How do you all approach anki?

[deleted1139574]

The cards are starting to build up over time. How do you guys approach it. Like will you press again no matter what if you get something wrong? Do you make sure you understand every single card as well? Just wondering because cards are building up and its taking a long time for me. By the time I'm finished with anki I gotta do lecture material for today as well...

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[Hollow Knight]

There is no point in doing Anki if you're going to lie to yourself. If you don't understand the card, hit 1. Now if the answer was antibiotics and you said penicillin, give it to yourself, you know what I mean. The point is to understand the material not memorize all of AnKing verbatim.

It's REAL tough. I found doing Pomodoros (25 minutes then 5 off) and doing 100 cards every 25 minutes keeps me on track. The thing is, if you spend like 30 seconds trying to remember a card you don't know anyway, that's 30 seconds wasted. So fly through those suckers.

The alternative though is me trying to review everything for a med school final. Or for step 1. Which sounds impossible without Anki to me personally. So I just accept it and suffer. I'm hoping third year is better in this regard, I've been told there are fewer cards per day.

Also, do you have mandatory class? If so, anki during class or you won't sleep enough at night.

Also, unless you're gunning for ortho, stop worrying about all those neural tracts your PhD professors want you to memorize that aren't on step. Learn what you have to learn to make Bs and Cs on your med school exams and move on. Not everybody is going to be AOA, and that's OK, we'll still be doctors.

Also- get at least 7 hours of sleep every night or your brain won't think fast enough anyway.

 

[eteshoe]

Definitely agree w/ the tips @Hollow Knight said. The power of Anki is in the spaced repitition that gets ingrained over time after continuous reviews everyday. If you approach the system such that every day you chip away at it, the card volume will eventually decrease and become manageable.

But you have to be honest w/ yourself (my rule of thumb is no more than 20 sec per card or I say I don't know it) and you have to commit to the system. So many students start off strong but drop off because they skip a few days and before they know it, they are 1000s of cards behind and give up.

 

[deleted1139574]

It's REAL tough. I found doing Pomodoros (25 minutes then 5 off) and doing 100 cards every 25 minutes keeps me on track. The thing is, if you spend like 30 seconds trying to

There is no point in doing Anki if you're going to lie to yourself. If you don't understand the card, hit 1. Now if the answer was antibiotics and you said penicillin, give it to yourself, you know what I mean. The point is to understand the material not memorize all of AnKing verbatim.

It's REAL tough. I found doing Pomodoros (25 minutes then 5 off) and doing 100 cards every 25 minutes keeps me on track. The thing is, if you spend like 30 seconds trying to remember a card you don't know anyway, that's 30 seconds wasted. So fly through those suckers.

The alternative though is me trying to review everything for a med school final. Or for step 1. Which sounds impossible without Anki to me personally. So I just accept it and suffer. I'm hoping third year is better in this regard, I've been told there are fewer cards per day.

Also, do you have mandatory class? If so, anki during class or you won't sleep enough at night.

Also, unless you're gunning for ortho, stop worrying about all those neural tracts your PhD professors want you to memorize that aren't on step. Learn what you have to learn to make Bs and Cs on your med school exams and move on. Not everybody is going to be AOA, and that's OK, we'll still be doctors.

Also- get at least 7 hours of sleep every night or your brain won't think fast enough anyway.

Does AOA matter if I don't want to do ortho or derm

 

[Hollow Knight]

Does AOA matter if I don't want to do ortho or derm

I mean this is SDN so you'll get some different responses on this.

But I want to do FM or internal med or peds- AOA literally doesn't matter at all if you just want to match in a community program and be, ya know, a doctor.

If you want to do a competitive specialty (plastics, derm, ortho, CT surgery, etc)- you don't absolutely have to have it, but you should try your hardest.

Even in the chill fields like IM or FM, if you want to match at a powerhouse academic program, you'll have to have good grades (like AOA) and a high step 2 score.

But to match at a bottom of the barrel derm program you have to have a good step score and good grades/maybe AOA. Make sense?