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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2024

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  • I’m different from your roommate, but as another low-effort overachiever here’s what I can pin down: First of all my memory is seriously horrible. I’ve always struggled to remember things I’m not interested in, so whenever something could be intuitively understood and creatively applied rather than memorized that’s what I did. To me memorization was, and still is, my last resort after everything else failed, which was only really common in social studies, languages (other than English, which I already knew) and memorization-heavy sciences like biology and geology. I am, however, really good at chemistry, physics and math, because you can get through those mostly via intuition and creativity, and so I ended up in that weird state where I was losing marks in Arabic and German and making that up in math and mechanics, and as long as I didn’t do too badly on the former the latter carried me. So to answer your question: Understanding, intuition, creativity, and an absolute, undying hatred of rote memorization. For example I make it a point of proving every theorem I run into during math or physics class, both as a matter of pride and because if I can accept the result as something natural and reproduce it when needed, I don’t need to memorize it.

    I want to maintain that this is something anyone can do if they set their mind to it, but I’ve always been a weird kid so there’s a good chance this only works because my brain is just wired that way.