 I have saved pretty much every single note I've taken over the last nine years of university. I mean seriously, I have files and files of handwritten notes and then loads of files of computer written notes on my iPad and on my laptop. Over the last nine years or so, I feel like I've tried out a whole bunch of different studying techniques and I've finally been able to find the one that works best for me. What is up guys, KarmaMedic here and welcome back to another dose. In this video, I'm going to be reviewing nine years worth of notes all the way from back in high school and to my undergraduate degree and now in medical school. A lot has happened during that time so let's take a trip down memory lane to see how much has changed. So let's take this all the way back to 16-year-old Nasser about to start high school. Now for me, high school marked the beginning of the IB exams and for any of you who've taken the IB before or are currently studying it right now, you'll know that it is content heavy. During this time, I stuck to the note-taking technique that I think most students do at that age which is handwriting lots and lots of notes. Unfortunately, I don't have the actual workbooks that I wrote during my time in high school. I actually ended up burning all of them in a big dumpster fire right after I graduated but we're going to skip the high school and move on to first year of university because it was pretty much the same note-taking technique. So let's go all the way back to my very first semester in my very first year at the University of Toronto. So I actually haven't looked in this folder since I wrote them almost 10 years ago now which is quite a nostalgic trip for me to go through. Oh my gosh, Physiology 300, Immunology 340, HMB I think was Human Medical Bioscience or something I've completely forgotten. As you can see, my study timetables have not changed one bit. But anyways, let's go back to the very beginning here. So during this time, my general strategy was to take notes on individual pieces of paper and then staple them together into these little workbooks. And that way I would know that for one course, HMB 265, all the notes I'd ever need for the exam would be in this one little workbook. This was too much information to learn and memorize and study for the exam. So what I had to do was take these notes and condense them down into something much, much smaller. So when I would condense down my notes, I would make something called an important things document. So what this would do is take something like a 20 page workbook, like one of these over here, which is actually quite a lot of pages, tons and tons and tons of notes, and I would condense it down into literally just a couple of pages. So now instead of a single lecture, taking up one or two full individual pages, a single lecture now only takes up this much space or this much space or this much space. And this important things document would literally be like my North Star, my guiding light for what I needed to know for the upcoming exam. It was only filled with the most important of information, no fluff, nothing extra, just what I knew was coming up on the exam. And that way, right before the exam, all I had to do was read this little important things document over and over again until I understood the material or it was fully memorized and ingrained in my brain. Now I'm pretty sure this is how most of us started our studying journeys, you know, before we learned about active recall and spaced repetition and all of these things. And that's probably why I stuck to this note taking method for so long, up until I moved into semester two of my first year at the University of Toronto. So in my second semester in the first year of the University of Toronto, I got a Surface Pro 2 tablet. Now this tablet was absolutely amazing and it completely changed how I thought about taking notes at university. I could be in the lecture hall looking at all the slides on the screen, but then if I ever needed to write something down or draw a diagram or draw an equation, I could do that using the pencil on the tablet surface. Because before that you either had a computer with the slides, but no pen and paper, or you had pen and paper, but no computer with the slides. Now I don't have the actual Surface Pro 2 to show you. Unfortunately, it died many, many years ago. It actually didn't last that long. I think about three or four years. But what I do have is all the notes that I ever took on it because I was using Microsoft one note. So this over here is the first semester where I was taking the handwritten notes that I just showed you, that I just showed you guys before. And then when I went to the second semester, I started taking notes on this tablet. Now, as you can see, the most amazing part of this is that I was actually able to save handwritten notes in a digital way. So instead of having to carry around pieces of paper in a folder like this, it all lived inside this tiny little tablet that I could access from anywhere in the world, even now pretty much 10 years later on my computer. And what I loved about it so much is that I could actually draw diagrams. Here in physics class, you know, we always had to do these free body diagrams. There were all kinds of equations going on, maths obviously as well, so much of that. And then also if I wanted to as well, I could have all the lecture slides here on the computer. So I could put the lecture slides on here and then I could annotate them using that pen and pencil or just write notes in a separate document. So what I started doing here is that I would still take my handwritten notes based off of the lecture and the information that came in the lecture, but I unlocked all these new capabilities. So now I could take screenshots of lecture slides and I could include them in my notes instead of having to draw out these diagrams by hand literally copying them whenever I needed to. So before when I was handwriting notes, I would need to re-copy and rewrite most of the information on the slide itself and then add on my own handwritten notes, whereas now I could just annotate the lecture slides directly. Now my studying technique hadn't changed very much. It's just the medium in which I was studying had changed. So now instead of writing everything on pen and paper with those little booklets, I could do that with these digital notes over here and I could take them anywhere that I wanted. I could pull them up anytime without having to search through the papers. It was great. But the problem with this studying method is that I was still just passively taking notes. I was transcribing lecture slides onto a piece of paper or onto my tablet and just reading that information over and over and over again. There wasn't really much active studying and active consolidation of this information. And the bad thing about that is that it obviously took a ton of time. Like it takes very, very long time and it's really inefficient for learning. Look at the title of this. Only writing down important shit not appearing in the lecture. So these were kind of the efforts that I was making to stop spending so much time writing notes. I was really trying to force myself and tell myself Nasser just write down what is important because this was all taking so much time. So as I started progressing through my undergraduate degree here we move into second year and here we move into third year. I started realizing that I just don't have enough time to do this whole handwriting business. And so instead what I adapted to doing was sitting in the lecture and typing down everything that the professor said. Now the reason for this is because if I was to hand write whilst the professor was talking there was no chance in hell I was going to be able to take all that information down fast enough. And back at the University of Toronto we didn't have any recorded lectures. So if you missed the lecture and you weren't there there was no way to get that information back and you were just screwed for the final exam. So making sure I got that information was really important. So as you guys can see here I'd have the lecture slides on the left and then just type down pretty much everything that was being said as aggressively as I could as fast as I could to make sure I got all the information. Now the good thing about that was that I got all the information so when it came time to study I had this comprehensive complete set of notes that I could work with. But the bad thing about that is that during lectures when sitting down and typing this information as fast as you can it's a very very passive process. I could literally just be sleeping like this typing away. I could be having a conversation with my friend to the right of me. I could be watching someone streaming a football game on a computer in front of them whilst still typing down all that information. Which definitely means that I was not understanding it well. By the way this is one of the hardest courses I've ever taken in my life Immunology 340. Oh my goodness this was such a tragic tragic difficult course. Anyways I'll make a video complaining about this another time. So this is kind of the note taking style that I had in my final years of university. It was mostly just typing down everything as fast as I could as much as I could so that when it came time to study I had this comprehensive set of notes that I could work with. Now during my final year at the University of Toronto I was doing all of my exams that I needed to pass to graduate and get a good grade that would allow me to go to medical school and on top of that I had to study for this huge huge medical school entrance exam called the MCAT. Now at this time I could take absolutely no risks. I needed to get into medical school. I wanted to get into medical school. It was everything I wanted since I was a kid and I didn't want to take any chances. I had always known that handwriting notes just worked well for me and helped me learn and memorize the content in the best possible way for me but it took so so so much time which is why I adapted my methods over the years etc but because there was so much at stake in this final year and for this exam I said you know what I'm going back to handwritten notes and so that is exactly what I did. I studied for the MCAT by continuing to take notes in class in this handwritten way because it was a good way of storing all of the notes and then when it came to actual hardcore revision for this MCAT exam I ended up going back to my basics. Going back to handwritten notes because that's what worked best. That's what I felt safest with and that's what I felt the most comfortable with and I hoped would be able to let me score well on these exams to be able to get into medical school. So yeah this was a pretty intense summer and then final year in university doing the best that I possibly could to get accepted into medical school and these are actually the notes that I wrote for the entry exam to get into medical school here in the United Kingdom and these are the same exact notes that I have for sale on my Etsy store. I just digitized them, updated them and made sure they were even better than when I hand wrote them but if you're ever wondering this is what they started like you guys can you can purchase these notes on my Etsy store I'll leave a link in the description down below if you're interested but anyways that's it for my final year and for the MCAT now let's move on to medical school. So moving on to year one of medical school now I felt like my previous note-taking methods had worked for me after all they allowed me to get accepted into medical school and I was happy with my grades at the University of Toronto and so I kind of kept doing the same thing but with a bit of a change so my Surface Pro 2 was dying on me at this point it was becoming very slow I couldn't write on it anymore and I couldn't afford to buy a new one or anything like that so what I ended up doing was I just used it as a sort of organizational tool for my lecture slides so we had the big module over here then lecture one lecture two lecture three lecture four lecture five etc and that way I could have those lecture notes anytime I wanted easily organized quick to find etc on one half of the screen then I would take my typed notes on the other half of the screen so since I had discovered that typing notes was way faster and way more efficient than handwriting notes and I was saving plenty of time which allowed me to go out and have fun and do all these extracurricular activities outside of medical school like start this YouTube channel I started typing notes a lot more so what I would do is I would have these lecture slides on one half of the screen then I would open a word document on the other half of the screen and I would literally write the module name over here the lecture headings in pink and then the individual slide headings in light blue those should be light blue yeah they should be like this I don't know why they're not but anyway let's move past that now even this typing out all this information would take quite a lot of time and effort so what I would do is use an optical character recognition software so what's something like text sniper allows you to do is it allows you to take a screenshot of an image that has text on it you take the screenshot and it copies that text to the clipboard so if I show you guys here I copy paste now I have all of the text literally copied over there and if I was to do that over here it even copies the number one number two number three everything so I could very quickly transfer information from these slides to these notes now obviously in the process of doing that I learned and remembered and memorized absolutely nothing but that wasn't the point all I needed to do was make these notes so that I would later print them out and then go through them and review them and revise them this was just the note making process it wasn't the learning and the revising and the reviewing process that was for later just to give you a sense of this document it's absolutely huge and this is like one of I think five documents for that year how many pages it's 50 000 words 51 000 words 68 pages um so yeah absolutely massive but it had everything every single piece of information that I could possibly need I had there and then you know as I say I would literally take it here it is right over here and I would print it out and there we go I would have everything that I needed right over here there's my printed out notes and then I could annotate on top of them with different colors I could write different pieces of information on top of them and this was this was great this was amazing for me I really enjoyed this period of my note taking and my studying because these notes were just so neat and they were fully comprehensive I had everything in one place I mean look at this this feels like a work of art to me you know I've screenshotted all the lecture slides I have all the information I'm able to write on top of it with the equations I mean I thought this was absolutely amazing now the only problem with this like I said is that I would spend most of my time making these notes and less time reviewing and reading and learning and understanding so this was great for my aesthetics of my notes but not very great for actually learning and consolidating all of this material so then about halfway through my second year of medical school in 2018 I knew that I needed to make the very difficult decision the very difficult change of going back to handwritten notes now since I had already been in the digital age taking digital notes well typing notes pretty digital um and not really using paper except for when it came to exams to study I didn't want to go back to handwriting notes like this you know I was I'm over this I had done this for so long I think it was five or six years at that point and I was getting tired of taking these big folders with me every time I'd go abroad for Christmas and Easter and holidays and things like that taking these was not fun at all and so I made probably the best decision of my life and I got an iPad now this iPad right here honestly might be the single best purchase I've ever made in my life it completely revolutionized how I study how I learn how I take notes how well I did in my academics in university this single tiny thin paper like thing has completely changed my life one of the best things that happened when I switched to this iPad in comparison to the other tablet that I had was that it was extremely fast and smooth yeah that was great but I could also search through my notes through my handwritten notes and find anything that I wanted on top of that the battery life was great it would last throughout the entire day unlike the other one that would last about two hours before I had to charge it I had all these different colors and tools and shapes and stuff that just made my note taking experience so much better now my note taking technique here was fairly similar to what I was doing in my earlier years at the University of Toronto I was handwriting these notes now they were much neater and much better organized but then when it came exam time I would still condense them down into this which is just a much smaller amount of notes in comparison to the full amount of notes up there then I would read this smaller amount of notes over and over again until I felt like I completely understood it or I had memorized it well enough to go into the exam so yeah for my second year and my third year the iPad was my primary note taking device I've made tons of videos about the iPad and how I've used it how I make notes on it etc I'll leave linked somewhere up over here if you want to check them out but for now I think let's move on to the summer of my third year of medical school when I started studying for the USMLE step one in the summer of my third year at medical school I decided to write the USMLE step one exam now honestly this wasn't even an exam this was just an absolute monster this thing completely burned me out I spent about four to five months sitting at this desk for 10 hours a day studying for this exam and I've made a bunch of videos all about that exam and all about my time studying for it you can check them out on the channel if you're interested I think it's um some pretty interesting videos they're very brutal brutal studying period but basically the vast majority of what I was doing was taking handwritten notes in this book over here and this book was meant to act as sort of the central hub that had all of the information I would possibly need for this exam so if I ever needed to find a specific piece of information or if I ever needed to review something this book was going to have it now what ended up happening was that you'd have pages like this with just a ridiculous amount of notes on them and just so much so much so much dense information impossible to remember impossible to memorize this was really a very very difficult exam a very difficult period of studying for me I also did this for this book here Pathoma which was kind of like a condensed important notes version of a lot of the information from the first eight books so after I'd written down all the information I would possibly need in both of these books I took out my iPad and I then condensed that information into shortened important notes so here under the USMLE tab if we go down to USMLE step one notes and let's say cardiology for example I took all the information I learned about cardiology in these two books and then I condensed them down into as little as little as little as I possibly could but unfortunately because this exam is so huge and ridiculous even that the condensed condensed information turned out to be a lot a lot a lot I mean look at how many pages are here 13 pages of really what I consider to be only the most important and need to know information for this exam for the cardiology section and I have this again for every single subject we've got neurology over here again a massive document of just tons and tons and tons of notes I've got reproduction gastrointestinal system dermatology micro I mean literally everything you can imagine and then this document high yield facts so every time I came across a fact that I thought was really high yield and really important that I absolutely could not afford to not know or forget I would add it to this document and what I ended up with was this 64 page document of just endless endless endless notes and this is one of three of them we had this very important to know before the exam look at this document look at all this writing absolutely crazy I told you this was not an exam this was an absolute monster eight to ten hours a day for almost five months that's what this work represents right over here and then also I was using other resources that were more video based like sketchy medical and sketchy micro on farm so here we have all the bacteria you know there's the video that accompanies all these notes and then I would take my notes over here and I have this for every single bacteria and virus that we needed to know it was a great time now during this studying period as I mentioned before it completely burned me out and by the end of it I just started hating notes like I had this deep hatred for sitting down at a desk and writing things with my hand I felt like I had spent my entire existence for the last like half a year doing just that and I was done no more notes for me after writing this exam in the summer and then having a short two week break and starting my fourth year of medical school I had exactly this much motivation for my medical school and so this was a turning point for me I knew that I needed to do something different I knew that something had to change I needed a more efficient way of doing my notes of learning and understanding this material whilst also still attending medical school and being on the wards being in the hospital being motivated to learn handwriting notes and condensing them whether that was on my iPad or in paper forms like this was just not going to work anymore enter the almighty god of note-taking apps notion so by this time my fourth year of medical school was in full swing and I was spending tons of time in the hospital on the wards actually on clinical placement talking to and examining and dealing with real-life human patients and so since most of my time was spent there I had no time at all to be sitting down and handwriting notes after listening to the lectures and the tutorials so two months into my fourth year of medical school I completely stopped taking notes I realized that I wasn't paying attention in the lectures I wasn't writing down the information in a useful active way and it was basically just being a waste of my time and this is when I changed my studying methods and techniques to a much more active one I started using past paper questions and notion to build out my study notes and to practice and to learn and to revise for my exams so this is my medical school notion page we've got a whole bunch of pages here an organization of my different rotations in medical school but what I want to point your attention to is this uh conditions list which I've made over the last couple of years so now instead of handwriting notes and condensing those notes and then reviewing and reading those notes the only thing I was doing was doing past paper questions so past paper questions provided by my university or by online past paper question banks like quest med which I have an affiliate link for if you guys want to check it out I'll leave a link in the description down below I would do questions from those question banks and then use the information that I learned in the question to make my notes now this way very importantly I wasn't working from the notes towards the exam I was working from the exam towards the notes now the benefit of this is that you focus on exactly what you're going to be tested on if you start with the entirety of the notes and then try and pick out the information that you might get tested on in the future that's going to be very difficult but if you start with the actual questions and then work backwards to expand your knowledge on that topic then you're actually focusing on what you need to know so each one of the conditions in this conditions page is organized very neatly by a body system and then further organized by for example here cardiac and vascular and each one of these notes has the presenting complaint for the patient in blue the investigations in yellow and then the management in green and then on top of that I just have a bunch of other extra information that is helpful to know useful to know and that I can reference at any point that I want now the great thing about this is that for pretty much every condition in medicine at least the ones that I need to know for my final exams I have this highly organized system of finding information very very quickly and so anytime anywhere that I want whether I'm on the train whether I'm on a flight whether I'm in the hospital in the woods I can pull out my phone go on to notion and pull up these exact notes very very quickly on top of that I can search for pretty much anything that I want so let's search for syringo myelia syringo myelia so now I can very quickly very easily search for literally anything that I want I mean search for hepatic see where the word hepatic comes up in all of my notes hepatic encephalopathy jaundice chronic liver failure ischemic hepatitis butcharis syndrome having these notes like this and easily searchable means I will actually use them and review them much more often than I would if they were in big blocks of paper like this now taking notes in this way using notion isn't only useful for the progress tests or the written exams like single best answer or multiple choice questions I also use notion to organize my studying for the practical exams the oskies so this over here is a kanban board which has all of the different stations or things that we might be asked to do in a practical exam in an oski so we have for example a respiratory exam an upper limb neurological exam fundoscopy acuity cranial nerves whatever we've got a bunch of communication stations so exploring weight loss psa prostate specific antigen results smoking cessation you name it so I have them all here organized into columns by communication exams procedures histories prescribing done once as in I've already done these ones and I feel confident enough in them to move them to this column and then almost definitely coming up and whatever so the good thing about this board is you can move things between different sections so once I'm done with them here I can move them to the done once I can also move them to the bottom if I feel like they're not as useful or they're less likely to come up etc having my notes like this digitally gives me tons of flexibility for moving forward now genuinely I don't know how I would have survived the last two years of medical school if I hadn't switched to this note taking method to this studying method it's meant that I'm so much more efficient with my time I actually focus on what I need to know and what is going to come up and show up in my exams and there's just so much information there's tons of knowledge and things that I need to know and write down that having them organized like this is just completely life changing for me you know having all the information in its place you know even here with screenshots of questions and things like that accessible anywhere anytime is so much better than just the pile of folders that I had before now the scary parts of being note free and using past paper questions for like 90% of my studying was the anxiety that I felt when you know taking this leap for the first time and writing my first exam without having written a single hand written note I wasn't using my tried and tested method anymore the one that I had pretty much been using for seven years in a row and that had been working for me so well for all of that time and I just didn't know how I was going to turn out then after I scored well in the exam that kind of confirmed to me that this was a valuable method of studying and that I could get the same scores by studying in only half the time if I just studied smarter by looking at past paper questions and focusing on the high yield content not only that but I was way more interested in the content and I was having so much more fun studying than I was when I was just handwriting my notes doing practice questions when you're actively trying to figure out a diagnosis is infinitely more fun than just looking at the lecture slide writing down the notes and then reviewing those notes over and over again I actually ended up scoring very well in my end of year exams and I scored highly in my oskies as well I'll leave links to the videos that I made about that up over here for me this change to a more noteless system was driven by necessity as opposed to voluntarily because I just had such little time left to write notes and I was so burned out from writing notes that I just kind of had to do it but looking back I wish I had done it sooner if you take anything from this video I hope that it's the confidence to try something new when it comes to your studying technique we often stick with what we know or what we've done before instead of what the evidence suggests or what may be more beneficial I hope you were able to learn something from this video of me reviewing my notes over the last nine years of university from my mistakes and the things that I think went well I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions down in the comments and it's pretty much it for me I'll catch you guys in the next one subscribe to my patreon peace so let's go all disaster