 So today I'm gonna give you one tip, just one tip that if you follow after this video and this episode, you'll find that not only grades and performance in med school will go up, but so will your sanity and wellness. Let's get into it. All right guys, welcome to The MD Journey, a channel completely dedicated to helping you succeed on your medical journey with less stress. My name is Lakshman, internal medicine physician and resident in training. And on this channel, we talk about how to study better, how to be more productive, as well as how to stay well during your medical journey that way you can be on your pathway to becoming a doctor with a smile throughout the whole process. I'm super pumped for this episode because I really wanna give a piece of advice that I've been giving some of my coaching students, my med school students that I've been working with on how they can effectively kind of raise their grades, get better scores on their exams and their quizzes, but without having to do much effort and in fact, less time when they're actually studying. And that one tip that I wanna give you right now is to be able to make mistakes as quickly as possible. Now it may seem like I'm just being very superficial or just blowing smoke, but just hear me out for a second. The typical med student approach of how to study for a class or a quiz is that they're going to get their information like their syllabus or their slides, they're gonna go through them and they're gonna go to lecture or listen to lecture. And then they're gonna have some kind of review process where they create an outline and somewhere along the way, usually about a few days before the actual exam, you start studying or doing the review. But the more and more you focus on this approach, the more you realize that a good portion of that learning phase is truly just acquisition. There is no form of testing that's done until usually about the very end. And that's usually when students find that their anxiety goes up, their nervousness though goes up, and the reality sinks in that they probably won't do as well on the exam as they'd wanted to. And so an advice that I've been giving throughout this channel is to be able to get into a testing and review environment as quickly as possible. A few of the methods that I've talked about on this channel and on MDJourney.com is things such as how to use flashcards effectively. I'll show you a free eight step kind of approach if you guys are interested down below. But getting to that review phase is kind of step number one of really improving your medical school performance. But the next part of it is to be able to make that mistake as quickly as possible. I take for example a student who gets away from the typical approach and starts using things such as practice questions or flashcards to really practice their retention on all the information they're learning throughout their course. Now one thing that I find students struggle with the most is being able to get through their flashcards or getting through their practice questions without spending excessive amounts of time. Now when I dive in deeper with them and I ask them during my coaching calls, tell me how this works, how long is it taking you? How are you trying to answer the questions? The one thing that I find is that the students are trying to answer that flashcard or that piece of questioning or that practice question as if it was test day itself. And for a medical school exam it's probably not gonna be the best thing you can do just because there's so much information that you have to review. So instead my one tip that I wanna give you in this video is to be able to get to that review phase or that acquisition phase as quickly as possible. And what I mean by that is as quickly as you could go from the clinical vignette that has all the information to the explanation that highlights truly what clues you should have focused on. That is where the learning happens. Now most students spend a lot of time doing the reading and then eventually they'll see the explanation. But really the learning truly happens when you can quickly go from that vignette to the answer explanation and have that aha moment of saying, okay, these are the clues I should have been looking for. Let's just get to that part of your learning as quickly as possible. So when you're doing practice questions instead of spending an excessive amount of time actually looking through the clinical vignettes instead try to give yourself a timer. Maybe if you're typically spending two minutes on a question saying, how can I do it in about 45 seconds to a minute? And what that truly will make you focus on is just clues, you know, what is the vital for example in the clinical vignette? What labs are they giving me? Really, what's the main question and options in the answer choices itself and what clues should I be looking for? And then when the 45 seconds to one minute are starting to run out, just answer the question as quickly as possible because it really doesn't matter if you get it right or wrong if there's just a practice kind of question bank. Really the point is, how quickly can you get to that explanation that tells you this, this and this are the clues you truly should have focused on? Because then when you read that explanation the next time you see even remotely a similar clinical vignette you're gonna start looking for those clues and that's gonna make you not only more efficient and faster and answer the questions that's gonna make you less likely to fall for traps when the real thing comes by. So next time you're doing any type of review instead of really focusing on the actual review phase really focus on being able to make those failures those mistakes as quickly as possible. So while anyone will tell you that doing practice questions will help raise your grades how you do your practice questions will also emphasize how many mistakes you can make now so you don't actually have to make it on the real thing. So this applies for all medical students regardless if you're in your first or second year or if you're in third year of your rotations and you're studying for your shelf exams you may start to wonder how can I do so many questions or so much reviews of my flashcards effectively and time-efficiently it just doesn't seem like that's possible. Well the first thing you have to ask is how long am I typically taking and how can I get to that acquisition phase of that aha moment that I'm highlighting all of the things I should know as quickly as possible. So if you're a flashcards kind of person then definitely check out some of my Anki videos down below so you can understand how I approach Anki cards which I get myself 10 seconds to 20 seconds of answering the card as quickly as possible. If I miss it that's fine it's gonna show it to me again. If you're doing practice questions instead of saying I'm gonna do it in a minute and a half I'm gonna say how can I do it in 30 seconds to 45 seconds. Now obviously you can spend more time doing it but that timer, that focus will really help emphasize the most important part of your learning which is that final part when you see the explanation and say okay these are the things I should have focused on maybe I did, maybe I didn't and that way next time that similar question shows up whether on the real thing hopefully or later on your practice questions studying sessions you now know how to approach that question a little bit better. Simply by using this one tip guys a lot of my coaching students a lot of the med students that I've worked with have truly found that their grades have gone up simply because they've been able to make more mistakes than their peers and so by the time the test day comes around they've kind of emptied out how many more mistakes they'll be able to make because they now can recognize the patterns that are presented with certain topics and certain kind of clinical vignette. To start getting to your explanations into the answer as quickly as possible and stop prioritizing whatever grade or how many percentages you get correctly during your review it doesn't really matter that a review is intended so you can finally get to that aha moment. So focus on that and hopefully that helps you on your studying. But that's it for this episode on how to study better, how to get better grades. Obviously you have tons of more info for you here on the YouTube channel on the podcast as well as AmityJourney.com. Check out a few of the resources that we have down below including the level up your studying course and that's three weeks to completely transform your grades, your studying and your efficiency using techniques just like this one. And if you want even more help besides on how to just study in medical school then definitely check out some of the other resources that we have including the Met Elite Academy as well as some of the coaching programs that I have in case you're interested. But I really want to know what you guys think of this tip definitely add your comments down below and before you leave hit that like button that tells me one, you enjoy this kind of content you want more and also it supports the channel and definitely hit in that subscribe button in case you haven't already. Drop in two videos just like this on a weekly basis but thank you guys as always so much for the support for making it to the end of this video. Hopefully I've been a little help to you on your journey. Thanks as always for being a part of mine. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.