keep undergraduate notes?

[Pianoman32]

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Any point of keeping undergraduate notes ( for classes like micro, immunology, biochem, physiology) if I'm starting medical school in August. Will I ever get any use out of these? Or will these notes be doomed to a good foot rest and an eventual fate of kindling for the fire place?

 

[BOOURNS]

Round file.

 

[TexasTriathlete]

no

 

[Lastmanstanding]

I have to agree with Tex here. depending on what level those classes were they'll either be too generic or too specific for what you are learning and not clinically oriented enough...just take solace in the fact that you have a background in what a lot of med students find to be difficult concepts to wrap their heads around.

 

[bydotte]

YES, keep your "charts." if you made mnemonics/drawings to sum up/remember how to classify bacteria or cytokines or rate-limiting enzymes or other trivia, keep them and remember you have them. why reinvent the wheel on that? you don't need all of your notes, but not everything in med school is clinical, you still need to memorize plenty of trivia, and some of it overlaps with undergrad. if you still have any notes on photosynthesis burn them.

 

[coldweatherblue]

There were a few times in biochem where I wished I'd had my notes from undergrad.. it would've helped for a few poorly written and confusing lectures. That was about it though. They will give you enough to study, and the material you get from your professors (ppts/syllabi) plus BRS/textbooks is what you need to study for exams. You might leaf through your old notes a couple times through the year but mostly they'd just be sitting around taking up space.

 

[LongIslProdigy]

I was an biochem major undergrad. I would definitely recommend keeping your biochem lectures, ppt's, hand-outs, etc. Biochem in med school does not go into as much detail with pathways, instead, introduces more clinical aspects like diseases of enzyme deficiencies, etc. It's nice to have your old stuff to make it a little easier to remember things.
In retrospect, I wish I would have known about Lippincott's Illustrated Reviews- Biochem during undergrad! Might have saved me from living at the library!

 

[tomorrowgirl99]

soon to be 3rd year. I think keeping your notes is a waste of space. All the stuff I needed were in the powerpoints. I barely used the books that were for the class. If I needed any supplementation, it was usually in one of the review books in a nice condensed format. Like the other poster said the classes you took in undergrad were probably not clinically oriented.

 

[Pontifex Maximus]

Shred em.

 

[Depakote]

Wasted space.

You'll have plenty of stuff to study in med school, you're not going to find yourself looking back to ugrad texts/notes or wishing you had them.


the ONLY exception was Lippincott Illustrated Review for Biochem, which I'd bought for Ugrad, I used that for med school biochem.

 

[45408]

the one single thing I used was a nicely drawn chart of glycolysis and the TCA cycle, in the fall of M1. Haven't touched anything else since.

 

[fMRI]

Unless you have a very visual memory and studied a lot (!) from those notes, it is unlikely that you will dig them up. Everything you don't remember will be in the textbooks. And more than that. 😀
As a friend recently commented: Scary to rediscover the stuff I already forgot. 🙄

Live in bliss, go for the recycling bin.

 

[hardy]

I scanned all my notes from undergrad (Xerox copycenter - 1000 pages in like 10 minutes!). In all of the first two years I found myself once looking for something, just to find that it still didn't clarify anything. If you actually keep the paper it's a total waste of space and dust magnet.

 

[TMP-SMX]

Recycle it. About to do the same with my M1/M2 notes.

 

[Pianoman32]

Great advice. Thanks everyone.

 

[CorazonDoc]

Don't keep your notes. Here is why: Every class you will have will focus on something slightly different or in a different way than your undergrad courses. I've seen classmates who get lost in their previous notes and miss the boat on what the current class is focusing on.

If you learned something from your undergrad classes, it will come back to you and you'll find that you pick up the info a little easier the second time around, even if it's presented in a different way.

 

[Cp22kjer]

Threw all mine away and it felt good. I could not believe the amount of paper I'd accumulated.

 

[ACGator09]

i threw all of mine away. figured it was too basic anyway... plus i'll prob spend less time making up a new diagram/chart/list than if i tried to find it

 

[anesthesio]

Threw mine away, they weren't particulalrly good to begin with.