When you study, how often do you reach your goal?

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Nyphool

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When you study, how often do you reach your daily goal? I seem to never reach my goal. How much time is actually efficent when you study? I seem to be 60% efficent. For instance, I plan to study make an 8 hour day on the weekends but probably only study 4-5 hours efficiently. What about you? How do you keep focused?

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well, first of all, u should never study that much in one day unless ur taking and reviewing a full length mcat.
whenever i study, i always reach my goal for that day cuz i really concentrate on the material, and also i dont study that long ever.
 
jtank said:
well, first of all, u should never study that much in one day unless ur taking and reviewing a full length mcat.
whenever i study, i always reach my goal for that day cuz i really concentrate on the material, and also i dont study that long ever.



I would just like to remind you that when you get to med school, you WILL be studying that much...for instance, most weekends i pull 2 8-hour days. So you might want to think about trying to find the best study environment for you and making sure that to maximize your studying, you take little breaks every now and then (I usually distract myself about every 30-45 minutes for about 5-10 minutes just to break it up). You get used to all the studying and 8 or 10 hour days of it doesn't bother you after a while. :)
 
teamballs said:
I would just like to remind you that when you get to med school, you WILL be studying that much...for instance, most weekends i pull 2 8-hour days. So you might want to think about trying to find the best study environment for you and making sure that to maximize your studying, you take little breaks every now and then (I usually distract myself about every 30-45 minutes for about 5-10 minutes just to break it up). You get used to all the studying and 8 or 10 hour days of it doesn't bother you after a while. :)
You can say that all you want. 8 hours is just inefficient and you can never find me doing that.
 
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i watch alot of tv...i studied all throughout undergrad watching tv and did really well...but i sense it wont work out for the mcat. luckily, there is nothing to watch during the day...so i spend most of my time doing the reading and taking notes and doing passages midday...but i need background noise to do physics...i need to watch something while doing problems...
 
i just break my goal up into like 8-12 half an hour sessions and I always reach my goal
 
Cozmosis said:
You can say that all you want. 8 hours is just inefficient and you can never find me doing that.

Good luck once you get to med school, Cozmo. Team balls is a vicious med school alliance. She knows what she's talking about. If you make it to med school you can apologize to her after the first month. She speaks the truth. Maybe you will never study 8 hours and if you don't, I applaud you, but for all its inefficiencies, sometimes 8 hours a day has to be done, in fact a lot of the time it has to be done. Sorry to break the bad news.
 
aamartin81 said:
I completely agree, there is no way that your brain can process eight hours of new information a day (on a level of testing comprehension). I have always found that those people who spend that much time in the library are just not studying the correct way. In a lot of my business classes, people would spend hours upon hours trying to memorize details instead of learning to apply the theory and concepts in 2-3 hours. Don't get me wrong, in reviewing for an exam/final, I could spend an eight hour day going back over notes, but that is not processing new information or an upkeep scenario.

As for the MCAT, I'm putting in 1-2 hours a day, 5-6 days a week. Since I don't watch TV, this is quite easy.

Adam

I almost feel hostile toward you for your ignorance. Perhaps when you study "Filling Out Other People's Income Tax Forms for Them I-IV" in your business classes, studying 8 hours or more seems absurd. I get that.

I'm not saying that you need to study biochem 8 hours a day in medical school, and neither is teamballs, most likely. What happens is, you study biochem for two hours, and you barely keep up, because there's another 2 hour lecture the next day. Then immunology takes you an hour... just to keep up. But you had pathology for 2 hours that day too. You have a paper due the next day about stem cell research, and you have to be prepared to talk in a small group session about that too. Population epidemiology has a 4 hour assignment due in 7 days, as well. You just got back from interviewing patients on the wards, or learning how to perform the pulmonary exam. You break up the pathology studying by working on the assigned learning issues of the week that you are expected to present to your small group in 2 days.

You finish your day, having studied 9 hours. It was impossible, but somehow you remembered some of it. God knows you don't remember all of it. Way to state the obvious guys. But just because you can't remember 99.9% of what you studied in an 8 hour session doesn't mean you should just say, "Oh well, I can't remember it!" and just go home after only covering biochem and immunology for the day.

Get real, kids. Good luck! :laugh:
 
speaking out of complete ignorance on the med school issue, I would supsect that the study strategy is totally different than the mcat strategy. I find it difficult to study for the mcat because there is so much to study and really not that much direction, except for what (fill in prep course) tells you to do. But when you finish what they recommend...what do you do then? I think in Med School they give you assignments that obviously are gonna take longer and are more structured...in that case...a longer study day is to be expected.
 
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