Learner Profile
Maria Garcia

School

Costa Rica Scientific High School

HMX Courses

Physiology, Immunology, Biochemistry, Genetics

Maria Garcia’s high school experience has been a bit different from many students; as a junior at Costa Rica Scientific High School, she attends class for nearly 12 hours each day. Instead of relaxing during her summer break, Maria decided to keep studying, taking four HMX courses. “I pretty much didn’t have a vacation, I just spent time doing the courses – which was ok because I really enjoyed them,” she says. Here, she shares what she liked about the experience and how it will help her in school.

It was really easy to take. Not easy, but easy to take. What I’m used to in my country, they give you a book, you have to read it, memorize everything, and take a test. [In HMX courses], it’s more like you have concept videos that are not long enough to get you bored. I tend to get bored or at least tired when I get a lot of information thrown at me. It was more like you had a really good explanation that you could use and understand before going right after to the quiz questions. It was a really good system to learn and get you motivated as well, so I really liked it.

In immunology, I really liked that after the innate immune system and adaptive immune system, you got the whole interactive summary. It was really helpful to recall all the concepts before going into the next step. I really liked all the animations in physiology, they were really good. You could use what you were learning and see it in the charts and animations.

In biochemistry, I really liked that it was this kind of introduction using a non-biochemistry topic. For example, when [the instructor] was talking about how the currency developed. They wouldn’t exchange money, they would exchange rice and goats. But that process was too tiring, so they used money instead. So that was like an example for ATP, and that was good for understanding what was going on in the cell.

In genetics, I liked the fact that there was a little story behind the topic – the introductions were really fun.

I would definitely recommend it, at least for me it was a great experience and I learned a lot. I actually recommended it to some of my friends who also want to study medicine, and I think they’re capable of doing what I did. It’s so easy to take part in it and just to learn, so I would recommend it to anybody that’s interested in medicine.

Right now I’m starting to see some of the basic concepts I learned in the course [in high school], so they helped me review everything and learn better. When I get to medical school, knowing the concepts before will help me become a better student as well.

I want to be a pediatrician – I’m debating between that and something related to immunology. Before taking the course, I was pretty sure about being a pediatrician, but now I really like immunology and I want to get to know more about it.