So I just finished my second week of medical school
Slow down, haha.
cut yourself some slack.
Also, everyone has gone through what you're going through now. that panic of, 'this is nothing like undergrad'. 'What study habits should I now adapt and create.' !
also see Goro's 2017 guide to studying: Goro's just posted a 2017 guide to studying for med school.
MD & DO - Goro’s guide to success in medical school (2017 ed.).
and its obvious to me that the first pass though the material is taking me way too long.
It's only second week.
If you think it's taking 'too' long, drop it and move onto something else. there's countless subjects around that will soak up as much of your exams as the ones you're struggling on.
If you're bogged down, have no focus left, study something else. Go back to the material you're struggling with later, more refreshed. get someone in your class who majored in that topic to tutor you or try to explain it.
Personally, true inefficiency is when you spend a lot of time over a topic and majority of that time is not well spent. You haven't learnt anything and you don't have focus to learn or absorb/retain. There's nothing gained, and worse, you could have spent the time doing something else.
Try learning techniques like pomodoro to cut out the 'fat' if you will. Or set time limits for yourself to ensure you're also spending time on other subjects.
always ensure you're still allocating sufficient time to cover other topics. things that come more easily to you, so you can still ace those topics on your exams. and not cram them at last minute under duress.
It would suck if you actually did spend too much time on an area of weakness, and not enough time on other things. then you end up doing less stellar across the board on everything.
There's no golden rules to how you approach things in first pass. It sucks but you have to experiment with what's most efficient for you for nearly every particular subject.
you may have to accept that there will be some things that will not make perfect sense to you even when you get to exam time. Things that will take years before you fully understand them. It will depend on familiarity (built on years, not just a few weeks) or just seeing it in a different light. It could be that nothing will fit together until you get to rotations and see patients.
And that's okay, everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, these will later help you decide what to specialize in (or generalize in) later on.
For example, if I get a biochemistry lecture it takes me about 3-4 hours to understand the concepts from that lecture. The school gives 1.) a ppt, 2.) a handout (written explanation of ppt), and 3.) lectures are posted online(watch at 2x).
Although my reading comprehension on standardized exams has always been great, I have always struggled to understand biological concepts from simply reading alone.
In undergrad, I would understand something like DNA replication way better if I saw a video of the enzymes involved compared to reading about what each enzyme does.
The issue is that this process of combining online videos with reading the material is taking me ~3 hours to understand one lecture in med school.
welcome to med school?
Painful isn't it?
There's good advice that Peach Newport's given you, by sharing what works for them. It's not necessarily going to work for everyone. However, it's a good example of how much of med school during the "first pass" simply isn't going to feel efficient. It's work. It eats up time. It sucks. But it will get better. The 2nd, 3rd or 30th pass will be easier. Eventually, it will take less time and you'll feel and be more 'efficient'. But you have to get through the first pass first. the time you spend on first pass, will cost you less time later. Medical school builds on what they initially teach you at a very fast rate.
As long as it's not all of your subjects that's using up copious amounts of time, it should be fine. Things that happen to be "easier" for you to understand, will allow you to breeze through the lecture materials (relatively), then go to questions. It shouldn't take 3 hours to pass through those things.
At least you know that reading alone doesn't help.
Find good video series that suit your learning style.
there's a heap of videos out there now. try one, if that works and minimizes your study time great. Don't use like 3 videos for every lecture.
Or try the reverse.
Go through 'review' sources or videos first. the things that break down material to the bare bones. that which makes it simple. then add meat onto it later.
For the areas I struggled on, I did review stuff first, then questions and then read the lectures last (or watched the lecture recordings at high speed). Maybe I wouldn't have time for lectures until the weekend before exams. By then, the lectures felt like 'review' and I was getting more out of them, because I understood the basics of what the lecturers were discussing. It was also much more interesting to listen to (so I had more focus and was able to absorb more), as I had more capacity to understand.
Don't beat your head over a wall. If something's not working, drop it and move on,
Our school starts us off slow for the first few weeks and then it becomes increasingly harder as the semester goes on. I've done well on quizzes so far, but obviously i cant spend 3 hours on the first pass going forward when I have ~4 lectures/day AND I need to review lectures/do ANKI from previous days.
Oh wait, are you in first year or second year?
Now I'm confused. Unless your school is opening with, we're going to make it harder later.
Make sure you allocate time for breaks in there too! if you burn out, it can knock you out for days, if not weeks.
Do you have an arts or science background?
You don't have to answer if it's prying too much.
Generally, the subjects you took courses while in undergrad (or majored in), should ideally take you less time to 'relearn' or review.
If you're an arts background, not ragging on arts major, anecdotally, it is often more of an uphill battle at the start as you're confronting a lot of 'hard' sciences as a 'course' for the first time with less foundation that someone who knows it well from years of study (Review courses for MCATs don't count).
A physiology major will find it easier to tackle physiology because they've seen it before and spent a lot of time on it for undergrad exams. So it will come more easily to them when med school feeds it to them through a firehose. Similarly, so will someone who's taken biochem before, learning the krebs cycle again isn't going to be as hard the first time.
Not equating med school with undergrad, but saying again, there will be subjects that will take less of your time. And some that will take the 3 hours first pass. Because you're catching to those with a greater command of the topic. Overall, hopefully things should balance. If not now, you will catch up eventually. You'll have to see a lot of the same things again in 2nd, 3rd, 4th year etc. etc., in different variations and forms. However, if you laid the groundwork during your first pass well, you make your future life much easier later. Maybe you won't get to reap the benefits of what you're doing now, but you'll feel it later.
It is different to undergrad. It will be work. It will cost you time to figure things out. But you'll get there. You kinda have to.
Edited for grammar and clarity.
