 When I started medical school, everyone warned me. You're going to study all the time. You won't see your loved ones or have time for yourself. You'll always be stressed and you'll lose your hair. But aside from that last one, the rest of them were completely overblown. In fact, my four years of medical school were some of my favorite years of my life. And not only did I get the grades and board scores that I wanted to get into the residency of my choice, but I still had enough time to spend with my now wife, spend on my personal hobbies, as well as starting a side business. So let's go ahead and break down in today's episode exactly how you can do all of that. Number one is understanding that an hour to yourself can make a huge difference. A lot of times when I'm working with students one on one, many of them think that I have no time to be able to fit in a workout or personally hanging out with my family or just chilling and relaxing because they think that hour could be better used for studying. And I'm sure there's a lot of you that are watching and listening that feel exactly the same way. You feel like your studying has to be included in every free hour because otherwise you're going to fall behind. And to highlight this point, let's do a quick exercise. Let's take a normal week, for example, and use an hour a day. You can use that hour to spend on an upcoming exam or a quiz, or you can use that hour on something that helps advance you or just makes you feel more like a human being when you're in medical school. I learned very quickly in med school that that extra hour was much more important and impactful if I use it on myself versus if I dedicated it to studying for a class. And here's why most of the time and most students are guilty of this when you have an extra hour or an extra two that could be spent on you versus the class. If you spend it on the class, you tend to use inefficient techniques that never really mattered and you just never actually get the most out of those two hours. And by the time the tester of the quiz comes around, those extra hours never were the difference between you getting a C to a B, a B to an A. If instead you said, I'm going to use this hour every single day and dedicate to something that I care for. Maybe it's going for a run, a workout, just taking a freaking nap, hanging out with your favorite people, and then forcing yourself to say, I have one less hour in a day. What can I now do to my studying to make sure that I count for that without falling behind? Now you're asking the right questions. And so if you hear those sirens, if you hear those warning signs from people on a medical journey saying you're not going to have time for yourself, medical school is going to take over all of it, that's really just a personal choice. I never found that I was burned out in medical school because the parts of me that mattered were still parts of my day, even if it was just an hour. And then I could get back to my studying. So remember, one hour can make a huge difference or very little depending on where you spend it. Principle number two is to always work on streamlining the process. Now as I work with students at one on one throughout the past few years, I realized that most students will either get a bad grade or a good grade and that's where they stop. Either if they get a bad grade and they want to completely jump ship and try something new, or they get a good grade and saying, let's just more or less do the same thing. Both of them, in my opinion, are actually incorrect ways to handle that. When I was in my first and second year of medical school, taking quizzes and exams all the time, regardless of the quiz, went my way or didn't, I always ask the same questions. How did I feel going into the test? How did I feel walking out of that test? And what would I have done differently in prepping for this exam? And how will I use that in an upcoming quiz or test for the same class as well as a different one? They started forcing me to identify things that I was doing that it really I should be doing more of, as well as things and resources I was using that really made no impact on my overall retention. And that helped me transition from a typical medical student who's using their lectures or syllabus online resources, question banks, flashcards to somebody who just says, you know what, this is my method of choice. And if I do A, B and C over and over again, as much as possible, I see the results that I want. But the only way that you can identify a streamlined process for your studying, your productivity, your CV development rotations is simply asking, what am I doing? And what type of things am I doing that are really not helping and taking them away until you just have a straight flow? And remember, there's always room for improvements. Even as an attending now, when I see patients on a daily basis, and I'm looking through their chart, I still identify things that I'm doing that I feel like I should be, but it's really not contributing to the patient's care. And thus as I'm able to take things away or add more of what's working, I'm able to better take care about patients while still being efficient. And so just remember that even if things are going away or if they're not always asking the question of what would this look like if it was easier and more simpler and more quicker and more efficient, you will start to find those rooms of opportunities and make those changes and keep asking that question. That's how you become both an efficient and effective medical student. Before we get to the rest of today's episode, let's go ahead and quickly talk about today's sponsor, which is Ken Hub. And one of the most tricky classes on your medical journey is definitely anatomy. That's just because there's so much information to learn. And unfortunately, not that many great resources to really master it if you have different learning styles. That's where Ken Hub comes in. If you're unfamiliar with Ken Hub, it's an online platform going to help you both learn, review and master your anatomy, both for your practicals, as well as your multiple choice exams and so much more. Now Ken Hub has so many cool features. The best way to show you is just by diving straight in. So if I was going into my anatomy lab, my anatomy lecture, and I had to learn a complicated topic, let's say like the brachial plexus, I could just go into the region of the body that represents that and seeing if I can find a module, which Ken Hub has tons of. And then when I'm in the general region, I can find the modules that are appropriate to the next lab or lecture that I may have to learn. So for example, if you scroll down, we'll find one of the most hardest topics to learn about medical school, which is the brachial plexus. And these modules are really what separates Ken Hub from the pack when it comes to a high quality anatomy resource, because not only do you have those texts if you're somebody who loves to read, but also resources and learning tools like videos. So if I wanted to learn about the brachial plexus, I could do so using their anatomy animations, which are very engaging, quick to the point. And if I wanted to speed it up even more, I have the option through the video player of doing so. And when you have a topic as complicated, but as high yield as a brachial plexus, it's nice to have both their videos, but also videos and some of their modules that include mnemonics. So if I wanted to really memorize the different parts of a brachial plexus like the roots, the trunks and the orders of these, you could watch one of their mnemonic videos to really help nail things in. Now probably my favorite part about these modules in Ken Hub are their quizzes, which I'll get to in a second. But when you're in the modules, there's tons of other ways that you can learn. For example, you can use an atlas where you can appreciate the entire brachial plexus or whatever structure of the body you're learning in one place using their color code system, or you can go ahead and just zoom out and sing everything like your typical labeled atlas that you may have, or you can also just go one by one and sing if you can quiz yourself on what you're seeing before going down and actually saying, oh, this is a spinal nerve. Now just by itself, those features really make Ken Hub so useful for studying for anatomy, but this is really where it changes the game for me. My favorite, if you like to use their quizzing option, you can actually do this before your anatomy labs and quizzes, where I can just do the basic ID function and I can quiz myself on different structures before actually going into dissection lab. So for example, if I need to identify the posterior MI, I can click that one and boom, still thankfully know some of my medicine. I want to know if that's inferior trunk. Beautiful. And then we'll just do one last one. Here is the lateral cord. You can do very simple basic IDs like this one, or you can do more advanced quizzing through Ken Hub's custom quizzing options. So for example, if I was going to study for my cardiovascular tests, I can just go ahead and click my refine selection. And those questions will be very similar to what I would see on a multiple choice anatomy practical. And you'll have questions that are straightforward, just kind of asking you how different structures are related to each other or how the body physiology is moving. And through their question bank, you'll be able to see a variety of questions, some that are more straightforward, some that actually include vignettes that can be very similar to board questions. And as you're doing the questions, you can go ahead and always check your answer to make sure that you actually know what you're talking about. So with this combination of features and bonuses, Ken Hub makes studying for anatomy so much easier, regardless of the type of learner you are. If you are somebody who is nervous about anatomy or currently in anatomy and struggling, want to find a resource that will work for you, definitely consider checking out Ken Hub down below. I'll put the link down below and our friends at Ken Hub have also been nice enough to include a generous discount, which will be included in the link down below. But as always, thanks to Ken Hub for being today's sponsor. Number three is to focus on building a purposeful CV. Medical school is very different than being a pre-med where you feel like you just have to do every single thing and stuff it into your CV. In college, it's very normal and recommended for people to say, do as much research, community service, join as many clubs as possible, and just add them and stuff them into your CV. Medical school is completely different because now the application you're trying to build is forced to sell the story that I want to do X, Y, and Z. For me, it was internal medicine. For somebody else, maybe orthopedic surgery, dermatology, plastic surgery, you can't just force yourself and focus on stuffing. It is really more a quality over quantity. And from this advice and natural question is, how in the world do I do this? I don't even know exactly what I want to do. I have ideas, but not really confident that this is the path that I want to take. It doesn't matter how clear or fuzzy your future career options are. The first thing to do is ask yourself, what type of things are you possibly interested in? I'll give you my own personal examples. I came into medicine after working a year with autistic kids that I thought that I was going to be a pediatrician. So the first thing that I did is to join different extracurriculars and projects where I was working in the field of pediatrics. I spent two summers of medical school working with type 1 diabetic kids because I thought that that's what I was interested in. I learned quickly after my pediatrics rotation that I was not going to be a pediatrician. But I learned quickly through those experiences that that part that I really enjoyed about pediatrics and that type 1 diabetic camp was working one-on-one with people and really working with very broad clinical diagnosis. That's what attracted me to the field of medicine. Now medicine itself is very broad. You can be in-patient, you can be outpatient, you can specialize, you can be a general doctor like I currently am. And as I got through more and more experiences in medical school, I realized I don't like outpatient medicine very much. I like being in the hospital, taking care of very acute sick patients, helping them get better, let them get home, and then take care of somebody else where the job pace is pretty fast. I like that. And number two, I like taking care of a little bit of everything and being knowledgeable in all the different organ systems. That was fun. That's ultimately what led me to go into an internal medicine residency and now being a hospitalist like I am. But hindsight, 2020, I purposely built a purposeful CV because I started to saying, what about this experience has taught me what I want in the future? My type 1 diabetic camp taught me again, I love working with people. I love working with part of the team. My pediatric rotation told me, I don't like working with parents when the patient doesn't communicate as well and then having to deal with essentially three people. That was my personal experience. That transition to saying, let's just work on taking care of people who are old enough to communicate being internal medicine. And still I can have that feeling of taking care of diabetes or et cetera. And we'll come back to a similar principle at the very end of today's episode, but you just have to be reflective of your experiences and saying, what does this tell me that I want more or less of? And then you can start looking for research projects, more clinical things, shadowing things that highlight those. This is how you build a purposeful CV. You don't have to feel like you're convincing anyone when it's time to apply to residency that you want to do surgery because all of your experiences point in that direction. Principle number four, this one is huge. Focus on tiny chunks of learning. I think one gracious benefit that I had in medical school is that I'd never let anxiety get too crazy, but I did realize that when you had, for example, a lecture that had a hundred slides or tons of information, HIV, anatomy, things that were just so hard to understand and memorize, I would be in there and say, okay, let's focus on three three bullet points on this slide and then move on to slide number two of 99 where instead I would see my classmates saying crap, like I have to learn this and then there's gonna be another lecture just like this one, how I'm gonna do it. People spend so much time focused on how much there's to learn versus just focusing on learning what's in front of them. Medicine is always going to be huge. You knew that. People always talk about drinking from a water fountain and feeling like you're just drowning with information. But to be a top student, you have to understand that everyone is presented with the same information that they're expected to learn for that quiz, test, board exam. And so it doesn't make sense of saying, how in the world am I gonna learn these 10,000 pieces of fact? Just have to learn the next one. And the nice thing about just starting and focusing on stacking tiny bits of information and reviewing them consistently is that you build a momentum. Now suddenly you're on slide four instead of slide one. Now suddenly you're on slide 10 and there's only 80 more slides. You're already 10% the way done where before you hadn't even started. This was a small mental strategy I used whenever I had a huge slide deck, a huge deck of Anki cards that I had to review didn't matter. Focus on the next one in front of you. Everyone is going to go through the hard struggles of having to learn it. The difference is how much time do you spend on being anxious about how much information there is to learn versus just moving forward and actually focusing on learning it. Principle number five is to focus on storing and being reflective of your experiences. Now this is the difference of a student who finishes their four years of medical school and really doesn't have to sell themselves as it comes time to looking for a job or applying for residency. For me it was very easy to look on my experiences and somebody asked me a question and bam I had an answer. And it's not because I rehearsed it, it's because I thought about what each experience, whether it be a clinical rotation experience with a patient, something that I put on the application, a specific class, what I got out of it. And admittedly I also have the benefit of recording my experiences for you guys here on YouTube and on the podcast and on the blog, but simply thinking about what did I get from various experience that I go through helps you one understand appreciating those small moments, whether it be lessons from a patient and attending, something you learn in classes saying this is freaking cool. I get to practice this for the rest of my life and then focusing on storing those in some form of modality. It can be on your phone through your notes app. It can be on something like Notion. It can be a notebook or a journal. It doesn't matter because when it's time to actually share your experiences, whether it be a personal statement, somebody interviewing you for a scholarship, residency applications, you don't have to think very hard. The biggest blunder that most medical students make is that they always keep thinking about the next test, the next board exam, the next phase and they never take a step back and saying, what did I get from this experience? This is why most students will go through medical school saying this freaking sucked. Honestly, it's just that you didn't give yourself enough time to take a deep breath and saying, what was this experience valuable for me? Good or bad? And as you do more and more of that, you become grateful for the experiences. You become grateful for the people around you, both your peers, patients and attendings and the experience starts to build you into somebody who wants to do whatever field that you are going to go into. So just be reflective of your experiences. You don't have to share with anybody. Put it on your phone, put it on Notion, put it on a physical journal and then come back to those and saying, oh, I did this random experience or I did this cool shadow experience or I saw this amazing patient and this is the experience that I got and the reflections that I got out of those. You can use those then when it comes to your personal statements, your experiences and just talking about that field during a residency applications. But through these core principles, guys, you become somebody who streamlines the process and thus becomes more efficient and more effective at studying. You always start focusing on how you can actually have time for yourself. You build a CV that actually seems like it tells a story which actually people find attractive because you're forcing yourself to be reflective on the experiences and when it's time to learn as medicine is crazy to learn, you're focused on learning it one check at a time. You're always making progress on your CV, your personal life, your personal progress and obviously your studying. And this is overall how you become a top med student. If you found any moment of this episode helpful and enlightening, motivating, go ahead and check out some of the links down below to some of the free as well as paid programs that we have for you on an empty journey, including our med school success handbook. This is 30 plus tips, absolutely free that I wrote down. They're kind of in the format of today's episode of the things that I wish somebody would have told me my first day of medical school. So make sure you guys check that out. If you haven't, there's tons of more free links and paid programs that you guys can check out below depending on where you are on your journey. If you have any questions, drop them in the comment section if you're watching on YouTube. And if you listen to this episode as a podcast, make sure you hit that follow, subscribe as well as leaving an honest review on the platform or your choice as well as consider sharing this episode with somebody who you think would also benefit. But as always, my friends, I always try to share my experiences about good and bad to help you propel on your experience even further. Hopefully this episode was able to do just that. If you did enjoy this episode and this episode right here on my favorite study technique ever in medical school, we'll be right here as well as all of the study strategies that I use to help me get a 3.9 GPA in medical school. We'll be right here as well as linked down below. As always, my friends, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I was a little help to you guys on yours. Now catch you guys in the next one. Peace.