Not a super-smarty pants!
I had a very strong background in small animal specialty medicine (several different specialties) prior to veterinary school; however, I had absolutely NO large animal experience (not even shadowing). So, I think it pretty much evened out.
One thing that facilitated that study schedule in first year was that ALL of our exams were on Fridays. Once second year started and we had exams any day of the week (including Mondays), I'd have to study on Friday afternoon or Sunday as needed.
Everyone learns differently.
I don't have the patience for making flashcards and they don't work that well for me, and I'm not much of an auditory learner so re-listening to recorded lectures wouldn't help me, either. I have classmates who spent hours and hours with each of these study materials because it's what worked for them.
I'm personally a reading/learn-by-doing type person, though my eyes will glaze over with boredom quite often.
What I would do is go through all of my lecture notes and highlight the important bits first, and then on each subsequent re-reading of the lecture notes I'd JUST read what I had highlighted.
The highlighting made it an active process--I had to consciously sort out what was important from what was not, knowing that if I didn't highlight something I was betting it wouldn't be important. Then, my visual memory would kick in as I kept going over stuff and being able to "see" the pages in my head (the highlighting "patterns" or whatever). As I became more familiar with the material (after 2 repetitions or so), I'd mentally try to remember what was on the next page before I looked. Also, to keep myself engaged, I'd mentally try to focus on what would differentiate two similar conditions/diseases/drugs/anatomy locations/etc.
I'd usually try to go over all the material 3-5 times before an exam, depending on how much tme I had. For the just pure rote-memorization stuff first year, I'd have to do more repetition (5-7 times), but for the medicine and path courses later, my attempts at actively reasoning through the material mentally ("okay, this is why you get this and this abnormality with this problem and so you see this") would decrease the number of times I had to go through it and cement it in.
I also enjoyed studying with a group--that really helped--going over old exam questions out loud and reasoning through them with your friends who are stronger in different areas than you are REALLY helped! If you're at all amenable to it, I highly recommend studying with other people as you get closer to the exam/more familiar with the material and are able to talk about it somewhat fluently.
Not sure if that answers your question, but hope it helps.
There are several threads in the pre-vet forum that talk about study habits in vet school and what works for other people. I was just lucky that the techniques that worked for me were also very time-efficient! If I had been stuck making flashcards, I would have probably poked my eye with a fork on more than one occasion.
I'm also old (30!) and did not have the motivation/patience to stay up until 2 or 3am to study. I'm a firm believer that sleeping in between reps of the material really helps solidify the material in your brain--so I'd go to bed by midnight every night. I also wasn't focused on points/obsessed about grades--which I think really helped, because stress rarely does any favors when it comes to memorizing a whole bunch of stuff! (That said, I do work best under pressure and tend to procrastinate with the best of 'em!)
