice. High school was never really challenging enough to force me to develop learning techniques/strategies, but I can now confidently say that taking a class like 210/215 forced me to have a strategy in approaching the material. I would read, do the problems, then come to class prepared with questions. Sometimes, I would fall behind; other times, I would be ahead. However, through thinking through the material and spending a great deal of time-solving problems, I found my ability to learn the material growing better, and my ability to understand the material in other fields also improved.

  1. You will gain learning-related attitudes, values, and beliefs

In simpler terms, you will gain a bias towards almost every material you come across from then on. The change is subtle but apparent if you are observant enough. It’s an amazing feeling to realize that you are starting to adopt the typical thinking of a chemist. You can (with some degree of confidence) say that you belong to this discipline. You start asking yourself: where are the electrons coming and going in this reaction? Or Where would the electrons like to go?

*** That isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy the supposed ends or fruits of my labor either. And how wonderful those fruits are! I can now tell wonderful stories about our world and how it works. The world comprises particles, which then come together to make atoms. Using the atomic hypothesis, bring two atoms too close, they repel, but bring them just close enough, and they’ll attract; we can explain many things about our physical world. Using a bit of imagination, we can make these wonderful, beautiful stories about how things work. And it’s enjoyable and exciting to do. There were many times when I would read something, stop, and then sit and imagine for a bit before seeing if what I imagined aligned with what my professor said. Through this process, I believe I’ve developed a pretty good “chemist intuition,” if you will. I talked about this greatly to my professor, Dr. Brian P. Coppola. The course and his textbook provided a perfect environment to learn and understand what I am learning. I can contextualize exactly what I am learning in the broader scheme of human endeavor.