 Essentially what I told this person and what I've told every medical student is that the most important thing you can do for yourself. So today I'm going to answer your question. But first, I've got to get comfy, so welcome back to the channel. In today's episode, you're going to be doing a Q&A video inspired by your questions, obviously, as we're approaching 18 to 20,000 subscribers here on YouTube. I went ahead and dropped a story on Instagram saying, what questions do you guys want me to cover in my next video? So if you're not following me on Instagram, go ahead and do so, and I'll link that down below in the description. But we're going to go do all of the Instagram story responses, as well as some of the comments that I haven't got back to on YouTube. And again, I'm sorry, I try my best to respond to these, but sometimes you guys aren't overloaded, but let's get into it. Alright, so question number one is coming from rmist05__03. Basically, I had dropped a quote on Instagram that says, a study tip that I really enjoy using is to use time limits on everything that you guys can do. And a lot of the questions that I get, including this one says, sometimes I underestimate time required for a particular topic, which motivates me to use these time limits. How do you recommend proceeding? It is okay if your time limit that you give yourself, let's say, I want to spend an hour on the syllabus doesn't meet a goal. And not being discouraged by it. Instead of using it as a motivation to ask yourself, like, how would I, one, change my time limit? Maybe you need to make it an hour and a half. That's fine. Or two, say, like, what goes into me reading a syllabus that I have to adjust to kind of meet that time limit? So, use your failure of reaching a time limit as kind of a motivation of saying, how can I make the system better? Like, if you picked a time and it didn't work out, why? Is it because your time was too kind of optimistic? Or is it how you're spending your time doing that actual strategy not efficient enough? And that really gets me going about time limits is that you really start to feed this machine. But don't use it to really discourage yourself. So when making this video, I knew I had to add some questions from my good friend Andrew. Andrew is actually funny, and believe it or not, is my first subscriber on YouTube. He's a good friend from medical school, and a colleague, and I love him. So I definitely have to answer some of his questions. Andrew, if you're watching, hopefully, these answer them. Some of them are goofy, so how are you so good looking? I'm not actually balding, too, if that makes a difference. What's your skincare routine? My wife would say, not enough, because she loves dermatology. I just used face wash in the morning. How do you get so tall? I don't know. The fun fact, my parents are both not average to short. My mom is 5 feet, my dad's 5 foot 7, and I don't know if it was moving from India to America and drinking at a different level of water, or drinking a lot of milk when I was young. But I'm 6 feet, 6 feet 1. I'm a smoking. Am I going to run for chief resident? So for people that don't know, a chief resident is kind of your fourth year of residency after a third year, and you're basically kind of helping lead the program. I'm kind of run for chief, so it's not something you run for, and to be quite honest, it's not something that necessarily aligns with my goals of things that I want to do. You know, I enjoy kind of working on these side projects, so people that are selected to be chiefs are amazing people, and they, rightfully, should be in their positions. I don't know if I would even have what it takes to be a good chief, but that's just me. It doesn't really align with my goals. And the lastly is, do I want to subspecialize? I get a question a lot. It's like, what do I want to go into? Personally, I've thought about going into cardiology a lot, because I was a feeler that was really interested in coming out of medical school. And I think as I've gone throughout medical school and gone through residency, I've realized that I enjoy medicine all of it. I definitely enjoy cards a little bit more than the rest of them, but I would like to explore just doing general medicine for a bit, and then deciding or not whether I want to do fellowship. So that is my plan for the next year. So it also gives me more time to work on side projects like BAMD journey and other businesses that I run. So as the making of this video, I am not planning on subspecializing in the next year, but we'll see if that changes. So the next question I have is how to revise for your exam. So for exams, I definitely recommend that one, you work backwards. So whenever your test day is, if it's next Friday, you ask yourself how many lectures you have for that exam, and then when you want to start reviewing for those tests. Typically, my personal goal was to get through every lecture twice before an exam. So if there was 10 lectures and I had 10 days, that means I didn't only do one lecture a day, I did two lectures. And usually it meant I loaded more of them on the weekends instead of the weekdays, but you guys get the point. And typically I would give myself one day. So if the test was on Friday, I'd give myself one Thursday to not necessarily catch up, but just do any bit of weakness. And that's the second part of revising for an exam. Is that it really important that you don't just like go through the motion of reading your syllabus and doing questions and like flashcards, but instead you have like a running list of things that you suck at. As you do your first pass of the material, you realize I'm weak at this and weak at this. As you do your next kind of pass through the weekend and you're reviewing, you realize, oh, I remember learning this, but it's still like not a strength of mine. And during these times, I like to use it to saying, okay, let's create a list of things that would trip me up on the exam with the exam list today. And as I'm going through my exam prep, I want to make sure that list is getting smaller. I'm spending a dedicated amount of time in the morning, a dedicated amount of time in the evening, doing things like watching videos, going back to the slides, writing those things by memorizing on a piece of paper to make sure that they're no longer weak points. And I feel like, one, if I have a nice system where I'm working backwards and kind of create a nice review system, and then also two, if I have a system to make sure that my biggest weaknesses are slowly not becoming weaknesses, then I tend to do better an exam and also go in with more confidence. All right, next question from the Instagram stories is tips for first year. So I actually made a video about this recently. So hopefully it's out before the making of this one. Essentially what I told this person and what I tell every medical student is that the most important thing you can do for yourself during your first year is really learn the most effective way that you study. There are a lot of different strategies. You may be using multiple of them. They may all kind of work a little bit. Find the thing that if the test was tomorrow, what you would do. And really ask yourself how you can focus your time to be spent on that the most. So ask yourself how can you make your most impactful task be the first thing you do, the middle thing you do, and ideally the only thing you do, and continue to refine your system. Because the more you do that, the more efficient your studying becomes, and then you start to have more free time. So that's probably number one. Number two, and I mentioned this in my other first year kind of tips video, is to make sure you always have at least one hour a day dedicated to you that's non-negotiable for medical school. So if you are really into fitness, or if you want to make sure you're working out every day, one hour per the gym. If you have a family, if you have people that you really care about, having an hour a day that you're spending with them. It can be kind of intermixed. On Monday, you force yourself to do some exercise. On Tuesday, you have an evening date with your significant other, whatever it may be. But during that time, you shouldn't feel guilty that you're forced to like focus on yourself, because that's really where the benefit comes long term. You keep the parts of you that matter the most, part of your life, even when you're working hard at medical school, that's truly the most important thing. So learn how to study the best. Really make that the only thing you do, and it's not always going to be like 100% efficiency, but you get better at it as you start to evaluate. And if you guys want to learn more about how I do that, the Rapid Study Accelerated Program, it's up my step-by-step exactly how I teach students to do it, so that'll be linked down below. And then number two, make sure you have at least one hour a day for your mind priorities non-negotiable. So the next question is, how do you manage your time for extracurriculars while in medical school? So the big thing in medical school is that extracurriculars aren't like required. And that's important to understand, is that you think that you need to do things for residency in the same way you did things for applying for medical school, but really you should only do things in medical school because they're interesting. So if you do community service, don't just do that because you want that to be on your ultimate application. Most people don't care if you did community service or not. It definitely reflects that you are an altruistic person, but don't do it if you're not, if that makes sense. But do those extracurriculars really matter, but you don't need to do clubs, you don't need to be the president of so-and-so. Really force yourself to ask, like, what do I want to do in the future? Is that force your extra time to shadow and get exposed to different specialties that you may be interested in? Once you have a few that you may be considering, then dive into the research or working on clinical projects or shadowing even more in those fields and then you can find community service projects and et cetera that may align to it. What you're essentially doing is you're using your interests to explore other activities that then start to build an application in a story when you apply to residency and say, I want to do this and here is my story of how I got here. It's much more telling, more convincing, versus trying to plug the whole CV with different things that you did and most of them don't interconnect. So honestly, you can go through medical school without doing extracurriculars. There's plenty of people who are parents, who are married, and simply they come to school, they study, they go to class, they take the test, they go back, and they spend time with their family. They use extra bits of time to really focus on their applications for things that really matter. So if they're going over the pedics, things like research may be important, and so they find time for research. But try not to overload yourself with extracurriculars and that's truly how you make time for those activities. So this is some insight for intern year. So I'm really passionate about talking about intern year because I feel like it is so easily demoralizing of an experience if you don't know how to approach it. One of the biggest things about intern year that is challenging to say the least is there is so much information that you need to know and there's still a little bit of confidence you have to, a lot of confidence actually that you have to build as you go through the experience and they don't always align. Sometimes your confidence isn't there even though your knowledge is improving. And so the easiest way to apply it to, to build your confidence and your knowledge base is to really literally create a hit list of all the different things that you want to become more comfortable at it. For example, when I started internal medicine, I couldn't tell you the difference between multiple different inhalers for asthma, COPD. I still struggle with them to be quite honest. But other things like the coagulation cascades, how to manage pressers, how to manage the ventilator. Oh God, the ventilator is like the most demoralizing thing if you don't understand it. And so I essentially created a list because all those things would freak me out. And week by week I'd focus on one topic and then another topic and then another topic. And as I started to have patience with those issues or needed to know about inhalers or needed to manage a vent, I got better and no longer became part of my hit list of things that would freak me out. And the hit list never completely went away. It continues to grow to this day. But as you go through intern here, you realize your confidence increases as your hit list kind of goes down for those most common things. And as you have more experience, it continues to improve. And so that's kind of my insight of intern years. That it's easy to become demoralized because there's so much you don't know and so much you don't know how to approach as a new baby doctor. But if you instead use it as a very systematic thing that I don't have to become an amazing doctor tomorrow, it's gonna become an amazing doctor eventually. One thing at a time, one step at a time, and eventually you'll get there. All right, now there's similar question. Is there enough time during intern year to do research and would you recommend it? So it depends on your goal. I'm gonna assume that this person is applying for something in internal medicine where you typically only have three years and you need to apply for fellowship for your third year. So really you have two years. Typically I would recommend holding off on that research until you maybe get into your second semester of intern year or if you have a nice kind of month off that you have really dedicated and no thing. Like my institution, for example, has an elective month that you can use during your intern year to do things like research. But I wouldn't simply try to force research into your schedule if you don't have that free time. If anything, wait until your second semester where you kind of figure things out, you have confidence a little bit better, you're more efficient and you can spend any bit of extra free time you may have to do research. And ultimately realize if research is even something you should be doing. Now let's go ahead and answer some questions that we have on our YouTube comments. Sergeant asked, is it necessary to have an iPad if you have a two-in-one laptop? So the answer is probably not. You know, I have a two-in-one HP Spectre now but I didn't in medical school and so I have an iPad Mini that I'd still use for rotations. I wouldn't be able to fit this 13-inch laptop with me like all my rotations but that one would fit in my white coat which is why I had those. But if you have a two-in-one, I don't think you need an iPad. You can easily take your notes, draw on it, you know, write on it if you wish. So answer is no. Healer asked, how do we tackle down overloading work at the same time to get at least the best amount of sleep possible with great lifestyle with friends and family to fit? So this is kind of the things that we talked about earlier in this video is that remember learning and studying like two hours extra a day doesn't necessarily lead to that extra 10%, 20% efficiency on your grades. You know, if you study 10 extra hours a week that doesn't necessarily lead to 10 more points on your exam. And so that would ask myself what would I be spending an hour less of my studying to still get the same results, still get the same efficiency but still have an extra hour to do other things that care about. So it's absolutely possible to get a good amount of your seven to eight hours of sleep every single day. So have time for yourself in medical school as long as you work with those in mind first then plug in the studying and your studying becomes efficient. It's like required to be efficient. So Mr. Bond Clay asked do you pre-read and post-read your lectures? So pre-read? No. I think when you study and I'll make a different video about this and I made a video about how I approach my notes which is very similar. I'm going to show you the method which I don't care if you're watching this on YouTube but typically I feel like pre-reading is kind of useless so it's only helpful for you to help understand the structure of the lecture that's going to come the next day. And so typically what I do is when I look at a lecture I'm forcing myself to already kind of get into quizzing mode. When I see a lecture or a PowerPoint slide I'm saying okay what questions could possibly come from this. I can be totally wrong but I'm simply forced to ask myself what questions come. I don't even know the answers right now. All the questions I could see coming and I create an Excel sheet a list of Anki cards whatever it may be and then when I go to lecture and now my goal is to fill those out. So I go to the lecture and I try to fill out the answers to those questions I've created. So now that I'm pre-reading the lecture I've essentially kind of created practice questions and so if the lecture is absolutely useless and the lecture is kind of like babbling about nothing I could use the slides and answer those questions and still use that time productively. And then when I go home and it's time to review the notes I don't have to redo anything just go into the question and answering form. And so do I post read my lectures? Kind of. I just kind of use this Q and E method so that video will be linked down below. If you guys want to learn more you can check out the Rapid Study Accelerator Program as well as the Domination Bundle those are like kind of step-by-step studies strategies and different programs that I have to help you on your medical journey. And then last but not least we'll do one more question so Resfying does having a W which I'm assuming is like withdrawing from a class look bad on your transcript and what should you do? You know I think you would make the decision on what the grade ultimately would look like if you were going to get ultimately a fail or a C then the W is much better but if you were going to get like a B or an A and retaking that class really wasn't going to change anything ideally if you were going to get a low B then I would just take the class. It also depends on the class it is if it's like not related to your pre-med majors then probably just finish it through that will depend on who you ask but the main thing is is that if you are going to fail the class absolutely just do the W take the class again but remember your grades and your scores are not the most important thing in your medical school journey they are definitely an important part when you are applying but if you can kind of create a story sometimes that story can definitely overshadow and highlight the most important parts of you which is why you want to become a doctor in the first place and what you've done in the past to prove that it's true so that being said guys that's going to conclude this Q&A video hope you guys enjoyed it before you click off make sure you hit that like button make sure you hit that subscribe button if you are watching this on YouTube two videos just like this on a weekly basis if you listen to this on podcast hit follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast listening platform and if you enjoyed this video then you'll probably enjoy this full on key tutorial that I do step by step to teach you how to use on key like a pro in medical school but with that being said guys thank you so much for being a part of my journey hopefully that was a little help to you guys and yours I'll see you guys in the next one peace my friends