If You Can Explain It, You Understand It by Myles

If You Can Explain It, You Understand It by Myles - September 2026 Scholarship Essay

The study strategy that has had the greatest impact on my academic success is teaching difficult concepts to other people. As a finance major, I have learned that it is very easy to convince yourself that you understand something when you are looking at a textbook, a formula, or a completed problem. You can follow the steps, get the right answer, and still not completely understand what is happening. Over time, I realized that the real test of whether I knew something was whether I could close my notes and explain it to someone else in normal language.

One of the best examples of this happened when I had to learn bond amortization tables in a very short amount of time before an accounting exam. At first, I approached it the way I normally would. I kept creating tables, working through examples, and trying to remember where every number went. I understood the process enough to complete a problem, but I did not feel like I truly understood why the numbers were changing from period to period. Instead of continuing to create table after table, I decided to explain the concept to two of my engineering friends.

Because neither of them were studying finance, I could not rely on finance terminology and assume they knew what I meant. I had to explain what principal was, what interest represented, why the carrying value of a bond changed, and why the amount being amortized mattered. Whenever they looked confused or asked me a question I could not answer immediately, it showed me exactly where my own understanding was weak. That was extremely helpful because it forced me to stop memorizing a process and start understanding what was actually happening behind the numbers.

I eventually started connecting bond amortization to something much more familiar: financing a car. Before someone walks into a dealership and agrees to finance a vehicle, I believe they should understand the relationship between principal and interest. A monthly car payment is not simply money disappearing from the balance evenly every month. Part of the payment goes toward interest, while the rest reduces the principal that is actually owed. Over time, that relationship changes. Once I could explain that idea clearly, amortization stopped looking like a complicated table filled with numbers and started making more sense as a way of showing how debt changes over time.

Teaching the concept to someone else helped me realize the difference between memorization and understanding. If I cannot explain a finance concept without constantly looking at my notes, then I probably do not know it as well as I think I do. If I have to use ten complicated financial terms to explain one simple idea, I probably need to study it more. But if I can take something difficult and explain it to an engineering student, a friend, or someone who has never taken a finance class before, then I know I have reached a much deeper level of understanding.

This strategy has also made me appreciate finance differently. I do not want to learn financial concepts only to pass an exam. Concepts such as interest, debt, amortization, investing, and credit affect decisions people make every day. Someone can walk into a dealership focused only on whether they can afford the monthly payment without realizing how much interest they are paying or how slowly their principal may be declining. Understanding the numbers can completely change how a person evaluates that decision, which is why I think being able to explain these concepts in simple terms is valuable beyond the classroom.

By the time I took my exam, I was no longer trying to memorize where numbers belonged on an amortization table. I understood why they belonged there and how each part of the table connected to the larger concept. Teaching has become my most effective learning method because it forces me to simplify, question myself, identify weaknesses in my understanding, and connect classroom material to real situations. More importantly, it has taught me that knowing how to get the answer and truly understanding the answer are two completely different things. For me, the best evidence that I have learned something is not a page full of completed practice problems. It is being able to put the page away and make the concept make sense to someone else.