 So what is the ideal study schedule of a medical student? That's exactly what we'll bring down in this video. All right guys, what is going on? Welcome to another episode in the MD journey as well as the TMJ show. My name is Lux. I'm an internal medicine resident helping people just like you succeed on their medical journey with less stress. And today is going to be one of my favorite videos that I'll probably do on the channel, which is breaking you down with the ideal study schedule a medical student will be like. I'm gonna do it on my tablets and hopefully you guys can see step by step how I think about setting up your study schedule and hopefully you guys can use a similar approach to help you out on your journey. Before we begin, you know, if you're new to this channel or if you haven't done so already, consider subscribing to this channel and hitting that notification bell to get two videos like this one on thrown to you at a weekly basis as well as supporting this video specifically in hitting that like button. And also don't forget to comment down below with any questions you have regarding studying and doing better at medical school. I'm gonna go ahead and take you straight into my tablet. And essentially what we're gonna do today is I'm gonna break to you kind of how do you go from point A to point C in studying? How do you get from the part where you acquire the information to the part where you're studying and prepping for your exams? I'm already gonna apologize because my selling is awful, but we're gonna get the point anyways. So, you know, the first step is you need to acquire the information. And then we're gonna go into step C, we'll call it four, that may change from now is prepping for exam and what your study schedule should be at different parts of that. So essentially we can go ahead and break it down on a Monday to Friday to Saturday schedule. So we're gonna say Monday, and then we can just say a weekend because I'm gonna assume that your Saturday and Sunday schedules are gonna be kind of similar or you pick one of the two days to do some study. Now, Monday, what I like to do, you know, you typically are going to have some obligations, like nine to 12, that may be a lecture. Now probably continue all the way through from 12 to one, probably have a lunch or something. And then from one to all the way till we'll just say nine p.m. is kind of the question. So like what should I do during this time? Obviously you may have obligations like a lab, you know, if you're doing an Adam lab or different things during these afternoons, but just assume that primarily we'll talk about the ones that are open and how should you be studying them. So I'm gonna assume initially that you're a class goer and they'll give you some different ideas of how to approach it. But the first thing that I like to do between that one to nine spot, ideally you can make the shorter or you stop studying at seven p.m., but again, we'll just say one to nine for now, is to go ahead and ask yourself, step number one is how do you wanna review the material? So you want to go ahead and do it through several options, you know, you can do it through. Flashcards, do you wanna create an outline? Do you wanna kind of essentially write down what you saw? Do you like to do group studying and meeting with people? But the main thing here is the first hour or so that you're gonna be spending studying is where you probably have the most motivation. You know, you've gone through a whole day of school, you know, you need to study and finally sit down. That takes a lot of motivation to do in the first place. And you have to get started and get the ball rolling. So you don't wanna start with something that you don't enjoy. So I recommend doing something that's one easy to get started with and two, able to keep motivated. So let's say you figure out that your preferred form of review is doing flashcards. So once you decide what your form of review is, number two is to give yourself a cut off on how long you wanna be spending doing that specific technique for each lecture. Unfortunately, sometimes med students think that because you have eight hours to study, you can spend as much as you want on lecture number one and eventually finish that and go to lecture two and go to lecture three. What happens is that you'll spend an excessively long amount of time on lecture one, maybe an average amount of time on lecture two and not enough on lecture three, even if you get to it. So you have to create yourself kind of blocks. You know, how much time do I see this lecture taking? So you wanna create a cut off time on when you think you have some time. So the way I do it is I evaluate all my lectures. So let's say there's lecture one, two, and three. And I kind of give them percentages, like how long do I think you'll take me to do? Using the technique that I like. So if I'm using flashcards, you know, usually I can do, what to say, lecture one is 30 pages or it's 50 slides. Then let's say lecture two is 25, so pretty similar. And it's 40 slides. Then we'll say lecture 30 is about 20 pages, but we'll say that the professor got a little crazy and they made them 60 slides. Now when I do this, I can take a step back and already see kind of where my study schedule is what may have some struggles. So I can see that because I like to use flashcards and you guys can check out my technique that I prefer using in med school. Because I go primarily off the slides when I'm learning, that 60 slide lecture is gonna take me much more time. You know, a 40 slide and a 50 slide. So I need to be able to account for that extra time towards my last lecture. So what I'm gonna say is, well, 60 is going to take me, let's say, one and a half hours. I'm just making up time at this point, but you pick what you think is comfortable for the amount of work you need to do. And I say, well, I can do 40 in about an hour, and I can do 50 in about an hour and 15 minutes. So you pick that time. So now you kind of have an approximate approach of what you wanna do. So now we're gonna say we're starting the study at one, so about one to 130 is where I'm just gathering my information and trying to get ready for the day. It also counts for any kind of laziness on my part to actually sit down and get to work. So I'm gonna say, just, you know, prepare. And then eventually from 130, sorry about that, to an hour and 15 minutes later, so that would be, I do my math right, and I'll be about, what is that, 245, is how I'll be spending doing lecture number one. And then what I like to do next is I like to get myself a 15 and a break between major tasks to one account for any task taking a little bit longer than I need and two also just giving myself a break because usually by that time you need one. So I'll say the next task will start at three o'clock and because I said the next lecture will take me about an hour, we'll say three to four. We'll be a lecture two and then we're gonna go ahead and add another 15 minute kind of break in case the next task takes us a bit of time and we're gonna go from four to 15. We said lecture three is gonna be our longest one. It's gonna take us an hour and a half. So that's gonna bring us down to about 545. And as a bonus tip, as you get further and further into your steady schedule, your last task is usually gonna take a little bit more time than you think just because you're more fatigue, you have less motivation. So usually I add a 15 minute buffer and you can choose to do this if you want. But I usually will say that it will go until 16. That just gives me a little bit more flexibility if I'm tired or if I need more frequent breaks to say I can still get it done in my desired time interval. So from one to about six o'clock, you've reviewed all three lectures of your materials. Now step number three is preparing for the next day. Or if you don't enjoy preparing for the next lecture, maybe you just don't enjoy reading the syllabus or slides, you may wanna have the lecture explained to you. So then you can go out and learn. That's completely fine. You can use this time to go ahead and review for exams and this is kind of what I would recommend and do. Again, you guys can check out the link down below to see my full study system. Now similar to our last task, you wanna kind of give a time block on this specific task. And what I would say is essentially the good way to go about doing this is you wanna ask yourself, what's your cutoff time? You know, is it 9 p.m., is it 7 p.m.? And ask yourself, how much more time do I wanna be spending each day? Like what time do I wanna finish doing everything? Now, if you've said it's 7 p.m., then you go ahead and look at your schedule and you're saying, well, I'm finishing at 6 p.m. I'm gonna give myself a 15 at a block. So I'm not gonna start until 6.15. And that means if I'm gonna go all the way to 7 then I can give myself 45 minutes to review. And this could be doing practice questions through a question bank. You can be doing flashcards from old lectures that you've had, but you picked during this time. Again, this is not to say, here's a study schedule. This is when you should be reading. This is when you should do a flashcard. This is when you should be doing outlines. This is how I approach evaluating what I need to do each day and also still getting done at a reasonable hour. Now, this is going to essentially break down my weekdays and I'm gonna tell you kind of how I would break down each of my weekdays. So for the weekend schedule, I'm gonna assume Saturdays and Sundays are both fair game. Although I recommend you take at least a half day off for each of those. Again, you guys can check out more blog posts that we'll link down below to help you. But again, I think that's the best time to help you get revitalized. For the weekend, what I would do is I would spend one half days, usually for like nine to 12. And I would review all of the lectures from the first half of the week. So I would review lectures from Monday to Wednesday and then either Saturday evening, which would be approximately three to six. I would do the rest. So I would go ahead and review from Thursday to Friday and usually I would put a nice solid six hours on a weekend day. Now, if you follow my principles, giving yourself at least a half day off, then Sunday you can do a few things. You can wake up early or get some sleep and from nine to approximately 10, about two hours, you can do some form of review for that week or a week before. That is totally up to you. But essentially this is going to be an exam prep. So whatever exam is gonna be coming up for that topic you're learning about, what do you wanna do? Do you wanna do practice questions? Do you wanna review the material from the previous week and just do as much as you can in two hours? And this should be like nine to 11, sorry. And then I would give myself another two hours to do one of two things. Again, this depends on your preference. So either do some more review or prep for the next day's lecture. So if I like making my flashcards ahead of time, like I told you guys in that video down below, then you can use this and this will be a perfect time to do it. So that guys would be how I would lay down my weekend study schedules. Now again, I wanna put it together because I know it gets a little bit messy on the tablet. So essentially, you know, your weekdays, you know, you go to lecture in the morning although I recommend that if you don't have to and a lot of your institutions may not force you to be mandatory, then you can go ahead and speed lesson from home and cut half of your time here. So instead of three hours, I was gonna be marking how much time each activity takes. So instead of three hours, you may be able to take that down to like one and a half if you can listen at 2X. And then the second thing you wanna do is you wanna start your review. So whatever method that is for you. And again, the way you do this is you evaluate how much information is on each lecture, each course, and you go ahead and extrapolate how much time you need to do it. Now this really depends on your study system as well as how long the lecture is on. If they can take three to six hours. And then finally, the degree on those days is either do more review. So we can just call this again, test prep or prepare for the next day. Usually I will keep this under one to 1.5 hours. And so things like practice questions, question bangs, more flashcards if you wanna do it. Those are good. And then in terms of weekend, I would say the first thing you wanna do is review the lectures from Monday to Wednesday. And this can take you three to four hours. And again, ideally you've already done the review the first time. So this is going to be a little bit quicker than your review the last time. So if you're asking, can I do a review in three or four hours, the answer should ideally be yes. So you need a better study technique to get there. And then number two would be at a different time block, whether it's the same day or on the next weekend day. I'm gonna go ahead and start reviewing Thursday to Friday. Now usually this takes you a lot of time because you only have to do two lectures. But sometimes if you take Friday evening off, for example, you may not have time to do that review for the weekday. So you can spend more time doing it on that weekend day. And then three is to go ahead and do test prep. And I usually will dedicate another two to three hours of this. Again, one thing I want you guys to focus on is when I create these study schedules, I'm giving them in the form of blocks because then you can say, well, maybe I don't have enough time to do it on this day. I'm gonna move this time block dedicated for this specific task. I'm gonna move it to another day or I'm gonna split it into two and I'm gonna move it here and here in my study schedule. This way you don't become overwhelmed, but it requires you to look at each task and ask yourself realistically, how long will this take me? And then you can put together a nice study schedule that'll get you from both acquiring the information as well as studying and preparing for exams. And the last thing I wanna leave you guys with is kind of how to study on test week because that's gonna be a little bit different. Essentially what I would do is usually I would start prepping already two weeks in advance and I know a lot of your institutions may have tests on a different schedule. But for this video, I'm gonna give you an example where you have a test every four weeks because that's usually typical for a lot of institutions. So I'm gonna say step number one is to start studying two weeks in advance. This just gives you 14 days to review and I know you haven't learned all the information yet you're still getting lectures as you're starting your prep. But essentially if I broke it down into Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then we'll say Saturday, Sunday, I'll say week one, week two. And I'm gonna say the test days here. Then what I would tell you to do is these days are going to be a little bit more intensive is to find a nice two hour block if you can to start reviewing. So I'd just say for example, you have 20 lectures to do. So go ahead and divide them by the number of days you have available. So this gives you one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. 11 days to study for the 20-ish lectures that you have. And one thing that I like to do personally is I like to review each lecture twice. So instead of 20 lectures, we'll say I have 40 lectures and I only have 11 days to do it. That breaks down to about three to four lectures per day and so during these two to four hours on a Monday evening, during my review of test prep time, I'll go ahead and do lecture one to three. And then so one, two, three, or lecture one to four depends on what you want to do. And then you can just continue to count over on each respective day to count four. So this would be a lecture, we'll say four, eight, and then nine to 12, and so forth and so on. So this may be a lecture 13 to 17. And then maybe, you know, you're still on lecture 14 or 15 in your class material. So what I would just say is go ahead and start over at lecture one through four, and then go ahead and do five through nine. And then eventually you can add the new lectures into that system. So go ahead and plan out your two weeks, ask yourself what three to four lectures or however many you need, depending on how much material is on your quiz, and give yourself that two hour block each evening to do it to where you can repeat each lecture review twice. Now keep in mind, I know this seems like a lot, but the first day, the day of the material, you've already reviewed the material after a class, ideally you reviewed it now on the weekends. You may have reviewed it again on a test prep session on a weekend when you're reviewing old material. And now you're going through both your fourth and fifth iteration of this material. So you should begin faster and faster review at this time, as long as you're using the technique that is well suitable for you. So that guys breaks down how I would look at a study schedule when you're acquiring information, as well as when you're prepping on test week, kind of how to design it in a way where you look at all of your to-dos in the form of blocks, where you can still get everything done. But if you want a more over the shoulder approach of how I study, you can check out one of the videos that I've made on YouTube that I'll link down below, or you can get a free aid step video course that kind of breaks you step by step on a lot of these different techniques. And if you want even more help on creating a study system that is perfect for you, personalized to you, and we do have a three week study system to help you do just that on theamdjourney.com. It's called Level Up Your Study. You can actually see what a lot of our past students, what kind of results they're getting, the reviews that they're giving, and those will all be linked down below. That's pretty much it for this video guys. Hopefully you had some golden nuggets on the front of it and found it helpful. Let me know what you guys think in the comment section down below. And if you enjoyed this video, make sure you smash that like button, hit that subscribe button, as well as that notification bell, putting out videos just for you on Wednesdays and Sundays each week. Thank you guys so much for joining me on this video, joining me on my journey. Hopefully I've been a little help to you on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.