 What's going on guys, Alex here from the MD journey, helping you succeed on your medical journey with less stress. This video, I want to answer a question I get off of the time, which is how do you study in medical school? And I've made various videos about this topic at different phases of the learning process, but I thought I'd make a longer video that would go from start to finish on how exactly I approach each different phase of the studying cycle, all the way from prepping for class to actually taking the exam. So it is going to be a longer video, but I think a lot of you guys will take some key golden nuggets from this video. So stick around, but first let's get to that intro. Alright guys, let's get to this video. But first, if you don't know who I am, my name is Laksh. I'm a fourth year medical student. The MD journey has been kind of my baby for about the last two years, or I've been giving tips about how to succeed in medical school as well as the pre-med. And that includes everything from studying, like this video, to productivity, to motivation. So I'm sure there's something that you can find that you're going to be needing help with. So make sure you check out the channel, make sure you subscribe if you enjoy the content, like this video. And without further ado, let's get to the principles and the rest of the content. So like I said, this is going to be a longer video. I'm going to break different phases, but I don't want to just make a specific video about each phase because I know you may not get all of the golden nuggets. So first we're going to start with principles that I need you to make sure you master in your studying. Then we're going to get to kind of how you prep for your lectures and, you know, how you approach your notes. Then we're going to talk about how you kind of just review the material that you finally gained through lecture. We're going to talk about how to prep for your test and then how to take your test. And at the very end, I'll give you some more resources and direction on where to go from there. So I'm not going to go super in detail to everything. I'm just going to give you the general idea and then point you to different videos, different blog posts I've already made to ideally help you out. But let's get to the first thing, which is what principles do you need to master to have an effective study regimen in that school without being overly stressed? And so there's four principles I need you to understand. And some of them you've heard about, but I'm going to get a little bit more detail. So the first is your active studying ratio. Now you probably heard about active studying, so I'm not going to belabor the point, right? But if anyone that's unfamiliar, active learning versus passive learning, passive learning is everything that we typically do, which is like reading a textbook, highlighting the notes, rewriting our notes, things that just don't work. But that's usually how our first phase of our learning process tends to be active learning are things like practice questions, flashcards, writing things on boards, quizzing your friends. Those are things that are active learning. But the first principle, as I mentioned, is your active learning ratio. Even if you try your best, there's going to be some element of passive learning. That's just how it goes. Now you typically will reach your syllabus, you'll typically go to class and sit there and gain the information. And you can make each of those a little bit more active. And so I'll link a video below on how to make each phase of your learning a little bit more active, but you need to focus more focus on how much of your learning from the start to the finish. So from gaining the material to taking your test is actually spend doing active learning techniques. So my ideal ratio is anywhere from 70 to 30 to 80 to 20, meaning you need to be spending 80% of your time with the material using active learning techniques. So that means if you're giving yourself 100 minutes to go over a specific topic, no more than 20 to 30 minutes of those should be spent on things like reading the syllabus or rewriting your notes. And ideally, as you get more practice kind of where I'm at, you'll probably be able to get to a ratio that's more about 90 to 10. This helps in many different ways. One, you retain the information much better because you're not spending BS time using BS maneuvers. And two, you spend less time because that information makes sense to you much quicker. So figure out what your active learning ratio is, ask yourself kind of look at your studying regimen currently and saying, what am I doing that's really not helping me retain info? That's probably spend, that's probably time that you're spending doing passive learning techniques and try to shift away to techniques that really are helping you, those practice questions, those flashcards, whatever it may be for you, but try to change that ratio. Number two is something that I like to call information prioritization. So a very wordy idea, but it's idea that if I have a syllabus lecture, med students, including myself when I started will try to give each piece of info the same amount of weight. And honestly, it's not right. There's some pieces of info that are more useful and more valuable than others. This is what we call high yield, but there's a second fate to information prioritization, which is after you learn the info, there's a clear distinction between the info that you know and the information that you don't. But still, we spend equal amounts of time on our strengths and our weaknesses. And then we're surprised when our grades are like eighties or seventies, we're wondering what we could do to get the A or get over the hump. The thing is you need to be spending more time on taking those weaknesses away and bolster up your strengths. So you need to kind of ration out your time to spend on the things that you're weak at. So that way on the test, there's fewer and fewer topics that would provoke anxiety. So that's my idea of information prioritization. So look at your study regimen again and ask yourself, am I doing something specific to focus on my weaknesses more than I'm focusing on my strength? Or am I giving equal time to everything? Because if you're doing the latter, that means you're setting yourself up for an average mediocre grade. So principle number three, and this kind of echoes our initial principle of information prioritization, which is go from big to small. And I've talked about this in various videos, but to reiterate, it basically means when you're doing your initial phase of your study, when you're going through a syllabus, you're going through a PowerPoint, ask yourself, am I giving each piece of info the same amount of weight, the same amount of attention? Or am I looking for the biggest idea and then branching inwards? Am I looking for the big headlines, the big questions the professor is trying to ask and teach? Or am I trying to look at the details and the big questions at the same time? If you're doing the latter, you're not really going to retain much info. But if you go from big to small, you're okay. And this is the principle you need to understand too. You're okay with not understanding the detail initially and understanding the big ideas and kind of going down. It's a trickle down effect in med school, you can get the big ideas, you'll get those points for sure. And then you'll get the smaller bits. So big to small and combine that information prioritization, which is more of a review principles. And we'll talk about those more as we get to the study techniques. But the last principle, principle number four is dedicated spatial repetition. Now most of you guys know that I love space repetition and I use Anki. Anki is a flash card making system. I'm not going to talk about it very much in this video, but I'll link down to both videos I made on the YouTube channel, as well as a free video course on step by step how I use Anki to study for medical school. So you guys can check that out if you're interested. But space repetition can be done in multiple different ways. And if you're unfamiliar with the topic, it basically says that if I'm learning a piece of info here, I want to be able to look at it today, tomorrow, maybe in three days for now and then a weekend and then a week from that, you want to be able to look at each piece of information at a scheduled kind of interval and focus more on the information that you're weak at. Go again going back to our principle of information prioritization. So using spatial repetition, you need to have a dedicated way of you doing it. If you use Anki perfect, the system allows you to do it. But some of you guys may not like making flash cards, you may enjoy doing outlines, you may making questions on an Excel sheet, whatever maybe group study, there's ways you can use dedicated spatial repetition in those principles. So ask yourself, how can I force myself to ask a question today, review it tomorrow and then look at it three or four days from now. But make sure you master this more principles such as review an active learning ratio. Ask yourself what it is and how you can prove it to information prioritization. Ask yourself, are you reviewing both your strengths and weaknesses at equal ratio? If you are, then you need to change it to a ratio that favors the weaknesses. Principle number three, are you going from big to small? Are you looking at all the info at the same time when you're learning it? And finally, principle number four, are you using dedicated spatial repetition? So I know that was a lot and it was a good chunk of this video, but I need you to master those four techniques and ask yourself, are you doing them? And if you are, can you improve on each of them? Because once you do, you will find you were spending less time and you're retaining more info. But now let's go ahead and get into each phase of our learning process and our studying process. So the first one is how do I approach my notes and my lectures? I'm going to kind of talk about them simultaneously, but it's the ninth before or it's the lecture you're looking at the PowerPoints. How do you look at a new piece of information? You know, the 60 slides that medical schools are notorious for, how do you look at that and identify the high yield information? So me, I tend to the night before, I skim through the syllabus and I give myself a clock. Everyone has different reading speeds. So find out where yours is. But when I say skim, I mean skim because I'm using the principle of big to small, meaning I don't really care about the details right now. I know using the rest of the techniques I'm going to talk about, I'm going to see the details plenty of times, but the details mean nothing to me if I don't master the big ideas. So I'm trying to master the big ideas through my first and second pass material because then third, fourth, fifth passes that I do through spatial repetition, I'll be able to pick up on the details and it'll actually make sense. Meaning that I'll have long term retention. So use big to small. So when I'm skimming through the material, I can typically read about a 20 to 25 page syllabus lecture and around 20 minutes with a nice like detailed skim. So what I'm looking for is I'm going through each paragraph, probably like two to three paragraphs or two to three slides. If you like to use your PowerPoints and asking myself, okay, what is the professor trying to teach me? What's the big idea? I love talking about hypertension because as usually my go to example, but let's say the paragraph is talking about the different mechanisms that hypertension can happen. Right. So it's talking about all the receptors, A1, B2 and you're like, crap, I don't know what's going on. Instead of worrying about the little details, the main question is what's the mechanism of hypertension and what receptors are in play. Right. Like that's the big idea. The detail that you'll get to in a second. So in my notes or however I jot them down, you know, some people like to make outlines. I like to use on key as my note making system because then they turn into flashcards. However you like to do it, make your big idea in the form of a question, because then you can look at your big idea and ask yourself later when you're reviewing, can you actually fill in what I like to call the evidence, which is the details. So if my question is what is the mechanism behind hypertension and what receptors are in play, that's a very broad question that's going to require me to connect a lot of dots to be able to kind of explain it. I like to form my questions in a way that maybe an attending would ask me on my rotation, something I'm expected to ideally teach, but it's not like a one answer question. It's not like what receptor or what does a one receptors do. That's a very kind of like short winded question and that leads to more memorization versus understanding. So use your big ideas in a form of question and however you not you jot your notes down, make sure that in the form of a question, but as I'm skimming through the lecture or the PowerPoint, I'm going through a few paragraphs, a few slides and asking myself, what is the big idea? I ask, I go ahead and put that in my note system and I keep moving on. So identify all the big ideas. Then when I go to the lecture where I'm listening to lecture, because I'm more of a streamer, I'm basically asking myself, okay, is the professor now actually talking about the big ideas that I asked about? So he may start his locally about the different receptors. And I was like, okay, my ears will perk up in that lecture, because I know he's talking about one of my big ideas. So now when he's talking in lecture, when he's going over those slides, I'm adding in the details as he speaks into my flashcards, into my slides, whatever it may be, because I know I got the big idea right, because he's clearly talking about it in a way that I expected him to. And now add the detail, add the high yield info that he thinks is important and likely is what he's going to ask. So he may talk about what each receptors do and you would add that into your detail section. Because now let's move on to the next thing. How do you review for this material? So let's just say you use the outline structure because this is the most simplest way to kind of explain this. If you use the outline structure, you've prepared your notes, you skim through your lecture, you have big idea of questions. And then after lecture, you should have little details of bullet points underneath each question. So in our mechanism of hypertension, you had the question and then after lecture, you were able to fill in the details of what each receptor does and how they relate to each other. But now we get to use different principles to actually learn that material that our outlines or flashcards made. So there are going to be informations that you're going to have to kind of connect the dots and there's going to be some pieces of information that you just got to plainly memorize. So let's talk about the info that you're going to have to connect the dots. There's several techniques that I talk about. One of them that I love to use is called the brain dump. And so it's not the most flatter his name, but I will put a link in the description on one of my first videos, me talking about the brain dump. And it's basically one of my favorite, favorite review systems, because the point of review is you want to point out how much you actually don't know. You want that nice slap in the face where, where your brain subconsciously says, I know it, right? Like we all have that moment in our life where we look through a material and say, I know, and then it shows up on the test. You're like, crap, I don't actually understand it at all. The brain dump, it's a nice way to highlight your actual weaknesses. So a long story short of how the brain dump works, you grab a piece of paper. It's like right here. And after you've kind of been through lecture, you know the structure, you know how the lecture typically started, you know what the topics, the big ideas he was talking about. Now try to regurgitate that info on a piece of paper as quickly as you can. I try to do it anywhere in five minutes because I don't need to write out full sentences. I don't need to be, be able to read what I'm writing. What I'm focusing more on is because I've memorized the flow of the lecture, I kind of remember how it went. I'm going to be able to quickly understand when I can't go from topic A to topic B. There was something clearly missing. There's a gap in my understanding. And so all I do is I mark a star near that topic and I do the rest of the lecture. By the end of it, you're going to have a lot of different points, illegible handwriting, that's okay. You're going to have a lot of markings. So now part of your view is going to be look up that info that pertains to that marking, try to fill in that blank and look through your syllabus, look through your, your lecture slides, whatever it may be. And then once you feel like you kind of filled in that gap, do it all over again and saying, do you have less markings? Each time you do it, you're going to be able to identify your gaps, understand which infos you're trying to convince yourself, you know, but you actually don't. So the brain dump, it's a great way to do it. I know that was a very kind of short-winded answer. I've had to use it, but again, I'll link it in the description and you guys can check it out. And I'll talk about it in the variant, kind of other techniques you can use and how you can learn about them. But the other thing that you're going to have to do is you're just going to have to memorize info, right? Unfortunately, that's a part of medicine that never gets old. So I'll forward you to another video that I use a technique called the memory palace and how to memorize things like medications, bacterias, things that you're just going to have to do. And so I'll point you to a video on an example of how I use memory palace and a resource in case you wanted to use it from med school. That'll probably help you out. So again, check that out in below, but that's how you do the review process. You have your notes now have a structured way of using active techniques where you could highlight your weaknesses for the connection topics and you can have an effective way to do the memorization aspect of it too. Now, like I said, there's plenty of other study techniques that I use for the review process. Anki is one of them. So I'll link it in the description. So make sure you check it out. And there's other techniques that we'll talk about at the very end. But I don't want to make this video longer than it is, but the review process is really important. So make sure you stick to the end and understand where you can get more info. But getting into kind of four, which is how do you now prep for the exam? You've understood how to approach the lecture. You've made your notes in a very question answer system, either through flashcards or your outlines, you make your reviews system, like the day after your lecture in a way where you can quickly highlight how much you understood it and fill in the gaps. And now you're getting to the test prep. So what principles do you need to understand? And this is what I would do. At the start of the semester, right, you know when your tests are going to be, especially if you're, you know, but if you're a med student, when the start of the block, I'm assuming your block is going to be a month long, you're going to know when your exams are. So I work backwards. If my test is on a Friday, I typically start studying for that test at least the Wednesday or Thursday before the week before, because that gives me a nice like seven to 10 days to prep for it. And that gives me enough time to one, do several passes of the material. The thing that most med students screw up on is they'll try to point to each lecture maybe once. And again, that gets to the idea of information prioritization where you're giving each lecture one equal value, but it's going to be a lecture that you're really good at and certain lectures you suck at. But if you just give enough time to look at each lecture once, you're going to have that old crap moment when you get to that lecture and you realize the tests in two days. I'm sure many of you guys have that. I've had that. But if you give yourself time to look at each lecture at least twice, then you're going to be able to do spend the second time more on the lectures that you really struggled with. So if my lecture is the Wednesday or sorry, my test is on Friday, I'm going to start studying the Wednesday before I spaced out how many lectures I have. So let's say we're studying for 10 days and I have 20 lectures, right? That means that I'm not going to be spending only two lectures per day. Instead, what I want to do is I want to give a little bit of a buffer time. There's going to be times where a lecture or review takes more time to learn or you're going to have a day where you slack off and not really study or busy day, whatever may happen. In addition, I like to make, I get the tests on Friday, I like to use Thursday and Wednesday to go over everything once and focus more on my weaknesses. So that means I really have, if I'm studying the Wednesday before, I really have seven days to go over 20 lectures. So that means I give myself about three lectures a day and I review them and I try to do them twice. So try to figure out how you can structure your lectures and that's why I like to work backwards. If you know you're going to start studying on Wednesday, what lectures do you need to do to be able to learn each lecture twice and give yourself one or two days to review everything and especially your weak points. I feel like by the time the test comes around, I'm not as stressed because I've done multiple passes and I focus more at the variant on topics than we get. Again, at the very end of the video, I'll talk about how to know which topics you're weak at and different strategies you use. But make sure you understand that your test principle is set up a nice review schedule. Unfortunately, we're very reactive to when exams come and we have that OCRAT moment and we try to understand everything at the very end that we're cramming. That doesn't work in med school. Many of you guys probably understood that. So use a study kind of review schedule and make it to however your school is set up. But I like to do 10 days before. Hopefully that works for you. Final thing about test reviews, I love using practice questions that weren't made for my professors. So things like Q-Banks or like Step 1 are amazing if you're a first or second-year med student. People love using what you world, but I like using U-World for my actual board prep. So I'll forward you in the description things like online method, which have great videos, but also have good practice questions for different topics. You guys can check that out. There'll also be a discount description below. I am an affiliate, so if you guys do check it out, I do get a commission, but you can choose to use online method without going through my link. And then the other resource that I also love using that I use as a first-year med student is called USMLERX, which is made by the same maker as a first-aid. And so it's a Q-Bank four-step one. So if you're first or second-year med student, it's perfect because it's quizzing you on first aid material without making you read the book. And so you can review the material for whatever class you're in that pertains to that section of the first aid. So definitely use techniques like the brain dump, practice questions at this very end of the phase to highlight your weaknesses, to use questions that weren't made by you, to be able to see how well you understand the high yield info, and then finally make sure that you have a review schedule for your test to where you can have multiple passes in the last few days. Give yourself enough time to focus on the weak points versus looking each piece of info just once. And finally, I know this has been a long video, but we're almost done, which is how do you actually take the exam? Many of you guys may consider yourselves to be poor test takers, and that's exactly where I was, but I'm going to give you two principles. One is kind of an approach, and one is a mindset. And both of them have helped my grades drastically improve, including my board scores. So the first principle is going from question-answer stem. Typically, we're taught to go from, you know, read the whole vignette, the stem, and the question, and then look at the answer choices. But in med school, most of you guys know the questions are long, you don't have enough time, and you need to be able to make decisions quickly. You also don't like being tricked on the freaking stem questions. And the other thing, as most of you guys know, the most frustrating thing in med school when you're taking an exam is when you realize all you needed to answer the question is to read the actual question versus looking at all the stem. None of that actually mattered. You could have been able to take away what you needed by just saying what they were asking you. So go to the question first, and try to get an idea of what they're trying to get at, and then look at the answer choices. What are your options, right? And when would each option be considered to be correct? So an example I love to give are the different forms of shock. If you haven't learned this, don't worry about it, don't over stress. But many of you guys probably know the different forms of shock are things like cardiogenic, hypovolemic shock, you have septic shock. And there's different presentations that the patients will show up with, as well as like procedural techniques, like such as a right heart cath. So your answer choice may be the different forms of shock. And those may be the answer choice. So now you know that the patient has shock, right? Likely, right? And all you have to look for are pieces of info that's going to be able to differentiate each of them. So you want to see, okay, the septic shock, my answers will look like this. If it's cardiogenic shock, my cardiac output will be like this. So now look for those pieces of info in your stem. Go back to the stem and look for the piece of detail. This works so much better than going from stem to question to answer. Because one, when you focus on stem, sometimes a lot of the info is useless and you're wasting your time. And two, your professors are smart. And so they're going to try to trick you. And so we're going to give you little pieces of detail to try to steer you away from the correct answer. But if you know what the answers are, and instead you're looking for proof for each of the answers, you don't focus on the traps as much because now you're looking for the detail. The same way we look at notes and how we prep for lecture, which is focused on the big ideas and then look for the details to answer them. That's exact same way that we're going to approach your exams, which is now look at our answers and try to find proof for each of them. You find that you don't fall for the traps as much. And you also are much faster in answering your questions. I usually can get through a test question with them like 10 to 20 seconds without thinking very much. That works wonders if you're especially some of that struggles with like time management. So use that principle of question, answer, stem. Next time you take along your best school exam. The final principle, and this is kind of out of video and is when you take tests, it's very easy for us type A personalities to get freaked out about how poor our grades are going to be, especially when we encounter tough topics, right? So you may have a 20 question test and you have three questions in a row that really give you trouble and you're just telling yourself, crap, I failed. I got to see like I'm not doing well. And so instead use a principle that I love using. So if you're a subscriber of my channel, you know this, but go from deficiency to abundance. So instead of focusing on the points that you're losing focus on the points that you're gaining. So each question, if you have a question and you know it, you mastered it, you learned it, be happy about it and give yourself a pat on the back and say, cool, got the points. Move on. If you keep using that kind of technique, you will find yourself to be in a more of a momentum when you're taking the exam. And by the end of it, you'll focus on all those test questions that you got correct. And typically some of the questions that gave you a hard time, you tend to do 50 50 on. So you'll claim some of them and you won't claim others. So your grade, ideally will be better than what it is. Sometimes students will do the opposite where they'll focus on the 20 questions that don't mark the ones that they got wrong. They're like, well, I probably got an 80 or 70 on my test. So instead of work forward, start claiming points each question at a time and you'll realize that your momentum and your confidence in the exam will be much better. The questions that you don't know, it kind of shrug your shoulders, try your best, get an educated guess and move on. Maybe you'll claim the points, maybe you won't. But try to use that mindset of abundance over deficiency and working on focusing on the points that you're gaining versus the ones you're losing. All of that combined with everything we've talked about, guys, I promise you you'll do much better on your medical exams. Material will become much easier to understand. I know this is a very long video with a lot of concepts, guys, but hopefully it was helpful. And quickly, I want to point you to kind of a direction for any of you guys that are looking for a little bit more help and assistance. If you want a little bit more hand holding, if you want more insight into each technique that I use through the review process, to how I take my notes, if you want real life examples of me going through them, I'm working on a really cool project, which is I'm making a video course on how to study from start to finish. And so it's going to currently, it's about 15 to 20 modules. So it includes how to study different principles you need to master, how to prep for your exam, and the study techniques that I love using. So different videos for those, as well as kind of how to prep for things like step one and step two, things that I've done well on and what resources and schedules I would give you if you're in that phase of your learning. So this video course is again going to be me kind of holding your hand and showing you different techniques, things that I would want to have known when I was a first year med student on how to approach med school and study better and have more free time, right? You want to become more efficient, you want to study better and you want your grades to be better. And I've been able to manage to do that. I want to teach you to do the same. So this video course is currently in the beta phase. I'm designing all the content right now and producing all the videos. And so I'm giving you guys an opportunity if you want to jump on board. Many of you guys know that I've already written a book about how to study medical school and most of my students have loved it because it's taught them how to study and transform their study techniques while they're spending less time. And you guys can check out a lot of the testimonials in the link down below, but I'm giving a pretty cool opportunity because I want insight on this video course I'm making if you get the book for the price it is right now, you'll get the video course for free as well. So check out the link in the description where you'll get the book and the course for the price of one. If you're watching this video much further in the future and you know, the price will likely have changed, but definitely check out the link still down below. But if you're interested in being one of my first students and giving me feedback, so I can make this course as effective as possible, check out the link down below and get yourself a really good deal. And now I'm not going to act like this video course is for everybody, it's not, but it is for somebody that wants a little bit more handholding that's kind of finding themselves in a rut and wants a little bit more assistance. So if that is you, if you think that is you, make sure you check out the link down below in the description and I'd be happy for you to be one of my first students, but I'm not going to belabor the point anymore. Again, if you guys enjoyed the video, make sure you give a like, subscribe to the channel, comment down below with any questions you have. And as always, I will see you guys in the next video. Take care guys.