Two things to keep in mind. One, there are actually tons of notes floating around from the four previous classes, most of which aren't even on the noteserver. There were some passed around in CD form and on flash drives that your big bro or sis probably has.
Two, you might not be able to study the same way in medical school that you did before. Taking notes on this amount of material can be next to impossible often times. You may have to totally change the way you study. You really need to read each chapter a time or two to get the general picture, then a third or forth time to start picking up details before you really even understand what the important concepts are. You'll be reading craploads of extraneous material in each chapter, and if you really take the time to make notes on that stuff, you may find yourself falling quickly behind. Trust me, the first time or two through some of those chapters you really won't even know what's important and what you need to know. You'll find yourself reading a lot of outside material sometimes in an effort to understand what the text is saying.
The key to doing really well is not picking out important tidbits and commiting them to memory. It's really understanding the broad picture and the relationships between everything. In other words, you can read all about congestive heart failure, jot down and memorize the signs and symptoms of it....or you can learn the important concepts of the anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, etc. of the cardio, pulmonary and vascular systems and you should be able to come up with the signs and symptoms on your own when you get a question about it.
That said, there are some classes where notes are great, OMM for example. Of course, all the notes you ever needed to know about OMM have already been written down by your previous classmates. Pharmacolgy and Microbiology are subjects that you might benefit a lot from notes as well because so much of those two is just brute force memorization. Why does metronidazole cause nausea and leave a metallic taste is some patient's mouths? Who the heck knows. It's just a side effect you need to memorize.
If it works for you, by all means do it. All I'm saying is just make sure that you are flexible and willing to look at other options.
I see what you're saying, and it makes a lot of sense. My study habits (when I actually decided to study in UG) consisted of reading the assigned chapters, then going back over and reading them again with a highlighter, then writing/typing out notes over the material, and then re-reading it after the lecture that day. Since I will have a lot more pre-reading to do in Medical School, my
plan is to dedicate a weekend day (Saturday or Sunday) to reviewing the material from the previous week in full.
I am not asking or forcing anyone to use this website, I just figured that with me typing up my notes anyways, I wouldn't mind sharing them with people who really wanted to have them. This website will be set up for people who have some kind of notes or scans of drawings or even data from flash drives/CD's that they wish to share with everyone else. Even if I am the only one to use it for uploading purposes, at least people have a chance to get use out of them (or I could remote access them during a study group).
My biggest obstacle I've faced with this has been getting the FTP portion loaded onto the website. I have a TON of free time and usually am sitting alone at my place anyways. This will give me something to do on those days before classes start and nobody is looking to hang out. Once it is set up, it will be an extra 30 sec to 60 sec per evening to upload my own files (maybe 10 minutes if I get a lot of people emailing files one night).
I think that, with all of the free-floating information around, if it could be consolidated for future classes, then its worth could not be measured. I am not looking for compensation or gratitude, I'm just simply trying to do my best to be a helpful fellow student. I remember in an interview I had someone (a Dean or something) gave a speech that said "don't do anything more than your capable of doing, but do what you're capable doing to the best of your ability." I may not be the best study partner or student, but if I can help, even a bit, by giving my notes to others, so be it.
So, to end my long-winded-ness, I've downloaded a website creator that allows me to make a more user-friendly website. Although it may look hideous now (and it really really does), I think this will be a good way to have the site: a home page with links to all of the other subjects and their files... hopefully. If I cannot figure out how to get the files to display on the page, then it will be all for naught. Here is the updated site:
http://www.lecomnotes.vndv.com/home.html
All criticisms (except dealing with aesthetics because I know it's terrible) are welcome. Sorry for the lengthy post.
now I am paying 36.49/month extra for the extra channels and 7Mbps internet.. yay!
