 So today we're going to have a little bit of fun. I'm basically going to play med school consultant on different sites like reddit.com, student forum, as well as Cora and basically answer the most common questions that I see there. And hopefully if you have any of these questions for one another answer, so you can benefit. So let's get into it. All right guys, what is going on? Luxury for an MD journey, helping you people just like you succeed on their medical journey with less stress. If you're new to this channel or the platform, my name is Lux. I'm an internal medicine resident helping people succeed on their medical journey with less stress. That's been my goal for the last few years. So if you enjoy that concept, that motivation and our message, then go ahead and consider liking and subscribing if you're watching on YouTube. And if you're listening to it on a podcast, consider subscribing as well. But today as I mentioned, we're going to have a little bit of fun. I'm going to pop up on my computer screen some of the more popular sites to ask questions regarding medical school or just anything in general. And then hopefully I can answer them and you guys can benefit. Let me know what you think. So we are going to start with Cora.com. It's people ask questions all the time in there. The first question I see from Jacob is how do doctors remember what they learned from medical school? Fun fact, sometimes we don't really remember as much as you think we do. A lot of it, and I made a video about this earlier of kind of how I review things, realize that we forget some of the most common things. Things like how to manage a heart attack, how to manage people that aren't breathing well, especially a lot of the training that we get in medical school is very test driven. So I have to pass exams like step one, step two, as well as our shelf exams. But then we're removed from that patient care. You know, you may be tested on things for surgery rotation or OB-GYN rotation, but then you may not do that ever. Again, if you don't choose to go into that specialty. So really the only way that we learn and remember things is by having some form or review. I like to use flashcards in some form or doing these apps that quiz me on cases or listening to podcasts about like case presentations. So that's kind of how I remember things Jacob, but there's no real right way around with it. The fun fact is we just don't really remember as much as you think we do. The actual memory comes from just actually taking care of patients with high blood pressure or delivering a new baby and kind of knowing everything that goes around it. So if you asked me about OB-GYN related questions I would absolutely have no idea. And that's simply just because I've been so far removed from it, I take care of adults and not babies. So Anne asked, can you give me any tips for studying in a medical school? Yeah, we can break it down into a few steps. So the first thing I will tell you to do is to really identify what you're currently doing if you already have a system and then spend a day or two really tracking you without wanting to change anything. Sometimes we always want to ask what can I do differently but the first thing to identify is what you're doing. And that includes tracking your techniques, tracking the time you're spending and then the last thing is tracking how in retrospect do you feel that that technique was? If you were doing flashcards as your method and you were spending two hours, how much of that two hours did you feel was actually effective? And if you find after that review, and I like to write it down or create an Excel sheet or something where I can document numbers, but if you feel like that was pretty ineffective, that's gonna be a good indication that maybe that technique needs to completely go away or you need to improve that because then the next question becomes, well, I like doing flashcards that gives them retention out of it, but I need to learn how to do them faster. Then you can go ahead and step number two and ask yourself how can you tinker with your system, look through online, resources, people who make YouTube channels for fun and ask yourself, what type of things are they doing regarding flashcards? And obviously you can replace this with whatever technique you want. And then step three is to incorporate that one or two change and make a small adjustment in your study technique instead of trying to do something completely different. So that is kind of my approach of kind of how to identify a study method. Now tips for studying, I would definitely recommend doing things that are active and more long term retention based almost 80% of the time. A lot of the times we have to do some form of passive learning where we're reading the textbook or listing the lecture, but even those you can make a little bit more active. But when you're reviewing, try not to be the person who's reviewing the syllabus and spending an hour reading, have some form of active learning in that process, whether that's going through a few pages and asking yourself, okay, what did I learn? Can I review that in like a sentence or two? Can I review this paragraph in a sentence or two? Making it active that way it's easier to review in the future as well as kind of remember when it comes to your test time. So those are just a few things that I will tell you. Man, hopefully you enjoyed those tips. Ben asked, why is medical school notoriously arduous? So I can't remember what arduous stands for, what, let's see, something that's like car involving or requiring studying is difficult. Okay, I was not far off. My vocabulary is absolutely terrible, by the way. Why is it arduous? So I think I've made a video on this past. It's actually one of the more popular ones on my channel which is, why is medical hard or is it really hard? And my answer is not really. Not everyone agrees with me. I get some flack in the comments section down below, but basically I think medical school is more of a test of your consistency when you have a large amount of volume. So that's problem number one is that just a lot of information. And number two is that there's consistent large amount of information. It's not like you have one class or one test of a semester that's really busy and then things get a little bit easier or you have a busy semester and the other semesters of college get a little bit busier. It's like every class and every kind of block topic organ system is going to hit you hard. So you have a lot of consistency of large amounts of volume. The material itself is not necessarily more difficult than college material. Sometimes it's more advanced, but that's true for any topic. When you think about your first classes that you learned as a freshman college, compared to what you were learning at the very end as your senior year, would you consider now that material to be really difficult? No, maybe it's just more advanced and more specific. So there is going to be topics that it's gonna require more of your time to understand and also gonna require a little more practice, but that's just part of learning. But I think the majority of what makes medical school arduous, learning a new vocab word, thanks Ben, is that the fact that you have to be consistent every single day and if you get behind and you have more information to consume. And so it's like the pancake theory that I talked about in the other video, which is imagine somebody gives you a stack of pancakes to eat and you're able to do it day one, day two, but day three, you choose not to eat it because you just don't want to and you're not interested in pancakes anymore. But day four, you're having to eat that stack of pancakes as well as a day before they missed. And it starts to add up and you have like five stacks of pancakes or two and a half over time, it just becomes difficult to consume and that's where the burnout comes in. So if you can be consistent, if you can have a system that can make you efficient. So like some of the questions that we talked about earlier, it's not too bad. I mean, it's still going to be challenging because the material is going to require so much consistency over the span of four years. But that's really my two cents. Comment down below if you agree or disagree. So the next question I see from Joel is why should I go to medical school? Now, if you're asking me that question, then I don't know if the field is specially for you. I feel like the idea of going into medicine is something that you should have an interest in. Maybe it's not necessarily becoming a physician. The next question is why I want to become a doctor versus a nurse versus a physical therapist versus a physician assistant versus a healthcare administrator. Those are all areas in healthcare. But if you're asking why should I go to med school or should I go to med school for the money or the prestige or the respect, absolutely not. So that's my two cents. If you're having to ask that question, I don't think I can really answer that for you. It's kind of like why should I go to business school or I should become a lawyer. I don't want my lawyer to be asking why they should be going to the school. If the train doesn't become a lawyer, you get the point. So obviously you may be in a situation where you're kind of deciding between two different fields and maybe you have a path here and a path there, but I'd recommend suggesting why you want to go into both and then go from there. So Robert asked a really good question, which is how do you support yourself financially through medical school? So this depends on your situation, your family situation. If you worked in the past, if you have a significant other, I'll tell you my story. So I funded my med school through loans all four years. And so when you get a loan through financial aid, you're able to obviously pay for your tuition and then you can choose how much of a loan you wanna take for your living expenses. So I think for me, my tuition was about $20,000, give or take a year, and then I had opportunity to take up to $48,000 of loans per year. It's a lot of money. So some years when I knew I'd have more expenses, whether that would be for traveling for residency or moving apartments, things of that sort, I took a little bit more of those loans and I tried to back calculate depending on my rent and my living expenses, how much I was paying for food and things of that sort. And basically try to keep a budget. I'm saying, maybe I only need $35,000 a year to pay off my tuition and then $15,000 to live on. And so that's kind of how I got myself through. I also worked some side jobs at the rec center at the medical school, as well as worked as a tutor in my fourth year and that job paid really well. But those kinds of things really helped me financially get through. I also worked a job a year before medical school. So I had a little bit of financial buffer, especially when I needed some money here and there for big time purchases. So Michael asked another question. These are all, really, I actually really like doing this. Can an average medical student or average student make it through medical school by just working hard? So I guess it depends on what you mean by just making it through. Can you pass and graduate? Absolutely, working hard is probably like 90% of it. 10% of it is some form of retention. And maybe 1% if you're trying to get to 101 is just some natural talent and things going your way. But yeah, working hard can definitely just get you to medical school. Hopefully through the process of working hard you're able to retain more information, become better at your clinical rotations and get the grades and the board scores. So can you graduate medical school by working hard? Absolutely. Now if you wanna be the top of your class it's gonna require you to do a little bit more than just working hard, but also be in the working smart mode. That includes trying to become a high performer by spending less time getting more done. That's a whole different video on how to be more productive, how to be more efficient, how to produce more with less time. Can an average student get through by just putting in the hard work? Yeah, I absolutely think so. I would say a majority of them are an example of it. Ooh, I like this question by David. How do I deal with gunners in med school? So if you are unfamiliar with the term which most of you guys probably know, gunners are people in med school. The extreme version is somebody who will go out of their ways. Other people look bad themselves look amazing because they have really high hopes and goals and aspirations and they're willing to step over people to get that. And there's gonna be gunners in every medical school class so if you feel like an institution that has more gunners than others I don't actually believe that. My institution had gunners, other institutions that are supposed to be a lot more friendly and I also had their examples but they're also people who aren't the extreme situation but people who are always stressed out and let everyone know or people on the opposite end that are doing really well but also let everyone know. These are two individuals you don't like to spend time with at medical school and so usually my strategy is limit my time that I spend with them. Try not to have them in your social circle and if they are so for some reason in your social circle because you have mutual friends and I would just say limit your time with them as much as possible and make sure that you don't go into gunner mode and being stressed out by them. So if they're being stressed out try to get away from them, remind yourself of the priorities you need to have. The biggest thing happened is I can be around gunners in med school and residency all the time just because I really just don't care when people are stressed around me and you sympathize with them and you kind of move on but you don't let that affect you and that's the biggest thing. Which is harder, med school or residency? Definitely residency. Med school is something that has a very nice structure there are days where you may not have to go to school because things can be watched online and I miss those days. Obviously trying to read a textbook and studying for exams things like that. I'm not missing that absolutely. Residency is tough. The hours are consistently long especially on the rotations with things like ICU and general medicine, surgery is a big one. I feel for my surgery colleagues. So there's different challenges but I would say that if you require something that's hard that intermittently gives you a break that school gives you enough of those. Residency is kind of just like continues to go on until you finish your training. So definitely you need a residency. So those were some good questions. I think that it's a good time to go ahead and move to reddit.com and see if we can answer your last few before we close off this video. So this is an interesting post that I see already that says somebody thought that med school would be a walk in the park which I'm already intrigued by. So this is a good question which actually comes from a med student in the UK. We finished med school on their question of when they compare UK med schools to the US the schools they realize that we here in the US are just definitely more stressed out. Overworked. They said that they were able to work part time to their friends and families. So that's an interesting perspective. I'm honestly not too sure. I think part of it is that we have a very kind of in finish line goal focus here in the States where it's always especially in pre-med and medical school environment where people are always trying to get to the finish line and try to hope they can just reward their thoughts off in the hopes that they're gonna have some different kind of results. Honestly, you can have the process I did when I was doing medical school which is still make time for your priorities. I always went home every other week to see my family and now my now wife. When I was in the first couple of years in med school I made sure I started a new side project because I was interested in doing that. So I don't know if we teach to a higher standard which is part of the question I think is just people have a little bit of higher expectations just because of pressure getting into institutions and usually the people that are going into medicine just have a different work ethic and sometimes it's not always for the best. And so I don't know, my UK colleagues, comment down below what do you think the difference is. All right, and so we'll do one more question. This one is, can I get into medical school without a research experience? I get this question a lot from my international readers and subscribers but even for people who live in the States if you wanna go to a specific med school this person has done zero research experience but they volunteered in the labs. They have some, they have a really good GPA at 3.9. They really wanna see if they can get into med school without it. I think absolutely, the answer really depends on the institution that you're applying to. If you're applying to an institution that really prefers to have research and you can tell by just the kind of institution it is, the question they may ask on their secondary application, you know, if the institution has an essay of our research you can assume that they may wanna know if you're interested in that may be a priority. If they wanna ask more about community service and public health, that may be a more of a priority for them. So just make sure you kind of ask yourself what a different program is focusing on and I'll kind of tell you what they are prioritizing. But that guys is a brief session that me serving as a medical consultant on quoraandredin.com. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. Let me know in the comments section down below. If you did enjoy this episode and this video make sure you go ahead and hit that like button, hit that subscribe button and if you haven't hit the notification bell as well because we're putting out videos like this twice a week just for people like you. Hopefully you guys have been enjoying the frequency of content we've been putting out. Let me know in the comments section down below actually in the description you'll find a survey that will indicate and give you the opportunity to tell me what subjects and topics we want me to make a video about in the future. And it's completely anonymous so go ahead and put out all your suggestions and I'll be happy to make a video just for you. But thank you guys so much for tuning in. Hopefully I've been a little help to you on your journey. Hopefully you guys have enjoyed this style of content. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.