It's funny how much this reminds me of my situation.
I know what you mean about having to memorize "everything". Unfortunately, most -if not all- middle eastern schools still think memorizing is equal to actually learning. If you don't memorize everything word for word in school, you won't get the 99.9% that everyone is expecting you to get if you actually want a good future. This is the reason people who are great memorizers end up being the top in their classes, while those who try to understand and actually learn the material don't. I used to feel so special when I used to be the top of my class year after year. Turns out that didn't really mean I was smarter than my peers (as my parents and teachers led me to believe), rather I was just an above average memorizer who would literarily memorize 100 pages per subject word for freaking word.
And then....medical school happened.
This is when people who actually knew how to learn instead of memorize shun brightly while my grades dropped to below average standards. You CANNOT memorize big robbins word for word, and you CANNOT memorize clinically oriented anatomy word for word. It's what one of my professors told me when she noticed I was struggling. I dismissed her advice as a mere opinion (I'm amazed by my own stupidity right now). Yep, I actually sat down and tried to memorize whole textbooks. It took me two hours to finish a freaking page while everyone else was finishing 10 to 20 pages during that time. And by the end of those two hours I would feel incredibly depressed and exhausted because I could see if was spending a ton of "effort" and still not getting anywhere.
Instead of trying to change my study style, I got depressed, fell in with the wrong crowd, and almost quit medical school altogether (also struggled with a couple other issues like perfectionism and blah blah). Lucky for me, I had my mother and a couple of great friends to convince me to change my decision.
Here comes the advise part:
- You are going to need to disregard everything you knew about studying when you were in school. Don't completely chuck memorizing out the window. You WILL need to memorize a lot of things, but here is how the kind of memorizing in medical school is different from that in middle eastern high schools:
In high school your teachers expect you to memorize EVERYTHING on the page. If you write 'is' instead of 'are' you lose the holy half mark that will determine your future. This isn't how things work in medical school. You need to understand concepts, then memorize certain words or important phrases.
For example: You'll need to memorize the word 'renin', but you're going to have to understand its role regulating blood pressure. Read about renin in a textbook, then spend a minute to recite what you understood of what you read in your own words NOT THE WRITER'S WORDS. Do you get me?
Think about it, no two textbooks have the same writing style or the same blocks of text. Each writer writes in his own style and words what he knows and understands about the topic. If everyone JUST memorized, we'd get 10 books with the exact same words only with different covers...not gonna happen.
It will take some time for you to change your style from memorizing to thorough understanding and only memorizing certain important details that you just can't go around. This isn't as easy as many people expect it to be. You aren't tweaking a study style here and there, you're dismissing a whole mind wrecking idea that's been hammered into your mind in the course of 12 god blessed years! It will take time, and more importantly, it will take sheer determination and discipline. But it's not impossible, you'll get there.
Might I suggest picking up a copy of:
How to Succeed at Medical School by Dason Evans and Jo Brown? (Obviously copied from Amazon...darn it).
It has a ton of study styles that have been more than helpful during my ongoing quest for efficient studying.
Listen, if you love medicine, if you can't imagine yourself doing anything but medicine, then don't ever give up on trying to change. You have to be flexible, or you won't make it that far (neither in medical school, nor in real life).
If you consider this in any way helpful (it was in my case), don't hesitate to ask me if you need anymore help...
