 As of July 1st, I officially transitioned from being a full-time internal medicine hospitalist to a full-time cardiology fellow for the next three years. And while I'm super excited, the thing is I need to know so much more before I can feel confident and take care of cardiology patients. So here is my approach on learning a completely new field and studying for it. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Luxe. I used to be an internal medicine hospitalist and I'm now transitioned to be a cardiology fellow. It feels still weird to say. Super excited to make this episode because last year I was working as a full-time internal medicine hospitalist. Overall, it felt like when I knew what I was doing because I just did three years of internal medicine training. The job was a very natural transition. Now I'm about to be a cardiology fellow and while I still know some things about cardiology, I definitely don't feel like I know enough. And so this is going to be my video on how I'm going to make that transition of educating, learning, and continue to grow obviously over the next three years or for the rest of my career to make sure that can take care of my patients the best way. And this video is not intended for somebody who just wants to become a cardiologist, but really you can take any transition that you make, whether it's a new rotation, a new field, going into medical school, going into residency, or going into the sub specialty of your choice and use this approach to understand how you can learn and master those topics a little bit better. So here's my quick three phase of really learning anything, but that I'll particularly be using to learn cardiology. Number one is acquisition phase. Number two is the review phase. And finally, number three is the gap filling phase. So starting with the acquisition phase is exactly what it sounds like, which is to obtain the information. And that really requires two parts. One is understanding what information, what topics you actually need to know more about. And then number two is to figure out where you're going to go reliably and repeatedly to fill in those gaps. So in regards to the first half, which is collecting a list of what you need to know, you need to have a good place of kind of collecting what you want to learn both now as well in the future. I love using Notion because I talk about a lot of the episodes here. It's just a great tool to be able to make tables and lists of things and you can do anything you want. But my no means is Notion the only solution. You can use a physical notebook and it would still work effectively well. You can use another note taking device, Google Sheets. It doesn't matter. But I love using Notion because it portable with me and it still works on my desktop really well. But you have to start collecting a list of topics over time and just have a place where there is a small topic or a big one to be able to collect. So for example, when I knew that I was going to start cardiology fellowship, I started increasing and creating a list of all the major topics and sections within cardiology that I will overall and over time will have to master. Now, you can collect this from any sources, whether it may be a textbook, which I'll kind of go over, but I have one book here in the office and so I use this as kind of a guideline. Now you can obtain these kinds of lists from a variety of sources. I went to some popular ones. So for example, the ACC website is a big resource in the field of cardiology. So I made these kind of big pillars of topics based off of their websites. I also have some textbooks and guideline textbooks that people use. You don't really use these to read from cover to cover, but you can understand how you can make those chapters into things that you may want to know about in the future. In addition, other sources that may not seem as obvious, things like blog posts or Twitter threads or things like Reddit forums, things your professors may have mentioned, can all kind of go into topics that I need to look at for. So for example, M-Mode is something very specific, one in the field of ultrasound, but has a lot of utility and it'd be nice to spend just at least a half day learning about all the things that are minutious that I would need to know that make my job as a cardiologist a lot better by learning M-Mode. Next is having a go-to and a small list of resources you can go to in times of need. So for example, right now I'm keeping it simple. I'm just trying to understand everything that I need to know and then finding the best resources and making substitutions as needed. So for example, there's an eight hour boot camp that is put together by the Houston Methodist cardiology program. That's basically eight hours of the basic things that you need to know as a brand new cardiologist, refreshing some topics as well as teaching some new ones like how to do certain procedures in the lab and it's super effective, super high yield, and so it's something that I've added to my list and I'm solely adding. As I find things that I need to review from those videos that maybe they know and go over, I'll add them to this list. If it's something that one of these topics fits perfectly with the lecture that they're giving, then I'll just go ahead and open this up and start typing away. So as an example, as I was going through that eight hour boot camp, somebody was talking about the complications you can have after having a heart attack and they talked about all the different things that can happen to your heart, both electrical and mechanical, and I just took notes on those. So if I ever wanted to refresh them about those things, I could easily pull those up on Notion on my phone, my laptop, and do so. As I'm learning more things through those videos, I would add them into this Learn section as well. But again, this list of resources initially should start out to be very minimal, ideally maybe one tech source that you can go to just in case you need to reference something. I'm not saying this is going to be the text of my choice, but for now, it's easy, it gets the work done, and if I find something that people recommend more so later on, I'll go to that instead. Maybe an online resource like a video library of you things you can watch, and so I have a YouTube channel that I can easily go to using that Heaton Methodist website, which is perfect for me. But the most important thing is to have both a small and reliable list initially and make substitutions as you need it. So for example, you may want to text, this isn't probably not the best source for me for a cardiology fellow, but it's something I can start with and time being and using as a reference material. I like watching videos as my learning points, so finding a YouTube channel that will have a majority of the things I would want will be my second go to. I love reading review articles on things about a big topic, so those are going to be a number three. And then finally, number four are just things and mistakes that I make, whether it's about not knowing how to treat a specific patient, having to look it up, that's perfect to add to my notion database, or something that I may miss as a practice question or something that a professor or an attending asked me. Those are all things that would go into this notion database of things that would force myself to learn or add to the list of to be learned. Now going into the second phase is reviewing the things that you learned. Now most of the time we have a habit of just taking information and then turning it into more information that we just don't come back to. It's very ineffective and if you imagine all the information that's within the field of cardiology or whatever you're trying to learn, it's very unmotivating to come back and try to read this big paragraph of bullet points you've made, just like in that example that I showed you. And so transitioning into review phase includes taking things that you've made in the acquisition phase like your notes and making them into the questions that you could easily ask yourself to help improve your retention but also just make it more likely that you will review. Now again, the method of choice that you do doesn't necessarily matter. As an example, since I'm still starting cardiology fellowship, if you want to see what this looks like, again I love to use Notion and I use this in medical school. A lot of times when we work with students on teaching about a study we teach something called the Notion method, or unless it's just a big database that you use in collecting your questions, you can categorize them based off the topics you're learning. So for example, if I'm in cardiology, I may create questions about ACS questions. I may create questions about heart failure questions that are both small and more detailed, add the answers here, maybe the source that I got them from if they were from a review article or if they were from some guidelines and get some categorization. And then you can actually get a little bit more controlled where you can ask yourself, did I cover this material the first time or the second time or if it was difficult? And again, now you have a database of all the information that you want to memorize and because a review method is meant to be simple, it's meant to be natural, especially when you're busy as a cardiology fellow, my goal is to just do five to ten minutes of this when I'm waiting for stuff to happen and going to the next question. If I wanted to, I could turn these into flashcards because Notion connects with things like hockey, but if I don't want to, I can just literally just create the questions here and read the answers and practice to see if I know them or not. Now, the final part of any learning is even after you acquire something, even after you review things, things still don't make sense. This is usually where our professors or attendings are telling us things and we're just saying, oh yeah, that makes sense. Do you have any questions? No. Like, does that make sense? Uh-huh. That's those are the type of things that we do because we don't want to look foolish, but it's a perfect opportunity of saying, like, those are topics that I need to look up more. Or if I'm taking care of a patient, feel comfortable managing them, but maybe they have a small nuance in their care or their history that changes what medications, what treatments I can offer them. Maybe I need to look up more about that subset of patients to be a better cardiologist for them, as well as some people like them in the future. And so again, having a system where you collect all the things that not only you want to review, but things you need to look up and get a little bit more refined on. So for example, as I was watching parts of that boot camp, most of those made sense, but there were some things that they glossed over, didn't talk about enough, or I needed to get more information about. So for example, as I was watching that boot camp, they mentioned some things or glossed over others and I just added them to the list of things I need to look up a little bit better. In this future, this list is going to go relatively fast and often will outpace how quickly I can learn and I'm completely okay with that. I'm aware that in the field of learning and the field of cardiology as an example, you're always going to have more things to learn, more things to look up and review than you all actually have learned and mastered. And often there will be things that are learned, which will be unmasked. So it's a live and fluid process of learning and being aware that things will move into different categories. But having this process of feeling in gaps and collecting gaps, if I know that I come through a Twitter thread and somebody talks about something like a balloon pump, and I don't remember anything about a balloon pump, I would add it here as things to look up. If I was watching a lecture or attending a Zoom call from my program and they mentioned something and I just don't know enough about it, I would add this to my list. If I was reading a review paper, maybe they mentioned another review paper that's really important for that topic, I would add this to this list. And the next time I would go and sit down to actually do some true cardiology learning, I could choose. Do I have a lot of energy, in which case I may try to learn something brand new, or do I have little bits of energy or time, in that case it may make more sense to just look up what the wavefront phenomenon is, or what this trial quickly is, just so I feel like I've had some exposure to the things that had question marks about. Now again, regardless of where in the medical field you are, or really what you're learning, it could be math or physics. The same process applies of learning where to acquire that information, how to collect it. Again, I use an ocean as an example, you can use whatever you want, transitioning to how you can make those review processes more natural by creating questions, and then having a way of constantly collecting things that you actually don't know anything about that. Don't know enough about that. Then finding time to set yourself up. That is how I'm going to learn to be a cardiology fellow, in addition to just taking care of patients, and then adding more to that database over time. This will be one of the first videos of me actually as a fellow. I will be obviously making more of my journey of a day to day, the challenges, and the wins that I have. So if you're interested in what my life as a cardiology fellow looks like, definitely go ahead and follow by hitting that like and subscribe button. If you're listening on the podcast, make sure you hit that subscribe button there as well. But if you ultimately enjoyed this episode, go ahead and check out this episode right here of why I ultimately picked the field of cardiology, as well as this episode right here. Super interesting and all the pros and cons of being a hospitalist for my last year working. Hopefully you enjoyed these, and as always thank you so much for being a part of my journey, of our journey. Hopefully we were a little help to you guys on yours, and we'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.