 Okay, tip number seven, which is of extreme importance. I couldn't more highly state the importance of this tip. Tip number seven is to what is up guys, Karma Medic here and welcome back to another dose. If this is the first time you're coming across one of my videos, hi, my name is Nasser and I'm now a third year medical student studying at King's College London. And once a week on Thursdays, I make banger YouTube videos here on the channel. If you want a closer look into my personal life, you guys can follow me on Instagram at karmamedic. Anyways, let's jump into the topic of today's video, which is how to survive your first year at university or medical school. And I'm gonna cover everything from money to social life, to studying. So make sure you stay tuned till the end to hear my tips for all those different things. So September is just around the corner and I know a lot of you guys are gonna start university. I'm sure you're all very excited and long story short, you're about to have the best years of your life and the challenge is gonna come in being an adult and sort of balancing all the different responsibilities that you're gonna get when you go to university and you're away from your parents and you just have all these different things to balance. That's where the challenge of university comes in. So before we start, do leave me a comment down below letting me know what you're studying and at which university you are studying. I'd be interested to see where you guys are if you're watching my videos. I think it might be cool. Okay, so my first tip is to make sure that you meet as many people as possible during Freshers Week or Frosh Week or whatever they call it at your university. You wanna shake hands with absolutely everyone. You wanna exchange names and numbers with as many people as possible. Cause this is an opportunity where you're gonna find yourself surrounded by other new students just like you who are looking to make friends and the more people that you meet now, the easier a time you're gonna have later on in deciding who you want to be your close friends and who you wanna spend more time with moving forward. The second thing that I wanna say is try not to compare yourself to other people. So I know when you're in a new environment and there's a lot of new things going on, it can be easy to compare yourself to others who seem either more happy or more sad or who are studying more or less than you and you really wanna avoid that as much as possible. You know, university is gonna be filled with all kinds of different people from all kinds of different backgrounds. And as cheesy as it is to say, each of you are gonna be different. You're all gonna have different interests, different paces of studying and learning, et cetera. So you all need to take your own path and figure things out for yourself. Don't compare yourself to students that are getting A's in every single class or who are partying every single day and doing no studying. You wanna find your own balance and see what works for you. Now the third thing that I wanna say is to take advantage of the libraries. Libraries, contrary to popular belief, are actually an excellent place to socialize. They're an excellent place to meet people, to talk to people, and to sort of break up your day of studying. You can go to the library as a group and you guys can take your lunch breaks together, your coffee breaks together, et cetera. And it's just a very good way to get your work done while also meeting people, socializing with people, et cetera. And that's always gonna be so much better than sitting in your room with the door closed, studying away by yourself, as much as you can be out and socialize and meet other people, I would highly recommend it. Tip number four, and this one is so, so, so important, please, please, please do not buy textbooks unless you really, really love textbooks and you really, really wanna study from a textbook, please don't buy them. Honestly, in my opinion, they're very unnecessary. All the information that you'll need to pass your exams and everything like that can be found in the lecture slides or on YouTube videos or on free online PDFs that you can download. If you buy a textbook, you're probably gonna have difficulty selling it next year because they always come out with new editions. It's just a whole mess that you don't wanna get into. Most textbooks that you'll want to read, you can find online for free, or you can find that same information in YouTube videos, et cetera. And of course, you can always rent those same textbooks from your local library at university. So really, if you can avoid it, don't buy textbooks. Okay, my fifth tip is about money management. Now, at university, for a lot of you, it's gonna be the first time where you sort of have your own budget and you need to take care of how much money you spend on different things in your life, for example, food, entertainment, travel, et cetera. You're gonna need to learn how to manage your money. So a good way that I did this was when I went to university, I kept a copy of every single receipt that I ever used, and I had an Excel sheet at home, which I had split into different categories like travel, alcohol, and I had the Excel sheet spread into different categories like travel, entertainment, university, health, et cetera, et cetera. And at the end of each week, I would look at all the receipts that I got and I would plug them into my Excel sheet so I could see where my money was going, how much I was spending on food, how much I was spending on travel, and entertainment, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if that sounds like a super outdated and dinosaur-like way of managing your money, it's because it is. Nowadays, we have apps that can way more easily automatically keep track of all of your money and where you spend it. Is there another dog barking? Bruh, just let me record my video. So the two apps that I wanna mention that completely changed my life when I was learning how to track my money was, first of all, this nowadays, we have apps that can easily automatically help you track your budgeting. For example, any of the online banks that are now in London, such as Monzo or Revolute, and there's a bunch of other ones, but the one I personally use is Monzo and it's an absolutely amazing app. Everything that you purchase using your card gets automatically categorized into whatever category it is. So for example, if I eat out at a restaurant, that money goes straight into the Eating Out folder. If I purchase something like on the London Underground or I take an Uber, it automatically goes into transport. But if you guys can't open an account with an online bank for whatever reason, there's a bunch of other apps that allow you to track your money, you just have to input all of the different purchases individually. So it's manual and it takes a lot longer, but it's still a good way to track your money. And the one that I used to use before I opened the bank account with Monzo is this one here, it's called Wallet. Hopefully that focuses and you guys can see. Yeah, I used it for a while and it was very helpful, but again, it's manual. You have to input everything manually so it takes a bunch of time. Now, if you're studying something like medicine, which is a very demanding subject, you're gonna have lots and lots of lectures, tutorials, workshops, et cetera throughout the year. My one tip for a subject as demanding as medicine is to really not leave everything until the end. And personally, that's what I do. I do a bit of work every single day, something between one and three hours. And then when it comes to exam time, I've basically already written all of my notes and I just need to read them and memorize them and understand them. At the end of the day, you are at university in order to study and get your degree. And so figuring out the balance between your work and your social life is gonna be the most important thing. Okay, tip number seven, which is of extreme importance. I couldn't more highly state the importance of this tip. Tip number seven is to learn how to cook. If you learn how to cook, you're gonna save a lot of time, you're gonna save a lot of money, and your body and your mind are gonna thank you for it. It's very easy at university to fall into the trap of constantly ordering food from outside or eating at the local chicken shop or whatever it is. You know, you can do that, but you're just gonna end up eating a bunch of junk and it's gonna end up costing you so much money. The best thing to do is to meal plan. And I have a video about meal planning. I'll put a link to it somewhere up here. I personally really enjoy cooking and I cook on a daily basis. So I'm definitely gonna make a couple more videos on cooking and meal planning and stuff like that, which I'm sure you'll find useful if you haven't done much cooking before. Okay, tip number eight is talking about studying techniques. So when you're at university, you're gonna start off with one studying technique, whether that's writing down on a pen and paper, whether that's taking notes on your laptop, whether that's using an iPad, whether that's listening to audio recordings on your lecture, you're gonna try out different things. And as you go through university, you're gonna realize that some of those things work better for you than others. So my tip is that you shouldn't be scared of changing your studying technique. Don't just choose one and get stuck in it because that's what you chose to begin with. You might find another study technique that works a lot better for you. And a good way to learn about different studying techniques is to ask your friends how they study. So for example, I started off with pen and paper and then I realized that I couldn't keep up in the lecture. I couldn't write as fast as the lecturer was speaking to me and so I was forced to switch to my laptop so I could type out all those notes. Then I realized that I wasn't learning as much and I wasn't retaining as much information from typing out on my laptop. And so I started writing down on a Surface notebook. I think it was the Surface Pro 2, so it's really old and outdated now, but that's what I started off using. And now of course I use this iPad over here, absolute game changer. I have a bunch of videos talking about the iPad and I'm gonna make a bunch more. Anyway, the whole point is that you wanna try out different studying techniques. Don't get caught into the trap of just sticking with whatever you've been used to. You might find something that works better for you. Okay, now tip number nine is to please, please, please do things outside of your academic degree. Don't devote your life to studying. Now at King's College London in medical school, I promised myself that I would have a very well balanced life and so now I have this YouTube channel where I spend a lot of time each week making and editing videos. I go out with my friends to bars or board game nights or video game nights or whatever. I play basketball once a week. I go to the gym and I run. I do a lot, a lot of things outside of my academic life and that's what helps me keep so happy in my life generally. That's what helps keep my mental health really good, my body healthy and fit and honestly that is what helps me succeed academically because when it comes time to studying, I don't mind that I'm studying because I've already had so much fun with my friends, with the gym, with exercise, whatever it is, so when it's time to study, it's time to study and I don't really mind and the last tip that I wanna mention, tip number 10 is to get into the habit of helping out your friends at university. You know, there is always gonna be a time where a friend comes to you and says, hey, listen, I couldn't make it to this lecture. Could you please send me those lecture notes and honestly I would encourage you to build a relationship where you guys can help each other in things like that because there will come a time when you were sick or you had a family obligation or something like that and you're gonna want to ask for the notes from one of your friends to help you save time and to help you move on and catch up with everything else that you have to do. So I really promote and I think it's a very useful thing to have a group of friends with which you feel comfortable and trust that you can share your notes with them and they can share your notes with you. At the end of the day, if you guys help each other out, you're all going to succeed and you're all going to do better. Don't be somebody who shies away from helping others and just keeps to themselves and keeps their notes to themselves. Sharing is caring, of course, within reason, within people that you trust, et cetera. So find that group of people and make sure that you guys help each other out. All right, and I think that's all the tips that I wanted to share with you guys today. I do have videos delving deeper into a lot of the topics that I did mention today. So if you guys wanna check those out, feel free to subscribe to my channel and you'll see more videos from me in the future. Please do leave a like on this video and leave a comment down below as well if you enjoyed and I will see you in the next one. Peace.