How do you find time to study in third year?

[sapience8x]

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Okya i know it's only 2 weeks into my first rotation but i have been having trouble motivating to study between the call and the long days. How hard are the shelf exams? I try to learn alot during the day and take notes on rounds. I have done a bit of studying but defintely not as much as first or second year. are the shelf exams something i cna cram for a week ahead of time if i need to?

 

[Cardsfan]

Okya i know it's only 2 weeks into my first rotation but i have been having trouble motivating to study between the call and the long days. How hard are the shelf exams? I try to learn alot during the day and take notes on rounds. I have done a bit of studying but defintely not as much as first or second year. are the shelf exams something i cna cram for a week ahead of time if i need to?

I found this was one of the biggest adjustments during my first few months third year. My advice is to read up on your pts early in the rotation, then when you are 2-3 weeks before the shelf, go over a review book and be sure to do lots of questions, Pretest and Appleton &Lange make books for every rotation. (Many threads here cover what is best for each rotation)

For the rotations with long hours, like surgery and peds, I carried around Recall, which was good to breeze through while sitting around the hospital.

If your school puts more weight on the Shelfs then you should spend more time studying, since they are pretty tough for the most part.

Good luck!

 

[TruTrooper]

The only rotation I found it hard to find time to study for was IM and that was because my Attending gave me tons of talks to do because I questioned some of the treatments and tests that was ordered for patients. Needless to say that that was a huge mistake but it was frustrating to read something in a text and find out that things can be done differently in the clinical setting.

I now do not accept text info as gospel and realize that there can be quite a few approaches to a case and things just are not so black and white in the hospital.

Anyway, just carry a pocket book to read during down times and quick few minute reading breaks. I also found it helpful to carry around my book bag sometimes to crack open a text during lunch or breaks longer than 30 minutes. Finally, I found it helpful to study right away after getting home from the hospital while I was still in hospital and learning mode. The nights were mine, baby!

 

[nerfherder]

Make sure you bring your study materials to the hospital. You never know when you'll have a free 1/2 hour to hour to study in the hospital library. Try to carry a pocket book of questions or some material on your clipboard with you in case you just have a few minutes of down time.
Try to do as many questions as possible to get used to the testing style.
Also don't worry if your first shelf score doesn't turn out to be as good as you like. It seems that usually shelf scores go up as the 3rd year goes on.
Good Luck!

 

[GenSurg]

This is one of the harder adjustments. I'd recommend reading for an hour/night if you can swing it. While you are on call, as long as you are not carrying a pager, you may have some down time. As long as you schedule yourself some time, give up some sleep, you should be able to get some done.

This is going to be an adjustment that you need to make from now until at least residency is over. When you are no longer in it for grades, it becomes even harder.

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[mdqueen]

I'm having a bit of a rough time. Luckily I had L&D 1st and now I'm on gyn. One more week of gyn then ambulatory, where I only go 8-5 🙂
I have pretty much not studied a thing, but I will start this weekend and try to alot 1 hr a night during the week. I try to read up on my patients, but they have low yield diseases like post op complications (vaginal cuff hematomas) etc. I will just try to do blueprints/recall/pretest as much as possible. Keep your head up, we all can do it...just getting used to sacrificing sleep is the hard part.