How to study in veterinary school

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Vetjoa

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Hello,
I am a first year veterinary student who just finished having a meltdown about, surprise! Vet school. I freaked out over the fact that it’s taking me so long to finish handwriting my lectures, while also studying for my upcoming exams. I’ve been hand writing lectures my whole academic life, and it’s whats worked thebest for me. I just wanted to see if there are any handwriting vet students who have survived using this studying technique during the didatic portion of the curriculum, or if it’s just unrealistic for me to keep this up. And if it is unrealistic, pleaseeeeee tell me what would work best for a person who is used to rewriting everything!

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I handwrote all of my notes in undergrad. I couldn't keep up with it in vet school. My notes now are all in flashcard form - I make them during class - and I quiz myself on them relentlessly. The only things I do by hand at this point are drawing out diagrams.

What works best will vary for each person, but I've maintained a high GPA doing it this way. It takes me a little more effort to memorize things than when I wrote everything out, but for time management, the typed flashcards work better for me. I have classmates who do everything by hand, not sure how they find the time for it.
 
I know at least two students in my class who handwrite most everything, so it is possible. It definitely seems super time consuming tho. Maybe pick a couple classes that you feel you could do just as well in while switching to just slides/flashcards/etc and handwriting out the more important classes?
 
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Hello,
I am a first year veterinary student who just finished having a meltdown about, surprise! Vet school. I freaked out over the fact that it’s taking me so long to finish handwriting my lectures, while also studying for my upcoming exams. I’ve been hand writing lectures my whole academic life, and it’s whats worked thebest for me. I just wanted to see if there are any handwriting vet students who have survived using this studying technique during the didatic portion of the curriculum, or if it’s just unrealistic for me to keep this up. And if it is unrealistic, pleaseeeeee tell me what would work best for a person who is used to rewriting everything!
The people I know who handwrite are people with, honestly, are extremely disciplined and faithfully study like 8 hours every night. They make the time to handwrite. Most people don't and cannot keep up with handwriting lectures.

Also, a lot of people assume that handwriting an entire lecture will help you 'remember' it (maybe for some), but you need more active studying than that. You need to be picking out the important stuff and quizzing yourself. I'm sure others disagree, but I really feel that handwriting is not the best study option, especially in vet school. You don't get much out of it considering the time it takes.
 
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Oof I don't know how your hand hasn't fallen off yet! I, too, tried to rewrite everything. There just aren't enough hours in the day. In undergrad I literally just read my notes over and over and tried to memorize the material that way. It didn't work (obviously lol), so when I got to vet school I thought I was being smart by writing everything out. But pinkpuppy is right, I think you will be most successful with an active approach to studying. The sheer volume of information that is taught just makes writing everything out and retaining that information next to impossible.

Do your professors give learning objectives for all of your lessons? If so, that's honestly what I would focus on, as that stuff is what they're hoping you remember from the lessons. The rest is usually minutiae that imo is bonus if you remember. But most times if a professor was giving us learning objectives, the heaviest proportion of their exams focused on those objectives. So instead of writing out every single thing, why don't you peruse through your notes trying to find the answers to the learning objectives and create a study guide for yourself based on that?

By far, the most helpful study tool for me in vet school was finding people to study with who would actively discuss things with me. For me it happened to be my two roommates. We'd just plop down at our kitchen table for the night and pick a subject and just go through the powerpoints discussing slides and helping each other wherever we needed. I realize some people are more independent studiers and if that works for you then good for you! But gosh, I don't think I would have made it through vet school without my roommates and our study sessions lol
 
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Hello,
I am a first year veterinary student who just finished having a meltdown about, surprise! Vet school. I freaked out over the fact that it’s taking me so long to finish handwriting my lectures, while also studying for my upcoming exams. I’ve been hand writing lectures my whole academic life, and it’s whats worked thebest for me. I just wanted to see if there are any handwriting vet students who have survived using this studying technique during the didatic portion of the curriculum, or if it’s just unrealistic for me to keep this up. And if it is unrealistic, pleaseeeeee tell me what would work best for a person who is used to rewriting everything!
I'm not sure what studying technique you're talking about......Are you hand writing out the entire lecture from a recording? I can't imagine how that would work - it's no wonder that you're overworked and freaked out.

Different people do best with different study styles, and it sounds like you like to study alone and go over things yourself (I was vocal and active when studying, talking to others (or myself), walking around making notes and spreading things around on tables, and drawing interconnections between things). If you want to study alone, consider just writing concepts on index cards, and then drill down specifics about those concepts on the back.....and then you could mix and match them as needed in different areas. There are a lot of overlapping concepts and interconnections of information.
 
I tried the writing lectures/re-writing notes thing for a bit, because that is how I have always studied. Take notes during class, then reorganize them later. It doesn't last for vet school. There is too much information. So I actually completely flipped from my usual. I am also a good auditory learner. So I flipped from writing everything to reading everything out loud. I basically ended up with very few hand-written notes. I would verbally state things out loud, quiz myself out loud, come up with fake patients and go through cases out loud. It worked great for me, but most everyone thought I was weird. I got asked a few times if they could see my notes from a lecture and I either would have very few or none.
 
I would take handwritten notes on the powerpoints in class (electronically, but handwritten), then go back through and type study guides based on my notes. If something didn't make sense, I'd find a book and read about it, then rewrite it in a way that made sense to me. I would also meet with a study group for a lot of classes and we would talk through material and come up with silly ways to remember things - there have been soooo many times that I've been saved by remembering some ridiculous thing that a friend said that made me laugh and made me remember something. I'm not a flash card person, so I tried things like Quizlet and abandoned them fairly quickly. Synthesizing material into a concise (ha) study guide is the best way for me to learn. Then I have something I can quickly reference before test time.
 
I've found that re-reading the lectures is the best way for me to learn. I only take a note if it's something not already on the PP. I don't use any external resources except for anatomy, which I will use online quizzes and diagrams to help me, and I used charts for parasitology and bacteriology once or twice last semester. I find that every minute I'm spending making flash cards, looking up a YouTube video explanation, or consulting a textbook is a minute I could be studying material that's actually pertinent to the class (we are tested directly from lectures).

One big advantage for me studying from the lectures is that our lecturers will usually include pictures on their slides. I can usually remember the picture from the pertinent slide and that will help me remember the material that went with it. I even find myself re-drawing the pictures on my exam sheets just to help my recall. When I study from study guides, I lose that connection.

Another thing I've noticed is that a lot of my classmates waste a lot of study time trying to remember EVERY tiny detail about every lecture. Their study guides are way too detailed and they lose the forest for the trees. I try and focus on main concepts and remember the big "bullet point" details about them.
 
I hand write all my lecture notes and still have time to do research and extracurriculars. The tradeoff is that I don't attend class. We have lecture recordings which I listen sped up after I've done the notes. It's almost like a more involved pre-reading? I'd say it's definitely do-able. I hate how I study since its so time consuming but if it ain't broke don't fix it.
 
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I also learn best from handwriting, but that wasn't feasible for me in vet school since I wasn't dedicated enough, and didn't have enough time to frantically handwrite everything in the days leading up to an exam. So what I did was type out study guides which were faster for me. Then I would go back through those and handwrite out the important bits on the study guide (even if I was just duplicating what was written in the typed portion) in the couple days prior to an exam. If I had really tough classes then I would try to write out more for those, since I found it stuck in my head better. But I definitely sacrificed that for easier classes, or classes where my classmates had already written up awesome study guides or made quizlets to.
 
I hand wrote my notes in undergrad, but that was before PowerPoint, and the professors also hand wrote everything on an overhead projector. PowerPoint has enabled them to stuff a lot more information into a single lecture. I used a tablet with a stylus and OneNote. The instructors usually had no issues with giving us electronic copies of their lectures, either as PDFs or PPTs. OneNote allowed me to highlight the emphasized information, which I tried to review nightly. The stuff that clicked, I reviewed less frequently than the stuff that perplexed me. My usual method was to review the lessons for the day that night. On the weekend, I'd review the entire week.
 
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I hand wrote my notes in undergrad, but that was before PowerPoint, and the professors also hand wrote everything on an overhead projector. PowerPoint has enabled them to stuff a lot more information into a single lecture. I used a tablet with a stylus and OneNote. The instructors usually had no issues with giving us electronic copies of their lectures, either as PDFs or PPTs. OneNote allowed me to highlight the emphasized information, which I tried to review nightly. The stuff that clicked, I reviewed less frequently than the stuff that perplexed me. My usual method was to review the lessons for the day that night. On the weekend, I'd review the entire week.
Very similar to my strategy. I own a Surface Pro 2 and used 'Drawboard' to annotate my PDF slides digitally. Also hand wrote my notes in undergrad. No way I could manage that on a daily basis in vet school. Not enough time, and re-writing in and of itself does very little for retention. Repeated exposure to the information over an extended period of time is what cements information in the mind. Spaced retrieval and repeated passes were my formulae for success in vet school. I hardly ever used written course notes (in narrative form). Rarely, I would refer to these as a back up. I actually preferred published texts over course notes, as the index saves a lot of time leafing through pages of text for a very specific bit of information. I have classmates, though, who employed the complete opposite strategy- relied heavily on course notes, hardly ever studied from slides. Different strokes for different folks, there is no one right way. Just don't waste time, OP, hand writing notes ONCE when this is the last time you'll look at said info before exam day. Multiple passes should be the goal (three times, at a minimum, was the target I tried to meet for information covered on any given exam). As mentioned previously, I was a religious user of paper to take notes in undergrad (like @Armymutt25A, before the age of PPT). I've been converted to digital- faster, easier, more efficient. Plus, you can annotate digital photos in real time. Super helpful for histology, path, and the multitude of other clinical photos/diagrams you'll encounter throughout vet school.
 
I do quite a bit of quizlets for the things that I just have to straight memorize. I do that for almost every class. It forces you to know it and sometimes the questions I make match what is on the exam. I spend time in the anatomy lab before exams and take note on where structures are in relation to others. If it's more of a physiology type of studying, I'll draw things out to try and see how it all ties together, I also revert to youtube as well because I like to see it occur, sometimes words just don't do it for me. I also ask older students on how the exams were and they give me some tips on what to focus on. Hope this helps!
 
So I'm in my second semester and I mostly used One Note for taking notes in class. For the most part I love it, but it's a huge problem not being able to print the PDF's after I've annotated them without the pages getting chopped in half. I know this is b/c One note is supposed to be a digital notebook and its purpose is too eliminate paper usage, but some classes I just need to have hard copies after class. Does anyone have any recommendations for an app that allows typing, LOTS of colored highlighting, drawing, and has full printing capabilities?

Thanks!
 
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So I'm in my second semester and I mostly used One Note for taking notes in class. For the most part I love it, but it's a huge problem not being able to print the PDF's after I've annotated them without the pages getting chopped in half. I know this is b/c One note is supposed to be a digital notebook and its purpose is too eliminate paper usage, but some classes I just need to have hard copies after class. Does anyone have any recommendations for an app that allows typing, LOTS of colored highlighting, drawing, and has full printing capabilities?

Thanks!
I used Drawboard PDF exclusively for note taking in vet school. I had toyed around with OneNote, but found the program clunky and difficult to deal with. Drawboard functions flawlessly- I've never had a problem with it. Not sure about the printing capabilities (you'd have to do a bit more research, or try it out), but I'm a huge fan. Color annotations, different sized pen/highlighter tips, the ability to view one vs. multiple ppt slides on a screen...tons of flexibility. Give it a try. Drawboard PDF: Easy Document Managagement
 
I do quite a bit of quizlets for the things that I just have to straight memorize. I do that for almost every class. It forces you to know it and sometimes the questions I make match what is on the exam. I spend time in the anatomy lab before exams and take note on where structures are in relation to others. If it's more of a physiology type of studying, I'll draw things out to try and see how it all ties together, I also revert to youtube as well because I like to see it occur, sometimes words just don't do it for me. I also ask older students on how the exams were and they give me some tips on what to focus on. Hope this helps!
Personally, I was never a fan of Quizlet flash cards, but I know that many of my classmates found success with this method. There's definitely not a single route to success. Students need to try different methods on for size and determine what works best for them.
 
Personally, I was never a fan of Quizlet flash cards, but I know that many of my classmates found success with this method. There's definitely not a single route to success. Students need to try different methods on for size and determine what works best for them.

Yeah... definitely wasn't trying to come across as this is what you should do.. just an example of what one vet student does.
 
How to not study: Take hours and hours to crawl through very few lectures.

So, in other words, don't be me.
 
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