Incoming MS1s...Do you have plans to commit to Firecracker or Zanki?

[kkl2018]

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Yes, but my foundation is Zanki. Everything else builds on top of that. BnB provides more context. Lecture is a supplement at best and a total waste of time at worst. It's usually more of a waste of time for me, unfortunately. This is because lectures are not board relevant at my school. They focus on nitty gritty low yield stuff that doesn't matter whatsoever.

You have to understand that I'm not learning the stuff in class, I'm learning the stuff on my own first and using class as an additional pass of the material in a way. What ends up taking less time is really class stuff, not the boards material. And you don't even have to go faster than your curriculum if you don't want to; it's not relevant to using the method I've laid out. I'm doing it mainly because I wanted to hit qbanks earlier and you need to have strong exposure to a lot of topics to be able to have some confidence in answering questions. I got this by running through Zanki at an aggressive pace. My study method is step focused; so yes, it doesn't matter what they cover in class because I'm going to do at least a pass over it in order to make sure that I pass school exams.

There is a finite amount of time in the day, and there is a massive overload of information that you're required to know for step. I am putting the lion's share of my energy towards that, because there is a very high potential return on that investment; a high step score. Focusing on school stuff first would be counterproductive towards that goal, especially as my curriculum is not boards relevant and they suck at teaching.



You just look at the fact that the schedule says you're on respiratory, for example. You go to the respiratory deck and unsuspend all of the cards. Boom, you're done.



No problem. A lot of people run some variation of Zanki + BnB/Pathoma/sketchy + UWorld +/- other qbanks for step. Sketchy has been really good for basically permanently remembering micro/pharm.


Anki definitely is amazing. There are a ton of helpful add ons out there. I'd recommend watching The Anking's recommended add ons playlist.

Thank you again for this incredibly helpful and makes a lot of sense.

One last question. So if everything centers around zanki, with class basically being supplemental, how do you learn the content in zanki? Card by card?

Im used to learning from a textbook and then doing questions or notecards so learning from a deck is really a strange concept to me.

Do you open up that day's set of cards and get everything wrong the first time to learn what they are? And then do BnB and Sketchy to give background? It seems like that would take so much time to learn each factoid/card individually. But if med school is all factoids it make a lot of sense.

 

[slowthai]

Thank you again for this incredibly helpful and makes a lot of sense.

One last question. So if everything centers around zanki, with class basically being supplemental, how do you learn the content in zanki? Card by card?

Im used to learning from a textbook and then doing questions or notecards so learning from a deck is really a strange concept to me.

Awesome, I'm glad I could be of help. Yes, I discuss why I do it that way in this post: Using Zanki from day 1?

It doesn't matter whether you watch/read the primary source (videos/texts) before or after your cards; it just comes down to personal preference.

Do you open up that day's set of cards and get everything wrong the first time to learn what they are? And then do BnB and Sketchy to give background? It seems like that would take so much time to learn each factoid/card individually. But if med school is all factoids it make a lot of sense.

Yes, I get most of them wrong, but that's part of the learning process. Same with practice questions. Getting things wrong makes it stick better. When I did it the other way (BnB before cards), I got most of them wrong too. And it's very fast. Your speed will depend on your comfort level with anki and your retention/grasp of the material over time. You'll get faster and faster as you go along. Sometimes I can figure out the answers to cards I've never seen before because I've picked up so much background knowledge from Zanki. Yes, med school is largely memorization.

I understand your concerns, but the concepts you're learning in med school don't take a lot of brainpower to be able to pick up. You're just learning a bunch of interrelated facts that depend on each other. You can, and you will acquire a massive amount of these facts very quickly. The only thing that'll keep them there for most of us is repetition over a long period of time. That's where Anki comes in.

 

[FutureSurgical]

I’m going with AnKing just because it combines Zanki with lolnotacop and some other materials conveniently in one deck. That’s just me. I’ll see how my school does things with testing and lectures

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

I’m going with AnKing just because it combines Zanki with lolnotacop and some other materials conveniently in one deck. That’s just me. I’ll see how my school does things with testing and lectures

Yeah just don’t be afraid to switch. I started out using zanki and switched to cheesy lightyear because I liked that style better.