How Do You Know How To Distribute Study Time In Med School?

[965978]

I’ve seen this quite often on this forum where med students always talk about “high yield” topics and “low yield” topics. They also talk about how it’s impossible to memorize everything.

So my question is, how do you know where to distribute your study time? How do you know that a certain topic is more likely to show up? Is it just obvious?

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[efle]

There's some variation based on school curriculum, if you have an old school system with graded exams that are based on lecture materials then high-yield means learning what the professors teach. In a pass/fail system high yield will be what's tested on step exams and shelf exams, so you can study straight from board prep materials and ignore lectures.

Really it just means "a good use of time"

 

[The Knife & Gun Club]

Yea it’s a skill you develop over time too that grows with you’re constantly evolving study habits in med school.

For example I remember a kid who memorized all the different types of neurotransmitter receptors that act on the small bowel because it was in an image someone put in a power point slide. That dude wasted hours and hours learning where they were located and what they did. But could’ve just memorized the 3-4 major ones that the dude spent the rest of the lecture talking about.

Those hours were wasted memorizing those things when he could’ve studied other power points, or worked on research, or MOST IMPORTANTLY been at the bar having a few beers.

 

[aldol16]

You look in First Aid. The highest yield stuff for Step tends to be in there (as well as stuff that's just high-yield for you to know in general). And Pathoma. You really should minimize the amount of stuff you brute force memorize so it's always good to focus on the bigger concepts and mechanisms. Physiology is all about mechanisms and if you understand the mechanism, you'll also understand how things can go wrong and how to treat the things when they go wrong. That's high yield material. Memorizing all of the molecules in all of the biochemical pathways is not high yield.

 

[AnatomyGrey12]

You do Zanki. And then you do practice questions. And if you find something that isn't in Zanki you look it up on Wikipedia. And then you destroy both class and Step. And then you match that sweet ortho residency and forget all of it and only remember how to hammer things for lots of monies.

 

[macunga]

It's about what ideas you're sticking into your back pocket, since you're not going to hang on to every detail.

But sometimes high yield means a bizarre disease that Step likes to test because it's a good illustration of abnormal pathways (I'm looking at you Lesch-Nyhan). In the Peds world, it's DiGeorge (which might show up as an embryology question, because it illustrates the different things 3rd/4th branchial pouch affects). So you kind of piece things together and shove them into your back pocket.

You have to accept that you will forget things. And that's totally okay. Even with anki, you still occasionally see a card from like a few months ago and you're totally like "I have no idea what the hell this is." Then you look it up in First Aid and it clicks into place more quickly the second time.