 I hope you're well. Welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name is Sepi. I'll give a brief introduction about myself if you're new to the channel. I am a junior doctor. I graduated from a medical school in London called St. George's earlier this summer in 2020 and I'm now working in a hospital in London. In order to get to where I am, I had to sit several exams. So high school exams in England are called GCSEs. I had to do those and get good grades. I did A-level exams. It's the exam we sit before we go off to university. So it's the grades that we get on that which kind of gets us out of place in university here in England. And then in university, I sat a bunch of exams in order to get my medical degree. So I think by this point, I kind of know a thing or two about revision and I just want to share my knowledge with you guys because this is probably the most requested video and the most requested DM I receive is how to study and a lot of you guys message me saying how can I study for GCSEs? How can I study for A-levels? And how can I study in university? So I'm going to cover all of that because I feel like it's the same methodology for all of them. I'm going to try and be as efficient as possible. I don't want to like blabber on for ages. So I've written down everything that I want to talk about with you guys on my phone. So I'm just going to go through one by one. I basically have seven steps to this or seven tips for this. So I'll start with the first one. The first step is to do with timing. Do you have months until your exam or do you have a month or a couple of months until your exam? So figure out your timeline of how long you have. And then second of all, even if you have months until your exam, so you have like a whole year, you have to decide are you the kind of person who likes to study two hours a day every single day? Or are you, in fact, the kind of person who likes to study 10 hours to 12 hours a day, maybe even more, two months before the exam or a month before the exam? I personally am the latter and I have a feeling that a lot of you guys watching this video are also the latter. Because people like me who prefer to study mostly in the last two or three months leading up to the exam usually question themselves more because they look at the people who are studying throughout the year and think I just couldn't do that. The reason why I don't like studying two hours a day throughout the year is because I feel like by the end of the year I would have forgotten everything that I studied at the start of the year and so it just wouldn't be efficient for me and I just would always be worried that I'd forgotten everything. So I much rather study like 10 to 12 hours a day. Honestly, there were days where I'd study 16 hours a day, it really wasn't uncommon for me. So I could study 16 hours a day and be doing that for like two or three months. So decide for yourself what kind of person you are and that's the first step. Now the second step is to write out everything that you need to achieve and the dates for it. So for example, if you have a history exam in July, write down history exam, paper one and paper two, July 2021, for example, write out every single exam you have and the dates for it and how long you have until that date. So let's say if you've got eight weeks, you can write that out next to where it gives you a better idea when it comes to the next part which I'm going to talk about which is scheduling your time or organising your time. If you write down a sheet of paper, everything that you need to do and how long you have to do it, it gives you a better idea in your head of how you're going to manage this and you can then write that down as well. So I'll give myself as an example. If I have a medical exam, let's say I am doing my medical school finals and it is in December 2020, so that is about two and a half months away. So I'll say 10 weeks till medical school exam finals, then I will then underneath that write down every single subject that's underneath the medical exam finals. So for example, respiratory medicine, cardiology, endocrinology, ophthalmology, general surgery, and then I will then write how many weeks I want to dedicate to each topic because I'll write next to general surgery, I'll write for example, one week next to respiratory, I'll write two weeks next to cardiology, I'll write two weeks. So you'll know how much time you have, how much you want to dedicate to each topic and it gives you a better idea in your mind when you look back at this, if you're running on track with this or if you're kind of too far behind or if you're ahead of schedule, it's really good to give you an idea of where you are with your revision. Now when it comes to actually getting down to revision, I think it's really important that you set yourself daily goals. So every night before you go to sleep, write a list of everything you want to achieve the next day. I still do this to this day for just daily life activities. So I go on my phone and I make a list in notes, like a tick off list of everything I want to achieve. So you could go on your notes and you could write for tomorrow I want to do two hours biology revision or two hours chemistry revision or one chapter of biology, one chapter of maths. So decide for yourself what is feasible for you and write it down so that you make sure that you achieve it in that day. When you wake up the next day, check your list in the morning, then go ahead with doing the list. And then at the end of the day when you're done, make sure you check the list and see what you did achieve and what you did and why you didn't. Maybe you were overshooting and thinking that you could do much more than you could. Maybe the subject was harder than you thought it was. Maybe you were just having an off day, but make sure you reevaluate because it makes your list more and more efficient every time. And when you get your list, things on your list done, it gives you such a better feeling of achievement and it makes you much more motivated in order to actually study. Now the fourth most important tip is to figure out how best you learn. Are you a visual learner? Do you learn from watching YouTube videos, sitting in a classroom and having a teacher draw things out on the board, drawing spider diagrams? Are you an audio learner? Do you learn better from hearing? So just listening to people. Are you the kind of person who could read something and can understand it much better than someone talking to them? So decide are you a visual learner? Are you the kind of person who likes to read? Are you an auditory learner? Do you like to do spider diagrams? Do you like to write? I personally like to write things down. If I don't write it down, I haven't got that engagement between focusing and my hand moving and it going into my brain so I don't learn. And I actually had a talk in my first year of university by a neurologist who said that people who take notes whilst learning are much more likely to be able to remember that information later on versus the kind of person who just sat there and listened. But decide for yourself because maybe if you're sitting and focusing on listening to the lecture or listening to the YouTube video explaining your topic to you, you're much more likely to learn and engage than if you're busy writing. So decide for yourself how you learn best and use that to your power. So if you are the kind of person who learns best from visual stuff then make sure you can watch lots of YouTube videos about learning your topic of choice or make sure you listen harder in the classroom because it will definitely help to speed up your revision process. Fifth thing I wanted to talk about is note taking. I think when you take notes it's really important to make it as appealing to read for yourself as possible. So make sure that you don't write too much. So just highlight the most important key things. Make it colorful. I think using colored pens or highlighters if you're like me, I can't be bothered to swap pen colors so I just write my notes and then I read it and highlight the important bits. And third of all using visual aids, spider diagrams, these can all help with not only learning the information at the time but if you want to come back to your notes. I've got my notebook here from when I was in medical school and I've just literally flipped open halfway through. These are some psychiatry notes so as you can see I've got a lot of color. I've got really small handwriting, some of you might have larger handwriting so it might seem like I've got so much on the page of you guys but for me this seems like a good amount of work on the page. I've obviously flipped my book horizontally so that I can fit more into my spider diagram and pretty much the whole book is like this. It's a perfect book but this is how I learn best. So yeah that's definitely one tip. Also another tip is keep all of your notes in one place so I've got this book in uni. It's like these dividery books so you can divide it by each topic and all of your notes are in one place so you can just flip through and in between and they're all in one place so you don't waste time going around and looking for notes. And then the last tip I have for successful provision is practice, practice, practice. No matter what exam you're taking usually there is some sort of online past paper resource or some sort of online question bank or books with practice questions in them. The more practice questions you do once you've done your revision the more prepared you'll be and the more similar it will be to your exam so you will be much more focused and in tune with how to answer your questions and relate the knowledge you have to these questions. So practice, practice, practice. If there's one thing you take away from this video, practice, practice, practice, write it down in the comments, practice, practice, practice, don't forget that that really helps. There's no point doing questions if you haven't done your revision but let's say you do chapter one of maths and there is some questions at the end of it. If you do those practice questions you help to consolidate your memory what you've just learned so it really really helps. Now the last few things I'm going to talk about are all about motivation and efficiency. So loads of people ask me how do you motivate yourself to study and how do you remain efficient because sometimes I just can't be bothered. The most important thing to take from this is to recognize when you are tired and to take a break because sometimes we think we sometimes we go too hard and we get tired or like I just need a break now. So if you if you schedule your break so for example you say um after 10 o'clock I'm not studying anymore I'm going to take that time for myself and watch movies and not feel guilty about it um but I need to work before 10 o'clock then that will definitely help you to kind of feel a balance of not having burnt out. As well as taking breaks I think it's important that when you are studying you give it your full attention. The easiest way to do that is to chuck this thing away. Mobile phones are so distracting when you're revising. When I did my secondary school and sixth form exams so that would be the equivalent of like high school for America or other countries. When I did my high school exams I didn't have Facebook, I didn't have Instagram, I didn't have Twitter. The only thing I had was Snapchat and even then there was no stories or anything like that so I really was lucky but I feel now that there's so many of these apps around um if you have your phone there's so much more like you to be distracting for you so put your phone in a closet in another room on silent. Text everyone that you need to text and tell them that you're not going to be on your phone for a few hours um and if they need you they can contact you in an emergency via the landline for example um but put that phone away because it will definitely keep you efficient and it will make sure that when you do take a break it's for the right reasons and you haven't actually been sitting at your desk on your phone the whole time. I remember I used to go to the library and I used to see this guy sitting in the library um on his phone watching like football or rugby and I was like why are you sitting in the library and wasting your time? You're tricking yourself because you think just because you're in the library that you're doing something efficient but actually you're not being efficient you're still going to come out a bit tired because you weren't fully relaxing but you also weren't fully revising so be efficient and I think the last thing is definitely about motivation so the key to motivation I think as you get older it gets a bit easier because when you go to university you usually pick that exact subject that you're going to study so it's much more easier to motivate yourself to study um and even if at that point it's difficult I think the most important thing in terms of motivation is to remember your end goal so I would always remind myself why I'm studying so I'd be like you know I always knew I wanted to do something medical so I wanted to be like probably a doctor when I was in high school so I was like if you want to be a doctor you need to do well in all of these exams so don't forget that that's why you're doing this no matter how boring or repetitive it may be how good would it feel when you get those good grades just picture you getting those good grades how amazing would that feel when you have that to put on your academic CV for applying to university how good would that feel and when I was in uni and I would lack motivation or I was feeling like I was burning out I'd take more breaks uh but I definitely just remind myself why I'm here and why I'm doing this one doing this exam how far I've come so um just reminding myself you know this isn't just a moment this is years in the making and I owe it to myself to always do my best and just a few important quotes so my favorite one is some people dream of success others wake up and work hard for it so whenever I was lying in my bed taking a nap when my alarm would go off I would want to snooze it but I'd remember that quote and I would just jump out of bed because I was so motivated and I was like no I'm not gonna be a dreamer I'm gonna be like a someone who succeeds so definitely have a few good quotes in your little library to remind you why you're doing what you're doing I hope that you guys found this video useful if you did then please give it a thumbs up and leave me a comment down below and if you want to see more videos like this then don't forget to subscribe to my channel it really does mean so much to me if you do so thank you so much in advance if you want to check out my socials they're always linked down in the description my instagram is persian bunny and my snap is stephie sam I love you guys so much and I'll see you next time bye