Do I make the cards from FIRST AID? The lecture slides? BRS questions?
So this depends on your school's exam style. There are two types of exams that medical schools traditionally use: exams that are written by the professors who teach the course, and NBME exams, which are essentially old board exams. So if you're studying for a professor-written exam, I would recommend making cards based on your lecture slides. If you're studying for an NBME exam, I would recommend making them from primary and board review resources. First Aid is one of these resources, but it alone will not be enough - it's more of a review book once you've already learned the material, and is not good for learning new material on your first pass through. The other resources you use are your personal preference, but I use High Yield Embryo, Costanzo Physiology, Pathoma, Sketchy Pharm, Sketchy Micro, and First Aid, occasionally supplementing from other resources as needed.
The Brosencephalon deck that was mentioned is a good resource, and I did use it some to study for Step 1 once I already had studied all the material before. However, the best way to use Anki is to make the cards on your own - making a card forces you to make sure you really know the material before you start testing yourself on it. This is time consuming, but in my opinion it's worth it.
I do not recommend making flash cards that are just a copy and paste of a practice question unless you know for sure that exact question will be on the test. This will make you essentially memorize the answer to the question without necessarily understanding why that's the answer.
And also, should I start making them now in the summer time?
Absolutely not. The vast majority of SDN posters who are actually already in medical school pretty strongly discourage any sort of pre-studying. This will be a waste of your time because you don't know what material is going to be on your first exam, nobody has any clue of the depth and type of knowledge they need to understand for med school before actually starting med school, and a myriad of other reasons. However, do get started making cards ASAP after your first med school lectures.
Also, how often should I make the cards? There's so much material in medical school...should I make them after each lecture every day?
This is what I did and this is what I recommend. It's super easy to get behind on Anki and super difficult to catch back up. Make the cards when the material is fresh in your mind and you understand it clearly.
And to those who have used Anki, what times during your study do you go over them?
So I'm not sure how much you've used Anki before, but it's a spaced repetition study tool. Basically, you'll do a set number of new cards every day. When an individual card comes up, you have to say "Oh geez, that card was super difficult, give it to me again tomorrow" or "That card was super easy, I don't need to see it again for 4 days." And then that card goes into your "review" pile for that respective day. So every day, you'll have some new cards to go through, and some review cards to go through. And Anki works best to keep up with those assigned cards every single day. It's a big commitment, but it tends to work very well for those who commit to it. So my daily routine was a little bit of reading/making new cards, and a little bit of reviewing assigned cards. As it got closer to the exam, I did less reading/making new cards and more practice questions.
I do know a few people who just use the cards to cram right before the exam, which works for them, but it's not the most efficient way to use Anki. The trade off is that if you're keeping up with your assigned cards every day, you don't need to read through the source material multiple times - just once when you make the cards, and then Anki helps you to review it in chunks according to when you are most likely to forget it. If you're just using Anki to cram, expect to read through the source material multiple times or use another method to memorize it.
