 Today I'm going to break down the exact system that I used to study for exams in medical school and the system happened to help me graduate with a 3.9 GPA so hopefully you find some success with it as well. And I'll be covering it a lot in today's video and it doesn't hurt my feelings if you jump around so feel free to check out the bookmarks down below as well as the timestamps that I'll attach right here. What will hurt my feelings is if you forget to hit that like button if you found some value from this video so don't forget to click, but let's get into it. So today's episode I'm going to break down the entire process that I used to study for exams in four different phases. Phase one is going to be your test playbook and schedule so it's essentially your plan of what you'll be doing up until exam day. Phase two is arguably the most important, this is your content matrix. This is essentially what study strategy or strategies you'll combine to help you get through all that content before test day. I'll give you a few of my favorite personal examples that I just loved using. Phase three is arguably my favorite, the anxiety to confidence system. Essentially what you do from now until test day to make sure that you go into test day with confidence and without that overburdened anxiety. And then finally phase four is the mental game. We'll talk about systems and processes that you can include into your prep to make sure that you go into test day with confidence and don't get your own way. So let's get into our first phase, which is our test playbook and schedule. This is going to be the most important phase if you're somebody who tends to struggle with staying on a schedule or having a schedule to begin with, especially if you have multiple exams around the same time. So in this phase, I'm going to put you into my shoes exactly what I would do on when I start studying, how many lectures I plan on doing per day, and then actually assigning them to the specific days. So let's get into it. So for this phase, we're going to use an example where you're studying for final exams or you have tons of exams kind of within a seven to 10 days period. So December is a natural time for students to have exams in medical school and all other disciplines. So in this example, we have an anatomy exam on Tuesday. We have one on this Friday and the 12th and the making of this video. We are basically about a month away from this physiology exam. And so the first thing that I do is to come up with a rule on when I want to start studying as important as it is to have your calendar actually have the date of the test. It's also important to have when you want to start reviewing for that test or quiz in itself. This also just gets in your mind into saying, hey, you're already two or three days behind and haven't even started studying for the exam. Make sure you stay on schedule. My simple rule for every exam is that if it's just a normal exam for your courses, then 10 days. It's a final exam that I like to give myself two to three weeks. And I put it into my calendar. So for example, if we were looking at this physiology exam, then I could just say right here, start studying for a video. And that just tells me that once the 20th comes around, if I haven't, I need to make sure that I go ahead and start studying. And I can do this for all of the remaining exam. And once we have this done, you can move to the next step or you can do what I like to do, which is saying how practical is this in the first place. So for example, studying for this biochem and then the physiology exam is tough, especially when there's only two days left. There's a good chance I may fall behind and have a terrible weekend studying for this physio exam. So instead, what I can do is I can say, maybe I want to go ahead and start studying for my biochem exam a little bit early, gives myself more time to include more physio later on. And so both of those classes are tough for once you have this. Now you can start going into step two, which accounting for roughly how many lectures you'll be doing per day for that specific exam. Now that I have my rough review days in order, I can just go based off of each exam, or you can just do this for one exam at a time and look into how many material, whether it be lectures, labs, TBLs, class material, reading material, is going to be testable. And you want to look at each of them as individual things if they are going to require separate amounts of attention. So for example, for anatomy, I have 10 to five labs. For the biochem final, I may have 30 lectures. Maybe it's just a midterm and a final for this class. In physio, I'm going to have 25 lectures. So I want to know roughly how many lectures I need to do per day. Now, easily the easiest way I've used to do this is I would just go into Google. And if it was something I was going to start for today, because let's be honest, very few of us forever proactive in prepping for our exams, then I would say, well, let's see, for example, how long I have to study for my anatomy exam, which I want to start today. So between now and December 6, I have 14 days. Now, here's the caveat that we teach all of our students that we work with in our coaching programs is that, yes, you have 14 days. But you don't want to give yourself 14 days to study for this exam because if you fall behind, there's no buffer. You want to use that day before an exam to really catch up, or more importantly, do some extra review to make sure that you're ready for the exam the following day. So I always cut down that number by at least one. And if you're somebody who needs a little bit more of a buffer, then you can cut it down by two. So if we had 14 days, and I'm actually going to cut down to 13 days, and then come up with a rough amount of lectures. So if I have 10 lectures and five labs that are fair game for this exam, that means 15 pieces of material over a span of 13 days, it's about one lecture per day. If you're studying for finals or multiple quizzes, then you can go ahead and do this for all of your classes at once. You can kind of see the practicality of it. So for example, for Biochem, between the date that we had assigned, you can use one of these calculators where you just plug in the date, and then the test day that you want or the day before the exam. And then you can say, okay, how many days are in between? So in between the Biochem exam, I have 16 days for the physiology exam, I've given myself 14 days. And so again, it comes out to a rough number where you subtract one from your total. So from 16 to 15, and then saying, I want to do roughly two lectures per day over the span of 15 days, I'll still have a buffer before the day of the exam and overall be good. And same thing for the physiology exam. Now when we work with coaching students one-on-one, this step is probably the most enlightening because if you come up with a number that's like five lectures per day, and then you have to do an extra lab or lecture for anatomy and extra two labs here, you know it's not practical. You know you're gonna have to make some adjustment somewhere. We talk about where you could do that. But if you come up with a number where it's like, you know what, every single day I just need to do one anatomy class. I need to do maybe two pieces of material for Biochem. And I'm not even gonna start studying for physiology until an extra week, but I need to do two. Then it's much more doable. So now we get into step three of this specific phase and I promise you guys this will be a very detailed video, but hopefully you guys are enjoying it. Again, hit that like button if you are. But now we get to plug in our actual material into our daily schedule. So let's go into our week. And for the simplicity of the video, I'm gonna assume that you're not gonna start studying for your finals until after five or 6 p.m. This way if you're still going to class, if you're having new material presented to you, you still have that bit of the day from this morning to the evening to go ahead and actually study and review that content. But later in the evening would be dedicated time for you to do your review. And you can plug this however you'd like. But for the purpose of this video, we're gonna do 5 p.m. is when we're gonna start studying. And so since today's supposed to be the day that I start studying for my anatomy exam, I'm gonna say, okay, I've done this planning. I should be done in 30 minutes. Let's go ahead and study for that first lecture over this next hour and a half. So I can say lecture one and that'll be final. And this way I already know that that's when that lecture will be. And I can go ahead and plan out the rest of anatomy first before I move on to the next thing. So this is just an example of what my schedule would look like once I kind of finish it off. So the first thing I always like to do is just give a numerical number to which duration of the content I'm on. So as we talked about, there's 15 pieces of fair content for this anatomy final. So I'm just gonna give one, two, three. And I can choose to do this however I want. So if I wanna do a lecture one day and a lot of the next, I could do that. Especially if they're related, that makes sense. But here I'm giving myself about an hour, an hour and 15 depending on how long that content may be. So if I remember that a lab was really extensive, I may give that extra bit of time. If I remember a lecture was really heavy, I may make that one and a half to two hours. The next step is that we're gonna be doing is on the weekends, you may be studying for your normal classes, other final exams. And so I just try to demarcate where a specific class is going to be dedicated. So in the green is all my available time and I can move or stretch this depending on practicality for anatomy. And then within those times, I can say, okay, the weekends, this is how you catch up. If you have an obscene amount of average lectures you need to do per day, you can do more per lectures on the weekend to make your average go higher. So while you may be doing one or two lectures on the weekdays, you can say I could possibly fit in three lectures on the Sunday morning or Saturday morning. And then when I go to the duration of my week, I can do the same. So here we're kind of looking at Sunday and I'd be making that anatomy time and I can do two lectures or two labs in this case that are a little bit more heavier. And then as we go through the week, as I get closer and closer to test day and I'm getting more comfortable in the flow of my material, I may decide to start to go ahead and front load my schedule to make sure that I'm getting through those lectures. So on some days that I feel that I'm more available and my focus is completely towards final exams, I'm gonna start including maybe one or two lectures a little bit above my average because the main priority for you personally is to get through as many repetitions as possible. The first repetition is the most important because that's the repetition that most students don't get to. This is why cramming happens. So if you can make sure that you get through all of your lectures by the day before the exam, you're good. But I always like to, for personal reasons, love to do everything twice. And so for that reason, I wanna make sure that I have that buffer day plus maybe one or two days additionally where I can go through all the material again. And so for doing that, we get through our 15th lecture on Thursday and remember our test for reference is going to be on this Tuesday. So I still have about four to five days and now I'm gonna go through everything the second time around. Whatever study strategy I'm using, which we'll talk about later in the phases. And now because I've covered the lectures ideally once, as well as when I was studying for the quizzes and tests that I've taken in the past, that material should be easier to schedule in and thus I should be able to get through them faster. So I may be able to go through three lectures in the time that normally it would take me an extra hour or two doing it better the second time. And so now I can see that I've gone through all the material twice and I still have this buffer day. So if I fall behind, if another class takes priority, I can easily move these individual assignments and appointments with myself to another day the day before the exam. If I don't have to use this day for any of this, then I can simply go through each of my lectures either once more, I can do practice questions, other resources, but I have an extra day to just breathe as well as study for my upcoming finals and other exams and other classes. Now, once you do this for one class, you can go ahead and do this for your consecutive exam. So let's quickly go through that. So now that we've added all of our classes, we can actually see the practicality of how this would work. So for example, on our first day of studying for our anatomy exam, we're gonna go through lecture one. My goal is tomorrow to start lab one and because now today is my first day of studying for Biochem, I also wanna go ahead and try to get through lecture one, two and then try to do maybe two lectures of Biochem per day per my average. Now, when you do this, you'll be able to see how practical something is because it's visibly available. You can see on some days that it may be difficult to study for anatomy, Biochem and physiology at once, but technically when we looked at my averages, I was actually supposed to do two lectures for physiology in this day. Now, the likelihood that I'm gonna study from five to 11 and not spend any other time on my other classes or other activities and obligations is very unlikely. And so when I do this and when I was creating the schedule, I can say, okay, well technically I'm supposed to start studying for physiology today. Let's go ahead and under promise how much I'm gonna get done while I'm studying for those other two classes and then overbook myself on the weekends for physiology time or Biochem time so that way I can still catch up. So you can see that technically while in the physiology class I was supposed to do two lectures, there are some days where I didn't even assign myself any and that's because I'm planning on things going haywire. I'm planning on either procrastinating or getting to behind on other lectures and other classes that I don't wanna have anything else and further behind on. And if I'm still behind on Thursday where I don't even get to this lecture and I can just move things around accordingly. Again, I'm also giving myself Friday to either recover or to catch up on lectures that I'm behind on. But I can only do this practically if I have all of my exams, all of my lectures plugged in. This is why it's a playbook. You know what your options are and how you can do those. And it's also helpful because now you can try to see where you can physically include a second pass if that's your goal. It was mine, it helped a lot and it's also going to be conducive to what study system you're using which we'll get into the next phase. But I can see, for example, when I'm studying for anatomy that it's practical to go ahead and try to get through my second pass of the material over these last few days where I start with lecture one on the Thursday before and then I just do a little bit while still giving myself time to study for the other classes. But when it's the day before my anatomy exam that's going to be the time that I'll be using to do minimal work for the other classes and pretty much reviewing for anatomy or playing catch up. So if I wasn't able to get to these lectures I'm creating a time where I can still do those and my schedule won't get screwed up. Same thing for my biochem exam. If I know it's going to be on Friday, remember that Thursday is a buck or day I haven't assigned myself any physiology time there. And that's because if I'm behind here I can move it to this time and then tire day is available. So you can always go ahead and front load or back load depending on how practical things are. But you do have to create a calendar like this because now I can show up and go into phase two saying what study strategy will I use which ones work the best and how can I get through at least two passes of the material practically? This is a nice way of making personal appointments with yourself for an exam because if you're cramming that means you either never created a schedule in the first place or didn't commit to one that you actually had. And yes, you may not be able to show up for all of these lectures and things will have to get moved around but now you can visually see where things are actually doable. Now let's go ahead and get into the second phase which is your content matrix. This is the core study strategy or one or two strategies that you'll combine to do the majority of your setting for those classes. I'm gonna show you two of my favorites that a lot of our one-on-one coaching students really enjoy and then we'll talk about one more strategy you can do in phase three that combines everything and you really have a full proof system. Now my personal favorite study strategy to study for really any class in medical school was to use Anki. Now if you guys are brand new to Anki there is an entire videos or by far our most popular video here on the YouTube channel that breaks down the A to Z on how to use Anki for beginners all the way to advanced techniques that I used. So I'm not gonna go into the big nitty gritty details I will link them below that video in case you're interested in watching. It's relatively quick and lots of people have found it very helpful so again just go ahead and check that out down below. But Anki is basically a very smart flash card system. It will not only make your flash cards relatively easy but it'll also say, you know what? You suck at this topic but you're a little bit better at this one. I'm gonna show you that sucky topic more often just using space repetition. You can imagine if you're studying for a final exam of seeing your weak topics more often than your strengths is going to make you do wonders. And so essentially the Anki method for a final exam is you can have any class. For example, here we have a few but let's say I had a cardiology block upcoming. And so you have your individual lectures. So if I wanted to create another lecture we can call this lecture four and let's call this CHF or a heart failure. And I'm gonna go ahead and then just drag your individual lectures underneath the entire block. So this could be cardiology block four, cardiology final exam, whatever you may be and just move all the individual lectures that are responsible for them underneath. And as I'm going through the semester and as I'm going through the classes I'm making individual flash cards so just to show you kind of what they may look like you can go ahead and click study now. And now we use something here called the screenshot method or image occlusions. You may get a flash card that looks like this like an image occlusion or a screenshot of the slides where you got it from and you're just quizzing yourself on do I know this or not. Again, if you wanna see that entire tutorial on how to use Anki, I will link that down below. But if I did this for every single class for every slide and all the material in addition that came with all the review slides all of the labs and I made specific decks for them then I can go into my schedule and say, okay, today you're supposed to do lecture one and two for your cardiology block and I can just do the flash cards there. I can go into my individual deck. Anki gives you the ability to not only do their algorithm of how many cards you need to do that day but I can actually just go ahead and go into a cram mode where I can just say, I'm gonna do all the cards in this deck in a random order and I'm just gonna go ahead and get started. And then when you do this it will show you all of the flash cards that are available and you can just do them in one go. And now I'll go ahead and do that for lecture one and then lecture two. This is the simple method of just going down to the individual lectures. Now when I was studying for final exams I wanted to have a little bit more control. So what I would do is I would just create an extra deck and call this my reviewed deck and you can call this cards and I would put this underneath my cardiology block because you can imagine if I had 30 lectures I don't want to see all 30 at once but let's say I have now reviewed lecture one and lecture two and I only want to see the lectures that I haven't reviewed or in a similar way if I thought a lecture was difficult and I can move it under a week topics if I wanted to come back to it more often. But the beauty of this is that let's say now every morning I'm gonna go to the gym and I'm gonna spend 10 minutes or 15 minutes on the elliptical. I can easily say let's just do all the flash cards in this reviewed deck cards section. That means I see all the lectures I've already reviewed once for my final exam. I'm just gonna do it over 10 minutes while I'm on the elliptical without any pressure but I'm just seeing all those topics naturally. So if I've already covered 10 lectures over the span of a week and a half I'm gonna be able to see 10 lectures worth of stuff. But if I haven't covered a specific lecture then it's not going to be in that reviewed deck. This is a nice way of naturally getting a second pass especially if you're finding when you're creating your calendar that you're not able to actually get a second pass plugged in this is a nice way of using Anki to say you know what naturally show me my flash cards a second time around and you can schedule a 10 minute session a 30 minute session every morning or practically into your schedule to do this and if you just did this by itself you've gone through all the lectures once you ideally will be able to see all the flash cards on a daily basis and then if you have a second pass even more power to you. This system by itself helped me ace my exams without making my study feel monotonous. Now when we add one more thing from phase three you can see the power of what can happen to study for the final. And when you combine this with one more study strategy that we'll talk about in phase three then the amount of retention that you have going into exam increases and most importantly the amount of confidence that you have going into the test increases exponentially. Now the second method that we love to recommend to a lot of our students is some kind of table database. Now one thing that I love using is Notion because my entire business, my entire life is plugged into there. Speaking of if you guys are interested in having an entire database for your medical school journey then we will be sharing that with all of our followers in the next week as the making of this video. So the goal is by the time that you have access to this you'll actually have access to this entire database where you can schedule your entire life but also your studying as well as have an entire roadmap of tips for your medical school journey including studying but also our Notion method. Really what the Notion method is is essentially creating questions and answers from your entire material. Every time you go through a slide each slide is a potential of possible questions that could come from it based off of the material that's there plus the additional information the lecture adds, right? So if I'm listening to a lecture let's say we're on lecture three of cardiology I can write my questions and answers in the specific format. I can say for example what's the workup for AFib and then I can write you wanna get an EKG for your AFib. I can have all my answers in one section my questions in another and I can essentially quiz myself doing this. You can do this with an Excel sheet you can do this on an actual piece of paper but when I'm going through Notion I'm essentially using a flash card system without forcing myself to use Anki because there's now a lot of cool things that I can do. Because Notion is a table you can sort it however I want. So if I wanna go ahead and say okay let's go ahead and make sure you mark all the lectures that you've passed once and passed two and if I wanna feel super confident going into a test I can say I wanna go ahead and hit my pre-test confidence button for every topic I feel good about before the day of the exam. And if all of these are clicked and I feel pretty good going for that cardiology exam. In addition if I wanna go ahead and give things a difficulty I could I wanna say this is gonna be a two it's gonna go further down but if this is going to be let's say a five if I change this one to a five it's purposely at least the way this database is set it's going to rank things based off of difficult to easy. So when I'm coming for my second passes if I'm gonna do a 30 minute daily session of going through my hardest topics from all the lectures I review just like we talked about with Anki I wanna see my toughest topics first because I wanna make sure that I don't get slipped up on the day of the exam by all these hard things. The easy things I'm gonna come back to and sometimes an easy thing may actually become hard later and that's fine you can change the score and now when I come for my next session in the mornings to do 10 minutes of Notion review I can say let's do the top 10 questions that I had and if the difficulty improves maybe this five goes to a three now it's gonna go further down my list and if I've done the first pass I'm gonna do it if I've done my second pass I can click it and then I can do a lot of things with Notion such as don't show me any more topics I've already been covered twice or I feel like I'm confident before the test. So now you have a growing database of everything you need to learn and ideally now you can filter out all the things that you haven't covered the first or the second time or feel confident going into exam. So Notion or any type of database system is super helpful for anyone who wants to have a big visualization, big collection of everything and so for our personal students who don't like using Anki, Notion ends up being one of the most popular choices if you guys are interested in having a template to this database it'll actually be as part of that Notion medical school template and dashboard that we will be including as part of the medical school domination bundle so if you guys are interested that'll be linked down below it should be live by the time that this video goes out. Now those are just two styles of methods that I personally use when studying for exam and it doesn't hurt my feelings if you say those are all crap I'd prefer to do X, Y, and Z that is completely okay The most important part of your system that needs to be simple so that you can just go into the studying. If your daily schedule has two lectures for biochem then the goal is to actually review those two lectures and not spend an ex-absorbent amount of time making outlines or doing a lot of work and then intending to review them so if you're somebody who is going to spend a lot of pre-work to actually do something to review that doesn't count as your study method so whether you're making flash drives or reviewing things, doing it on a whiteboard actual reviewing is when you're going through the content and testing yourself in one form fashion. Now the second part of this phase is something that we've naturally already included in the examples of both Anki and Tenotian. While you still want to get two passes ideally of your material and definitely the minimum of one of just having what we call a feed-in loop this basically means how you can naturally have information be presented to you on a daily basis after you've covered them and just like we did with our notion example you can just say I'm going to do the next 10 topics that are on my list and try to change their difficulty I'm going to do this for 10 to 20 minutes every single morning before I go to school you can do this with every system you have and you can use this feed-in loop for pretty much any study strategy as an example maybe you're using physical notes so if you have a notebook after you've done your first review of a few lectures you can say I'm going to go back for 10 minutes every single morning and I'm just going to try to do as much of review of those pages that I've gone through already and do as many as I can over the next 10 minutes maybe that means having a demarcation as you're going through your notes saying anything that's starred is something you have difficulty with let's go to the star topics if the star topic is still hard I'm going to keep it as a star if it's something that is easy I'm going to make it a check mark there's so much you can do but you're just naturally feeding in old material that has been reviewed at least once and just doing it on a daily basis having this plus a system where you have the first and second pass scheduled in to your daily calendar is really all you need to make sure that not only do you show up but that material is constantly going to get hit throughout those two or one a week that you have before your final a phase three again is my personal favorite which is your anxiety to compliment system this probably is the biggest reason of why I can go into a test and my peers who've studied just the same amount but we would go with a completely different mindset and often you can make the difference between a B and A for just being more confident or at least being more calm and once again this happens to be my personal favorite the reason is when I was in medical school I'd find that the reason I could make it a where a classmate who worked much harder than I did make a B or a C it's not because I was smarter than them often that was actually the opposite so I can go into a test of final or a quiz with much more confidence and prevent myself from getting in my own way everyone knows the experience of having anxieties make you feel terrible about one hard question and it leads you to make multiple mistakes and exam questions that you could easily answer if you had a level head so here are three different things you can do number one is to have a lecture hit list this basically means that you want to have a bullet point of all your learning objectives and all of the major topics, relationships, tables and just formulas that each lecture is expected you to master if instead of having a multiple choice exam imagine if the professor said you need to teach this lecture by the time your final comes around to be able to teach it you're essentially going to either come up with a mental or a physical list of everything that that lecture has to be fair game the same thing goes to prepare for an exam or final in the same fashion now two of the systems that we had talked about being both honky and notion naturally do this your flashcards are essentially a big hit list of everything that lecture covered your notes databases are ideally a big hit list of all the questions that could have came from the slides but now if you're making for example physical notes you can essentially have a word doc of all of the topics that come from that specific lecture and just have a big list of them maybe your personal strategy doesn't naturally include a hit list that's built into it that's completely fine you can create it in conjunction so again going back to that example of having a physical notebook you can have a word doc of having a bullet point this is like your master list of everything you want to master so lecture one has all my learning objectives plus everything that I'm just going by the notebook and saying oh okay this formula I need to make sure I master I need to know the relationships between these two different things and I'm just making a big list of everything that I want to have perfected for that specific lecture I'm going to do this for every single one now the purpose behind this is as I'm going through my first pass and definitely afterwards I want to look at that hit list and saying how much of this do I feel confident if the test was on this lecture tomorrow because when you do this if you have a list of 30 topics you may find that 20 of them you feel pretty good about maybe five of them eh and then five of them you are absolutely terrified we'll show up to the exam that tells you that the next time you're going to review that lecture if you're going to do a second review or the next time you do a 10 minute session in the morning you want to start with those topics in mind first by watching a video on YouTube going to an outside resource re-watching your lectures going through your slides whatever it may be but you're filling in those gaps this is how you go from anxiety to confidence by visually being able to see this is everything that I need to know for this lecture and here is where I get tripped up so let's make sure we have a game plan to overcome that tip number two is a study strategy that I've loved using I've used us since college and a lot of our veteran followers here at MD journey know about the brain dump but the brain dump is basically essentially taking any piece of paper so here is my moving receipt that I have here we're just going to flip it over then you see the face of that and essentially you want to just verbally and mentally regurgitate everything for a lecture on a piece of paper and the way this works is imagine I did my Anki cards or I did my flashcards on the lecture I can see everything that I wanted to learn and have mastered now I'm going to say, okay Luxe take five minutes and go ahead and try to recreate all the things and all the flashcards you saw and try to do it in something that makes sense it doesn't have to be readable it doesn't have to be full sentences what I'm personally looking for is when I'm writing something let's say I knew that a slide had three bullet points or a question of a flashcard had three pieces to its answer I'm going to start writing it and I'm going to find areas where I'm saying ah, no there's four but I only know two that's perfect, that's what you want that's what the brain dump does it helps you find the gaps in your knowledge every time I identify a gap I quickly put a star or underlined it or whatever and I'm going to do this for the rest of the lecture again speed is the game I'm going to try to find as many gaps as possible and then I'm going to go back to my flashcards I'm going to go to my slides and say oh, that was a bullet point that I was missing I'm going to write it in really quickly and I'm going to flip it over and I'm going to do it all over again it's a very quick process sometimes it takes two to five minutes you can do this on a whiteboard you can do this out loud if you're not somebody who likes to write but I like to do it on a piece of paper because I can't BS myself I can't write something down even though I've convinced myself that I knew it that's perfect system but as I'm doing this over and over again sometimes I can do two to three repetitions in a span of 20 minutes you can again speed is the game if I find myself writing something and I'm like, yep, I already know that's right I'm going to stop, move on to the next thing but if I find myself having difficulty boom, found a gap start and we'll come back to it later and the end result of this after two to three passes is I feel super confident about this one lecture if this was the test, you got it and if you do this for every single class you've nailed it now if you're somebody who can plug in a second review or second pass of your material I challenge you to actually do a brain done before you go into your main study strategy this way you'll be able to identify, okay what did I forget for this lecture? Now you can do your Anki cards afterwards again after you fill in your gaps do your flashcards and then come back to this once more if you have that buffer day a simple thing you can do is let's do a brain dump on every single lecture or lab that I have and then after each lecture I'm going to go ahead and fill in my gaps make sure that's a strength and do this for the duration of the lectures that I have I'm going to feel super confident going into that test really easy thing to do I promise you if you guys haven't tried it it looks wonders but I do have to schedule in the time to do so and then tip number three is to feed in practice questions into your natural study strategy so practice questions are great most students will use them but they tend to use them too late often what I would do in medical school instead of waiting until the last few days to start doing the questions from the review slides or practice questions from an extra resource that I had I would just naturally fit in practice questions even if it was a little bit at a time throughout my two weeks or three weeks of studying so I may just do two or three questions here on the weekends I may do five to 10 the goal of it is not only just to do questions and get in the practice of being able to answer multiple choice questions but if I make a mistake which I made tons of now I can change that and make it into a flashcard or I can put that into my Notion database or I can put that into my notebook and now when I'm reviewing on a daily basis not only am I reviewing the questions that come from the slides but also from the material from practice questions that I've missed or guessed correctly on this is a great way of building your foundation material of making sure you don't make that same mistake going into test A and again most importantly anxiety turns into confidence and before we get into phase four which is going to be super critical for somebody who wants to make consistent A's and not just sporadically have good grades I do ask that if you're finding this content helpful the best thing that you can do to help this channel and help the community of students who are just like you is to hit that like button I like to think that if you found this video helpful thus far there's going to be somebody out there that is struggling to study for exam and this video may help them with just one small thing so again if you want to pay it forward if you want to say thank you or if you just found any value from this at all the biggest thing that you can do for me and for the channel is to hit that like button now this phase was born when I took the hardest exam that I've ever taken to medical school which is step one this is your first licensing exam that you take in your medical journey that's the most important because at that time when I was taking it you would get one score that score can really determine what kind of specialty and what kind of doctor you can be so it was really stressful thankfully it's past fail now it's still stressful but that test was rough you're studying for six, eight weeks to take one exam that's like eight hours long and you just don't know how well you're gonna do and I vividly remember taking that exam having to use a restroom so I went to take a break looking myself in the mirror and I just looked defeated I knew at that time that that version of me was gonna do one or two things he was either gonna completely mess it up and still screw up the remaining questions that he had to do and ruin it for me now or he was gonna figure out a mental gain to make sure that the questions that were left he was gonna nail regardless of how poorly or well he did on the questions that he had already answered anxiety to confidence is one thing as we talked about in phase three but you always want that sense of control you can feel in sense of control even if the test is difficult or easy you feel like, you know what? I got this and here are three things you can do number one is to understand it is okay to schedule and readjust remember when we looked at our calendar each specific task was like showing up for a personal appointment you can move it around as much as you wish the reason I like to use a visual calendar like Google Calendar or Ical is because I can visually see how practical my schedule is first of all and if I need to make some changes just like we did for physiology exam in that example that we had below but also if I have a difficult day life happens, procrastination happens one of the exams and classes just takes much longer and goes into another task that I needed to do you can move those appointments around and saying, okay if I'm gonna move this physiology class now that means I'm gonna have to do more lectures this upcoming Saturday but that's okay I feel in sense of control despite what happened it is completely okay to readjust so you can only do so if you know what the rest of the plan is which is why phase one is the first one and the most important tip two and this is what I told myself in that mirror that one day I know it seems dramatic but it made such a big difference focus on the points gained not points lost every time you answer a question you wanna think of it as this question is going to raise my grade this is what you do when you take your practice questions when you actually take the real exam if it is a hard question honestly the funniest thing that I would tell myself is like okay you're gonna miss this anyways I would put a star next to the question I would mark it if I was taking a digital version and in my head if I got that right it was a bonus but every time I came to a question saying I know what the answer is I've studied my butt off this question is going to be an easy one it is a mental success cool my grade just went up I answered C I know it's C and then after answering the first question I'm gonna go to the next one and saying you know what I feel pretty confident the answers be here awesome beautiful I've answered two questions in a row grade just went up now if I get to the third question saying shoot I don't even know what it's asking okay well I missed it that's okay I didn't lose the points I just failed to gain them here I'm gonna go to the next question and try to do so if you can do it it's a small difference but now you're thinking of how your grade is improving throughout the duration exam versus going from a hundred down to whatever score you're gonna ultimately get it's basically your glass half full or half empty but we're talking about are we filling the glass or are we taking water out at the very end and that small change made such a big difference because each question again is an opportunity to improve your score so if you don't know it it's completely fine but it won't let you affect what you'll do on the next question ideally now the questions that you feel confident in you get correctly you don't let that stress and over anxiety getting your way and then finally tip three is to understand that the purpose of anxiety is to alert you but to not overwhelm you most students will spend so much time saying this test is going to be so important I need to do well because if I don't my average is gonna go down my answer to them is pretty simple I'm gonna say awesome your anxiety has told you that this test is important let's make sure we implement all four phases to make sure you do as best as possible but would you rather spend the 30, 40, 60 minutes that you are now being anxious about the exam or would you want to actually use that time to actually do the first lecture or get into your study strategy don't let your anxiety suck up time that you would love to be using to study and then cause more anxiety because you have less time to study it's ironic the students will spend so much time being anxious of how little time is left but they spend so much time being anxious that they have even less time and then they become more anxious it's just a death spiral so use your anxiety to alert yourself okay it's important what steps am I gonna take and then actually get into them now if you found those four phases helpful and having a plan for your next test or your next final and just getting your head straight then all I ask of them in return is to hit that like button but if you want more I promise you this is not where it ends if you go ahead and check out any of the links down below in the descriptions you'll find some of our free resources like our medical school handbook talks about all the tips I would use as a student not just how to study for example all of them that's absolutely free if you guys go ahead and click that below if you're interested in working with us one-on-one where we personally help you create a study system and a study strategy where you can go ahead and get the grades you want but not have to work as hard or as long go ahead and definitely check out our some of our coaching programs which are linked down below at the very least you can click that link down below just to see the type of results our students have gotten so you can at least be inspired to improve your grades whether you work with us or not completely up to you but if you are interested that'll be linked down below but again my friends if you found this video helpful go to this video right here on how to use Anki like a pro as well as this video right here on all the study strategies that I used to get a 3.9 GPA in med school hopefully you found this video helpful hopefully I was a little help to you guys in your journey thanks for being a part of mine I'll see you guys in the next one peace