 Today's video is brought to you by Picmonic. We all think we know the information cold before a test or quiz, only to get a grade that we're disappointed with. But after two years of helping students study better here, the most common mistakes that I see students make. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lakshman here. The MD journey, we make content to help people like you succeed on the medical journey. Now really quickly before we get to the rest of the content, this is a new background because we finally have our new place in here in Austin, Texas, where I'll be starting my job as a first year physician. But now we also have our first official office for the MD journey. Never had one before. I'm definitely excited to decorate this place and just make it the home for the MD journey as we create more content for you guys. And so definitely stay tuned. And if you're not, consider subscribing down below. And as I go over the tips from today's episode, if you want more where that came from, make sure you check out the free document down below to get all your free tips, including studying, productivity, and so much more. But with that, let's get into the most common study mistakes that I see students make. Number one is being too dependent on lecture for retention. Now, one of my favorite questions to ask the students that I coach on how to study better, particularly in medical school, is about lecture and particularly when they go to lecture and then you leave, what percentage of lecture do they think they remember? Most of us hope that we retain 50, 60, 70%. But unfortunately for the students that I'm coaching, majority of them have given answer between 20 and 30%. Quite frankly, that's probably the number I would have given myself. And so that means that if you have three to five hours of lecture a day, you're wasting a lot of time if you think about lecture in the typical standpoint. Most students, including myself when I was in medical school, think of lecture as essentially a formal aspect. We hope that we can go to lecture and avoid missing something very important that may show up on the test. And we hope that we can absorb as much as possible going into test day or quiz day from that one lecture. But as we know, unless you have an amazing teacher that's your lecture or just material that's just relatively easy to follow, even if it's not 20 to 30%, 40 to 50% retention is not that great. That means half of the time you spend in lecture is just gone. And so that brings us to the solution, because if you're saying that, okay, a lot of shift, the lecture is not going to help me with my retention, then what should I use it for, how should I approach it? And the biggest shift and mindset that I have my students work on is to think of lecture as if you were the test maker. A professor who is presenting as well as showing you their slides and their syllabus material is essentially presenting the information of some of which will show up ideally on the quiz or the test. And if you know that and you keep that in mind, now you can look at your notes and how you obtain information much more differently. Usually a student will try to annotate and highlight as much as they can, but instead in this approach, I'll have students focus on, okay, what questions could come from that slide or that syllabus material that they're presenting and come up with different techniques and approaches that they'll be using. If you guys are interested in learning more about those study methods, I'll link down below an episode on how I got a 3.9 GPA at medical school, where I go over my favorite study strategies for lecture, during lecture, after lecture, as well as how to prep for the quizzes and tests. If you guys are interested, I'll be linked down below. But the biggest takeaway, think like the test maker and not the test taker. The next big mistake is that students spend too little time on predictable review. Whenever I'm coaching students one-on-one, one of the questions I'll ask them is that, do you know when you'll do the first repetition of your material? What about the second and the third? Do you know when you'll be starting your review for your test and your quizzes? And most of the times I'll find that students will say, yes, maybe to the first one. And then everything after that is a big fail. Mainly because school is so overwhelming, you have a lot of information to absorb. It's hard to schedule the rest of the review that you know you should be doing when you're still trying to figure out how the hell to learn the high yield material from lecture. But for the same reason that we know the lecture tends to not be the reason that you get a high grade, we also know that a good amount of repetition and predictable repetition is going to lead you to that grade that you ultimately want. So the main thing to do is to focus on having a system where you can say, this is going to be the study technique that I'm going to come home doing, and I'm going to do it on this kind of interval. I'm going to do it every four days, or I'm going to do it on the day of and maybe some on the weekend. Again, in that episode of how I got a 3.9 GPA, I go over some of the approaches as well as strategies that I use. So if you guys are interested, I would link down below. But as a pro tip, if you're somebody who really enjoys using a digital calendar, like iCal or Google Calendar, think of every single lecture and the review of that lecture for the first and the second time at least as fluid kind of tasks that can move from day to day and then practice plugging them in. Maybe you'll say lecture one from Monday, I'm going to review on Tuesday night or Monday night. Lecture one from Wednesday, I'm going to review Wednesday night. Lecture one from Monday, I'm going to also review for the second time on Saturday afternoon and move those around based on how long you think each lecture will take. And you'll be able to essentially see is your study method simple enough where you can essentially move things around if you're overly busy or tend to procrastinate. I found that this small step has helped a lot of our coaching students because now they no longer can procrastinate and just look at the weekend as an opportunity to catch up because the weekend is now an opportunity to do their second repetition. That means the weekday has to be done to get that predictable review. So make sure you always ask yourself when are you going to review the information for the first, the second, and even the third time going into a quiz or a test. Now before we get back into today's episode, let's take a quick second to talk about today's sponsor which is Picmonic. Now if you're unfamiliar with Picmonic and you're on your medical journey, they have hundreds and hundreds of videos for literally any class or material that you may need. And what makes Picmonic so unique is that in addition to having so many videos on literally any topic you need, so for example here we're in microbiology, you can click on any videos so here's staff warriors. And the videos themselves are very short so this video is about one minute 54 seconds but essentially will break down the most high-yield components that you have to know in the setting about staff warriors in this very nice story format using images. So here's a very nice Oreo cookie that essentially will link an image to your brain on an important concept about that. In the future videos you may find that the same memorable images included in another related video so then you can link together concepts. For example, here this venom jar with green represents food poisoning so any bacteria that may cause food poisoning may have this image in their overall picture and video so you can say okay I know all the different bacterias that have food poisoning. And then whenever you feel comfortable with a relatively short story, you can easily go into the review and quiz phase and actually quiz yourself on the various different high-yield components. Now in addition to having a very unique and easy way to remember information for your quizzes and tests, you can also add all of the videos you're watching into a relative playlist. So if you're studying for a microbiology class, you can go ahead and essentially click all the videos you add and add it to this playlist. And then whenever it's time, you can come back to your individual playlist and either watch those individual videos again or ask for specific quiz questions related to the videos that you've now said that you've mastered or at least learned the first time. And that's just scratching the surface in terms of features that Picmonic has to help you on your medical journey. Other cool things include having a weakness guide so you can see which topics you're the weakest in as well as their study scheduler so you can actually say these are the topics I need to know and here's my test day and then it will essentially will give you a study schedule based off of that. So if you're looking for an all-in-one resource to your on your medical journey and you haven't quite found it, definitely recommend checking out Picmonic. If you're interested, they'll be linked down below and our friends at Picmonic have also been nice enough to include an extra 20% discount if you use the code the MD journey at checkout. And so if you're interested in learning more about Picmonic, that link will be down below. And as always, thanks to Picmonic for being today's sponsor. Mistake number three is that students learn facts but they fail to make the connections. We often run into a situation where you feel like you know the slides cold or you know your flashcards cold or your notes cold and then you go into the quiz and test and you just lay a big goose egg. And the main problem is that you have professors who give you hard questions, but really it's because they're trying to get you to connect ideas either within their own lectures or between topics throughout the entire course and you fail to do that and you're studying. And so while most students will try to come up with some study strategy of how to memorize their lectures, their outlines, their flashcards, they fail to come up with a study strategy that also compliments nicely where they can practice those big connections. And again, if you guys are interested in some of my favorite study strategies to do this, feel free to check out that 39 GPA video, two of the ones I recommend in that episode include the brain dump as well as effective use of practice questions. But I found that the biggest shift for me when I was going from C's to B's to B's to A's consistently was having a study strategy where I can memorize the facts but also test myself on how well I understood all those facts together. I felt like I was just memorizing information that had no idea what it really meant that I knew I still wasn't ready for the exam. So I started adding other study strategies that really complimented that aspect of seeing the forest and the trees before a quiz or a test. Mistake number four is failing to make the study improvements. Now obviously, when we work with students one-on-one, usually a student will come to us because they're struggling and knocking the grades we want. It's very rare that a student is getting the grades they're happy with and still coming to us hoping for more efficiency better grades last time. Most students will try to improve or come up with a new strategy when things are not going in their favor. Me definitely being guilty of this back in medical school. But the biggest thing that I found that's helped me get the same grades with less time is even when I was getting consistent A's or high B's on my medical school exams, start asking the questions of, okay, what would I do differently even given that good result? Most of the time after a quiz or test, before I got my grades, before I knew if I had a good outcome or a bad outcome, I usually asked these following questions. So question one, was the test like the slides or the syllabus that I studied from? Question two, if that information did come from the study material that I was provided, did I actually include it in the study method of my choice? Question three, if I did include it in my study method, did I get enough repetitions of it? And finally, question number four, did I prepare well enough to connect ideas needed to answer the questions for this quiz or test? With each layer of these questions, again, regardless if the test performance was good or bad, I can already start to see, okay, maybe your note-taking wasn't amazing because there's information that was clearly on the slides that didn't show up in my ultimate study strategy. Or if it did show up in my study strategy, maybe I didn't do enough predictable repetition and I could look back my calendar and say, yep, you slacked off, you only got one repetition of that lecture. Or three, maybe this is one of those situations where I did get enough repetitions, but I didn't practice that complimentary study strategy to see the forest and trees and connect those big ideas. Going down this line, I was able to ask myself, what would I do differently for each of these questions? Because usually the answer is never perfect. I never took perfect notes. I never did perfect repetition and I never perfectly connected all the ideas. So there's always room for improvement. And if you can find that regardless, again, if the test is good or bad, you can make those small improvements and then avoid making these big overhauls in your study strategy, you're always just making small gains. Next, and probably the most common mistake is the overcomplicated study system. Yes, everyone studies differently, but that doesn't mean you have to keep studying differently just because you don't see the end results. Just like we talked about before, you're likely very close. It's almost like that quintessential meme or picture of the person is essentially drilling to get to the diamond for two individuals are. And one stops just a few steps before they actually get to Peter. The other person continues to go. Again, if you use the questions that we talked about earlier in today's episode, you can make those 1% improvements. And sometimes you may realize, okay, my note-taking study strategy sucks. I need to completely overhaul it to be able to answer yes to that question the next time I take the quiz or test. But if that's the case, then you don't actually have to come up with this overcomplicated system. You just need to collect those notes correctly and repeat them as many times as possible and possibly add an extra study strategy where you can connect all the dots going into a lecture. And after coaching students on how to study better for the past two years, I think one of the biggest lessons that I've learned is that your study system actually doesn't have to be perfect. You just have to have a good way to collect information and lecture, even if it's not super comfortable. You do have to have predictable repetition, even if it's not the easiest or thing that you want to do every single day. But once you start doing it and getting results, it's very easy to do hard tasks that you know will get you to the output that you ultimately want. So don't always judge your study strategy by simply, oh, this feels hard or this feels difficult. Does it help you with your repetition? Does it help you with how easy it is to take notes and then take those home and start reviewing them? If the answer is yes and yes, keep doing it, keep modifying it as needed, but don't just jump ship and try something different just because you see somebody on YouTube recommending it. Now, if you're watching or listening to this episode, that means that you're not only just interested on what mistakes to avoid, but also what type of things to do to get the grades you ultimately want. If so, make sure you click that link down below to get that free guide on all the tips that I found to be helpful for students just like you. Including how to study better, how to be more productive, how to be more motivated and stress-free and everything else that I found to make the journey a little bit easier each step of the way. And if you found this episode helpful, then make sure you check out that episode on how I got a 3.9 GPA in medical school using all my favorite study methods, breaking down one by one, as well as this episode right here, which is our most popular here on YouTube and on the podcast, which is how to use Anki to get the best grades you've ever gotten using a step-by-step method. Both of these are very easy to follow, so hopefully you guys enjoy. But as always, my friends, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully that was a little help to you guys and yours, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.