Understanding Before Memory: What It Actually Takes to Master the LEA
Every review season starts the same way: a flood of PDFs, Google Drive links, Discord channels, and a growing sense that there isn’t enough time to absorb any of it. Two topnotchers who lived through exactly that overwhelm — and came out the other side with Top 5 and Top 9 finishes — sat down for Series 05 of Topnotch Talks to explain what changed the outcome for them. It wasn’t more hours. It was a different relationship with the material entirely.
On Not Straight-A Students
Ar. Bernard Berberabe, VIZCODE’s founder and the session’s host, opened with a question candidates rarely hear addressed honestly: were you always headed for this? Neither guest said yes. Ar. Khurtz Gatus, LEA Top 5, described failing calculus and re-defending his thesis, without Latin honors to soften the record. Ar. Glyn Tubidan, LEA Top 9, offered a similar account — a quieter college run, a thesis defense pushed to the edge by scheduling conflicts. Neither framed this as false modesty. The point, as Gatus put it, was that topnotching isn’t a continuation of who you were in college. It’s a different discipline, built later, on its own terms.
The Overwhelm Is the First Test
Both guests independently named the same early mistake: pulling in every available resource at once. Gatus described the architecture syllabus as too broad to absorb in bulk — the fix wasn’t a better resource, it was smaller steps, taken deliberately, before volume became anxiety. Tubidan’s version of the same mistake was more specific: he tried to memorize material before understanding the concept underneath it, and within weeks, most of it had evaporated. The redesign that followed — building comprehension first, memorization second — became the foundation for everything that came after in his review.
Two Different Walls, One Shared Principle
The conversation’s most tactile moment came from a guest question about their now-famous study walls. Gatus printed and posted the codes and formworks he knew were weakest — structural computations, methods of compensation, professional fee percentages — treating the wall as a mirror of his gaps, not a comprehensive archive. Tubidan took a different route: small flashcards, reserved for what he’d gotten wrong in prior quizzes, kept deliberately minimal because a full wall, he admitted, would have been more distracting than useful. The tools diverged. The underlying logic — surface only what you don’t yet know — didn’t.
What “Understanding” Actually Meant to Them
Pressed on what comprehension looks like in practice, both guests pointed to the same habit: cross-referencing. Gatus described comparing similar-sounding code provisions against each other — stair requirements across the National Building Code, the Accessibility Code, and the Fire Code — because the standards differ in ways that memorization alone tends to blur. He credited VIZCODE’s Visual Code Library with making that comparison legible, especially for provisions that read as dense text on their own. Tubidan approached history the same way, mapping design decisions to the materials and constraints available in a given era, so that even a forgotten fact could be reconstructed from context under exam pressure rather than recalled cold.
Knowing Yourself Over Copying Someone Else’s Schedule
The session’s clearest divide was chronological, not conceptual: Tubidan reviewed mornings, done by early afternoon, protecting the rest of the day for recovery. Gatus, by his own account, was the opposite — a night owl who eventually had to retrain his body clock in the final weeks before the exam, since test day itself starts near dawn. Neither claimed their schedule was correct. Both were adamant that the other’s wouldn’t have worked for them. The instruction wasn’t “wake up earlier” — it was know your own pattern early enough to trust it, and don’t let someone else’s method talk you out of yours.
Some insights are better experienced in the room — including where the conversation went on mock exam anxiety, and the one line Gatus returned to whenever his own doubt got loud.
By the end, neither guest offered the kind of advice that resolves into a slogan. Gatus talked about writing his goal down — not once, but repeatedly, across his phone, his notebook, his PC — because motivation fades and written goals don’t. Tubidan’s closing note was simpler: enjoy the season, because the candidates who do tend to retain more of it. Nothing here promises a shortcut. What both accounts suggest, instead, is that the topnotchers who make it aren’t the ones who study longest. They’re the ones who understood, early, what they didn’t yet understand — and built their review around closing that gap on purpose.
Founder’s Note
What stayed with me from this session wasn’t the strategy — it was how differently Khurtz and Glyn arrived at the same conclusion. One’s a night owl, one’s up by seven. One built a wall, one kept it to flashcards. But both said the same thing in different words: stop memorizing before you understand, and stop reviewing on someone else’s schedule.
If you’re two months in and still figuring out your rhythm, that’s not behind. That’s exactly where they were too.
— Ar. Bernard Berberabe
Topnotch Talks is hosted by Ar. Bernard Berberabe, Founder of VIZCODE — built to make architecture learning clearer, faster, and actually usable for LEA candidates.
— VIZCODE Team
Two LEA topnotchers — Top 5 and Top 9 — on the mistake nearly every candidate makes early: memorizing before understanding. Series 05 of Topnotch Talks.
