Is there a way to get a slice of many tables?

For example: a typical university project, I have users, user_courses
(for instructors), user_enrolls (for students), courses, events (each
course have one or more events), groups (each event has one or more
groups), group_members (each group has 1+ members), etc

It is very common for me to get data from all of these tables. While I
can set association in model to do this, it requires me to do
associations in many tables and returned data will be large and
contain lots of fields that I am not interested in.

Is there a way to get a slice of all those tables?

For exmaple:

user_id=1
user_name=joe
enrolled course name
group name

etc.

Thank you,
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