Hey! I am a first year medical student and am having a tough time with the course. I was always very smart at highschool and whilst I always worked exceptionally hard, I never had any real troubles with my coursework. Since starting at medical school in September, my grades have dropped dramatically and I failed one exam and passed another by 2%. No matter what I try I can't seem to remember anything I study and I have a really tough time trying to get everything into my head (which I usually end up forgetting again very soon). It takes me about 3 hours to get through each lecture and this just isn't practical because there physically is not enough hours in the day for this. I have my mid semester exams on Monday and I am extremely behind just now and have a very poor knowledge of my coursework despite the fact I have been practically living in the library all semester. If anyone has any tips or advice to help me out I would be extremely grateful as right not I am starting to worry that I am not going to be able to make it through med school.
1st Year Struggles
- Thread starter susier
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Which country do you go to school in?
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Let me preface this by saying that it's extremely difficult to gauge strengths/weaknesses of your study habits without knowing you personally or having a more in-depth conversation.
But it sounds like you've lost sight of the forest for the trees. The brunt of why medical school is difficult is that you're bombarded with seemingly endless amounts of factoids and details and expected to remember them all, and it sounds like you're falling short because you're trying to remember them all. The reason that the meticulous 3 hour dissection of the lecture material isn't sticking in your mind is likely because there's not much contextual relevance to it. It's important to get a general overview of the material before you dive into the nitty gritty. General advice on your study schedule:
1. Don't write notes.
2. Set a strict schedule and follow it.
3. If you're taking a break, you're taking a break. Don't quickly pause the lecture or look up from your book to check e-mail/fb.
4. Don't get bogged down in a lecture and go too slowly.
5. Preview the slides before listening to the lecture. The key point with this is to try and integrate all the information presented and draw your own analyses. I typically try and do this the day before I watch the lecture as it gives me time to passively forget some details so that they can then be reinforced by watching the lecture.
6. Watch the lecture on accelerated speed and prevent yourself from annotating everything that the professor says. Only write something down if 1) You misunderstood it when you read through the ppts intially or 2) It's obviously important information that wasn't included in the slides. Anything that is in the slides, but you're only noticing in lecture should be highlighted.
7. Review all lecture slides with your annotations on the weekend after you've made them. This is key as it not only allows you to review the information, but also allows you to integrate information that you've learned on Friday into your Monday lecture.
The idea is to efficiently go through the material as many times as possible and focus your attention on things that were not immediately apparent to you or are critically important. At this point you've also completed three full passes of your lectures before you've even started studying for the exam.
But it sounds like you've lost sight of the forest for the trees. The brunt of why medical school is difficult is that you're bombarded with seemingly endless amounts of factoids and details and expected to remember them all, and it sounds like you're falling short because you're trying to remember them all. The reason that the meticulous 3 hour dissection of the lecture material isn't sticking in your mind is likely because there's not much contextual relevance to it. It's important to get a general overview of the material before you dive into the nitty gritty. General advice on your study schedule:
1. Don't write notes.
2. Set a strict schedule and follow it.
3. If you're taking a break, you're taking a break. Don't quickly pause the lecture or look up from your book to check e-mail/fb.
4. Don't get bogged down in a lecture and go too slowly.
5. Preview the slides before listening to the lecture. The key point with this is to try and integrate all the information presented and draw your own analyses. I typically try and do this the day before I watch the lecture as it gives me time to passively forget some details so that they can then be reinforced by watching the lecture.
6. Watch the lecture on accelerated speed and prevent yourself from annotating everything that the professor says. Only write something down if 1) You misunderstood it when you read through the ppts intially or 2) It's obviously important information that wasn't included in the slides. Anything that is in the slides, but you're only noticing in lecture should be highlighted.
7. Review all lecture slides with your annotations on the weekend after you've made them. This is key as it not only allows you to review the information, but also allows you to integrate information that you've learned on Friday into your Monday lecture.
The idea is to efficiently go through the material as many times as possible and focus your attention on things that were not immediately apparent to you or are critically important. At this point you've also completed three full passes of your lectures before you've even started studying for the exam.
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its a european student so they started right from HS
Thanks for your advice 
I got my mid semester exam results back today and I failed very badly, I would be very grateful if you could suggest any ways in which I could get more practise at multiple choice style questions? Many thanks
I got my mid semester exam results back today and I failed very badly, I would be very grateful if you could suggest any ways in which I could get more practise at multiple choice style questions? Many thanks
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D
deleted500612
Thanks for your advice
Ok it sounds like at this point you need to start taking this extremely seriously and speak to your program's guidance counsellor and utilize whatever other resources your school offers to improve your study habits and exam performance. I hate to be overly blunt about this, but if you've already failed multiple exams in the first year you really can't afford to fall any further behind than you already are or you are going to fail out of the program. Good luck, and I hope you are able to get things on track.
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Three hours per lecture is not unreasonable. Doing those hours all at once is. They key to med school is repetition, not time. You need 4-5 passes of the material in one form or another. The early reps will leave you feeling like you don't understand much of the material, but the later ones are when things coalesce.
The other key is scheduling periodic reviews of everything you've seen. Weekends are great for this. Make sure you review everything you've seen thus far so you will have to move pretty quickly. You will find more and more of it making sense at this point. You will also need some final cumulative passes right before the exam.
It still comes out to 3 or more hours per lecture, but spaces them out more.
The other key is scheduling periodic reviews of everything you've seen. Weekends are great for this. Make sure you review everything you've seen thus far so you will have to move pretty quickly. You will find more and more of it making sense at this point. You will also need some final cumulative passes right before the exam.
It still comes out to 3 or more hours per lecture, but spaces them out more.
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While putting in a lot of hours to study always sounds like a good idea, what’s more important is how you study. Based on what you’ve said, it seems like you’ve had a hard time remembering the details. A mistake that some students make is to simply try and memorize all the details before learning the concepts. A conceptual learning base takes time and cannot be crammed in. The beauty of conceptual learning is that it gives you predictive power, meaning that you don’t have to memorize as many details, as you can simply think about a topic and derive some of them. My advice is to really take the time to figure out what the concepts are, learn them, and then learn the details after you have a good conceptual basis.
