MedSchool: Successful Habits

[orangeblue]

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Hello everyone,
First year, med student. I want to hear and share what other people are doing to help them with med school. it's clear that there is no secret to success. Start early, repetition in different ways is the key. The successful students start early and have more time with the same material so better grades.

I am wondering, in med school, we take one exam and the very next morning we have a non-graded quiz or more assignments the same day. If you take the full day off after the exam then you are kind of behind the next day. How do you manage this aspect (ie. after the exam)?

Also, what do you do the weekend or few days leading up the exam day?

 

[Jojos]

good habits include prereading or getting the big idea of a topic before a lecture, it helped me take a lot more out of the lectures. it also helps that same night going over the material given in the lecture, if one can manage to study it even better.

of course, understanding is far superior to blindly memorizing and will save you lots of unnecessary work. memorizing does have its place in med school but it should be secondary.

spaced repetition. anki is magic. the reason it is magic is simply that it employs a simple spaced repetition algorithm. take advantage of this, it will make the info stick for the long run, which is fundamental.

finding your study method is important, however, so is being flexible. understand that one study method may not work for all classes and you will have to be flexible.

as for time off, in my experience, it is absolutely necessary. few things are worse than burning out. so take care of yourself, sleep, do things you enjoy, eat well, work out and have a social life. whenver possible i would take a day off after an exam. i would also try to limit myself considering the amount of hours i sat down and studied (i'm a bit obsessive). do you fall behind, yes, but if you are fresh you will be able to catch up. if you are burned you will fall behind anyway.

hope this helps.

 

[orangeblue]

Agreed.

For those of you that study at home, how is that experience been?. I have been more more"home study" as I'm more comfortable at home .
I like what you said about limiting the hours of study so one is putting quality vs . quantity.

The thing with Anki is that for these classes for me at least, I tend to do better with repetition of the full picture instead of random facts that don't connect. However one thing medical school has taught me to understand and respect individual learning differences and being careful what advice I take as "the it" as it may not work for me.

 

[Jojos]

Agreed.

For those of you that study at home, how is that experience been?. I have been more more"home study" as I'm more comfortable at home .
I like what you said about limiting the hours of study so one is putting quality vs . quantity.

The thing with Anki is that for these classes for me at least, I tend to do better with repetition of the full picture instead of random facts that don't connect. However one thing medical school has taught me to understand and respect individual learning differences and being careful what advice I take as "the it" as it may not work for me.

i absolutely agree that there isn't one truth and this applies from the study techniques to the sources you study from. As for Anki, i make my own cards and they are definitely not random facts. It all depends on what is on them.