 So today we are going to talk about how to become the top of your class in medical school. Let's get into it. All right guys, welcome to another episode on the MD journey. We're here, we're all about helping you succeed on your medical journey with less stress. My name is Lakshman, internal medicine resident of the making videos on YouTube, just like this for people just like you. So if you enjoy the concepts in this video, make sure you smash that like button, hit that subscribe button and that notification bell to get videos coming at you twice a week, Wednesdays and Sundays. But today I want to talk about how to become the top of your class in medical school. If you really need to be, if that's truly a goal you should have and if it is, you know, what kind of things you should do to get yourself in that position. So the first thing I want to talk about is whether you really need to be the top of your medical school class. And my personal opinion is probably not, you know, you want to be in the top, I would say third to 25%. If you're looking to be in a competitive specialty, things like radiation oncology, dermatology, orthopedics, you guys have heard me say this enough times. If you're going into a competitive specialty, your competitive residency program, competitive area, you want to be as high in your medical school class as possible because they do look at your GPA. They do look at your ranking and being at the lower quartiles, etc. can affect you. So you do want to be as high as possible. But do you really need to be the number one student in your medical school? Probably not, you know, being the top 25, the top 10% is probably going to get you the same amount of goals and desires you have. So that's what we're going to refer to in the rest of this video. But now that we've established that your goals require you to be at the top of your medical school class, let's talk about what kind of things you should be doing to really help yourself in terms of your grades, your performance. Now the first thing that I recommend you doing from day one in a medical school is to go ahead and interact and spend the majority of your time with top performing students. And you may think that sounds obvious or you may even ask like, Luxa doesn't all medical students, aren't they all smart? The answer is yes. You know, obviously you worked really hard to get to this point, but even in a medical school class full of extremely intelligent individuals, still 50% of them are considered to be below average. That's just how it works. And if you want to be in the top of your class, you want to make sure that individuals around you are in that top tier and they're doing things they have characteristics that help keep you driven. And they also motivate you to develop skills that you don't have. And a few of these skills that a lot of these top performing students have are one they're extremely efficient. They also tend to have an intrinsic source of motivation. External things like a difficult class or a tough greater professor don't really affect them as much. And internal things like their drive, their desire to learn really keep them going. So surrounding yourself around these individuals and the qualities that keep them top performing also kind of distill and diffuse into you to where you can go ahead and start imbibing those qualities and eventually becoming a top performing student yourself. Now in addition to surrounding yourself with the right people, make sure you also understand what your course is specifically value. And this can be different from course to course or organ system to organ system. But essentially when you're taking a test ask yourself based off of how the professors or the course director has laid out their expectations. Do they expect this to be a memorization based exam or topic? Or do they even want you to focus more on connecting topics? Usually in medical school, it's a little bit of the latter but with some of the former thrown in. And so once you understand what the expectations are, you can start tailoring your learning for that specific class in that specific manner. Again, if you're taking pharmacology, which is a lot more memorization based, your study strategies have to be designed around repetition. But instead if you are focused on a class like nephrology where there is a lot of memorization, really it's about connecting the dots, understanding that physiology and electrolytes and all the different parts of a nephron kind of play together and causing pathology, it gets really complicated. So you really need to know how to connect one idea to the next one. That requires a completely different style of learning. They need to make sure that majority of your time is spent. That's what top students do. They identify what is the goal of this class, what is the goal of the instructor, the professor for the specific lecture or the whole course. And if you don't know, then they ask, is this going to be something that I should be expected to spend majority of my time memorizing or do you kind of value somebody connecting the dots? And you want to get specific here. But once you can get an idea either through your instructor telling you or taking the first quiz or practice quiz, you get an idea of what kind of information they value and then you can tailor the rest of your setting to focus on those techniques and ideally do better on your quizzes exams from there on. So surround yourself with the right people, make sure you understand the goals of your classes and something else that I want to recommend is making sure you're interacting with your instructors, your course directors by asking intelligent questions. I feel like the best and highest performing students are those who attain their education outside of some of this outside of the PowerPoint and outside of just the requirements of what's going to show up on the test. You know, these are the people that you're impressed by because they just know something that seems natural to them. But for you it feels like you have to memorize it or you don't remember it anymore because it's a class that you took a while back. But those students who can just impress you with what seems like innate knowledge, these are the individuals who are curious, who are always asking questions or always looking for other forms of learning outside of what medical school curriculum requires them. And a few ways you can do this is interacting with your professors either during lecture or after lecture. I like to have at least one question I can ask, either look up, send an email, interact with them after the class if you don't like to raise your hand, or interacting with your course directors when you have interactive sessions in medical school. Just asking like, I don't understand how these concepts apply or what if I have a patient that had A, B, and C? Those are great ways to kind of expand what you're learning to make sure everything is well connected. And again, because the majority of your medical school class and material is going to require you to connect information to do better on tests. You can start thinking, what if, what did this happen? What if a patient had this? You know, how would I approach this? Those kind of questions force you to evaluate what your knowledge currently has. And then two, find the holes in them and use professionals like your professors, other physicians, other attendings to fill in those gaps. That's where you become smarter. That's where the knowledge really sticks. And this is something that top performing students do naturally. There's just inquisitive. They ask questions and they try to do this ideally without being, you know, abrasive or interruptive and making sure that it's helping part of both their learning as well as the learning of their peers. Now, I do want to throw a warning here because when you add these tips together, you can be a top performing student or you can be a total gunner where it is all about you, you, you and trying to become better. But make sure that your goal is not getting in the way of other people's education as well as just making you look kind of self centered. So enjoy the experience, enjoy the education without kind of getting in other people's ways as well. And the last bonus tip I want to leave you with is to become a top performing medical student. You do have to have an element of something people don't talk about enough. That is balance. You know, we may talk about all the steady techniques and all the study strategies and different resources that you can use. But if you're completely engrossed in medical school for four years, the likelihood that you become the best medical student is still not that high because after a while, you know, you may be spending thousands of hours more than I am on studying. That's an exaggeration. You may not be getting thousands of times smarter because you're likely losing information as quickly as you're gaining them. But instead, if you have the balance of acquiring information, doing something else that you love and then going back to learning, your brain has one enough time to process information and focus on long term retention. But two, your stress levels always remain low because your goal isn't to become the top of your medical school classes. You just become the best medical student you can be. And ideally, your potential should allow you to become in that top 25 to 10% that we've mentioned. So make sure that you include balance. And if you guys want to understand how to have more balance, manage some stress as well as productivity, I'll link down a playlist of all our favorite videos on those topics. But that guys is basically my recommendation on how to become a top performing student. Hopefully, you've enjoyed it. Now, before we leave, if you do want more resources, it's kind of more of a blueprint to becoming a top performing student without, you know, losing a part of yourself. And I think that's important. I think one of the resources that you guys will love is to check out our Medallion Academy, which includes all of our premium, as well as many courses that we created on every different topic that you will need in medical school. So if you searched about it, you would basically have created or likely are in the process of creating a course or training or a ebook to help answer those questions and give you an A to Z blueprint. So that may be studying for step one, studying in general, doing well on your rotations, as well as becoming more productive or managing your stress. If you want to check out all the courses and products that we have on the Medallion Academy, you can check out the link down below or go ahead and check out it at the very end of the video. But hopefully you guys have enjoyed this video. Make sure if you did, to smash that like button, hit that subscribe button and notification bell, putting out videos again every Wednesday and every Sunday. So hopefully I'll catch you guys in the next episode. Thank you so much for joining me on my journey. I'll see you guys later on yours. Peace.