 What is up guys? Karma Medic here and welcome back to another dose. Today I'm going to be doing something a little bit different, a little bit less education-y and tips and tricks for medical school things. I'm going to be talking about what is in my medical school backpack. I've gotten a couple of questions about what it is that I carry around with me to school, how it is that I study at school, and hopefully this video will help address some of those things. Just yesterday I did a Q&A with all of my followers on Instagram. It was really, really fun. I got to answer a bunch of you guys's questions and I want to keep doing it every single week. So if that's something that you guys are interested in, you can follow me on Instagram somewhere over here. Make sure to follow me and you can participate in those Q&As and ask me anything that you want. Alright, so let's get started with the video about what is in my backpack, what I carry to school with me every single day. So this is a Herschel backpack. I wanted it to be kind of simple, not too flashy. Just sort of be plain black but with a little bit of color or a little bit of style to it. It's pretty big. I don't know too much about backpacks. I just know that this one looks nice and I like it. It consists of three main compartments. There's that smaller compartment at the front that you guys can see and then in here there's the back compartment that carries electronics like my laptop and my iPad and then there's like that big main compartment at the front. So I'm actually not too sure what to start with. Let's get a couple of these things out of the way. Usually I try to keep as little things as possible in my bag but I don't know. I always say I want this as well. I want this as well. I want this as well and before I know it my bag is super, super heavy and I'm looking around this whole thing to school. I try and keep it as light as possible but it generally doesn't happen. First things first. I want to start off with what is like a staple of a medical student's backpack. What every medical student wants to carry around and does so proudly and that would be, let's put this down, and that would be my stethoscope. So this stethoscope is from Litman. I was super, super excited when I was going to medical school and I decided to get it in burgundy color because red is my favorite color and I also got the champagne finish on the end. I'll show you guys close-ups of these later. When you put it on patients seem to give you a little bit more respect. They seem to treat you as like a professional and that's really great because they take us seriously and we can ask all of our questions and they'll answer to us as if we were doctors. Carrying on stethoscope is really great. I only carry this on Tuesdays and Fridays when I'm in the hospital or in the GP and that's because I don't really need it when I'm attending lectures or the library or anything like that but it's really, really nice to have and I'm so glad that I got the Litman one because it was my favorite and I've been dreaming about it for a long time before getting into medical school. It's just one of those things that makes me super happy to have it in my backpack. So speaking of other things that I only carry on a Tuesday and a Friday that would be my medicine portfolio. This book I mentioned it previously in one of my more recent videos. It just has a couple of clinical skills that we need to get signed off by doctors either on GP or in the hospital and it basically keeps track of all the clinical skills that we're supposed to be learning in medicine as well as all the lectures and theory and things like that. You can also write your reflections in here so cases that you've seen like how you felt about them, what you think went well, what you think didn't go so well, when you were talking to the patient, anything you might have missed or want to do next time. So this is really useful to carry around on those days. Now let's move on to my absolutely necessary daily carries, things that I take with me every single day when I'm going to the lecture or to the library. I think we'll have to start with my electronics. So this is a case that used to hold only my MacBook but now it also carries my iPad. So we'll go through those two things one by one. This is my sexy new iPad and this is my MacBook Pro 13 inch. This MacBook is the one that I bought when I started university at Kings. I've been using a PC or Windows laptop for my whole life and honestly a MacBook has just changed everything. This is so light, its battery life is amazing, the user interface is so intuitive. It honestly has increased my productivity so much. I wish I bought one earlier. Now this Mac is what I will use to do everything that's sort of power intensive like writing essays, doing research, anything that requires me to be on an electronic device for a long period of time where I have to have many tabs open to do multitasking. This is where I do that and it does all of my work, emails, essay writing, research. Now a recent purchase which I'm super super super happy with is this new iPad Pro 2018. I decided to get the bigger one because I wanted to be able to do multitasking and things like that quite easily without risking my real estate of the screen. And basically this is what I use to write all of my lecture notes on now. A lot of you guys have been asking for a video on how I write my lecture notes, how I take study notes at university and it's coming soon I promise. It's just super difficult to film and I keep trying to film it and failing so it's coming out soon I promise. So on this iPad on the app notability is where I organize all my lecture notes, tutorials, case-based discussions, everything like that for university. So for example right now I'm doing supporting life and under there we have subheadings like cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, etc. So let's say under cardiovascular disease I'll open a lecture and I'll have the lecture slides up on my laptop. I'll be listening to the lecture and I'll be taking notes as I go along. And the great thing about the iPad is that you have this pencil and you're able to draw on the screen. You can highlight things as you would wish. You can copy paste images from lecture slides and annotate them on top. I found this to be a really really useful tool and in fact I used a Surface Pro 2 back when I was in university in Toronto and I used to take all of my notes electronically and write on lecture slides and things like that. But then it kind of died on me and I basically forgot about it until this new iPad came out and I was and I remembered how useful it was that I was writing on an actual screen and keeping all of my notes electronically. So I've been doing it now for a couple of weeks and I'm just so happy that I've switched back to digital notes. And if you guys are wondering why I switched digital notes let me show you. So these are my two folders from university all the handwritten notes I've ever taken both from the University of Toronto for this big folder here and for King's College London in this folder. But this is just so heavy this is so much paper and like the amount of organization and effort that it takes to hold on to something like this is honestly immense. I'm really proud of it. I wrote a ton of notes and studied super super hard but it's just so much work and so much effort to keep everything in paper on file. It's just way too much work and I don't want to have to do that again. These are the notes that I wrote for KCL last year and my first year. So there's like tons and tons and tons of notes in here. It's so much better to just have everything electronic and it'll save you so much time headache and hassle. Let's put those aside real quick. The next item that I never go to school without is my coffee flask. I am a huge coffee drinker. I have a cup or two before I leave the house in the morning and then throughout the day I'll have at least another three or four cups somewhere between five and seven cups of coffee a day. So I really really love my coffee so I need to have a flask because if I'm going to be buying coffee out each coffee is something like two to three and a half pounds in London so it's going to be a lot of money and that's going to rack up fast. So I carry around a coffee flask so I can get most of my coffee craving out of the way with coffee that I've made at home. I use coffee beans and a french press if you're wondering. I just think that black coffee tastes better and lasts much longer than if I was to mix it with milk or anything like that. So this next item is a pair of noise cancelling headphones. This specific pair of noise cancelling headphones are the Sony 1000MX3 I believe. They are absolutely incredible. Their noise cancelling is unparalleled, unmatched. They're super comfortable to wear for a long time. I can honestly barely hear myself right now. They're amazing for traveling for the commute on the tube and everything like that. I honestly can barely hear the sound of the train when I'm riding in the morning and it just makes my commute so much more pleasant. Any noise cancelling pair of headphones I would so highly recommend because it just adds so much value to your life. Really makes those commutes better. Really blocks out the sound and you can just relax on your way to work or school every morning. Now something a little bit more fun something that I always carry on in my backpack is this ping pong paddle bat or racket whatever you want to call it. Me and Kenji that you've seen in a couple of my other videos we play ping pong as much as we possibly can at uni. We have one table in the shed. I wish we had more because it's always full and busy at lunchtime. But really we play so much ping pong. We have so much beef and it's just a great way sort of pastime in between lectures or take breaks from study sessions in the library. And if you're wondering Kenji this is an official challenge to a ping pong YouTube series or championship or whatever you want to call it. I'm ready so let me know and let's go. So that's that. A couple more things for the big compartment. I'm not carrying this around all the time because this book is really heavy despite how small it is. This is The Essentials of Clinical Medicine by Kumar and Clark. As our testing in medical school has moved way more towards actual clinical questions about diseases, symptoms, management, treatments and things like that. This book is super super useful. It's not as useful anymore for me to just go through my lecture notes, memorize the lecture slides, having an actual read of what patients present with, what they look like, what medicines to give them. It's something that's becoming way more useful. So I'm carrying this book around when I'm studying for my exams and accompanying my lecture notes slides and notes. I also have my charger here. This small tiny charger charges my iPad Pro but since it's also a USB type C cable it can charge my MacBook which is great because this charger is tiny and light in comparison to the huge MacBook one so I'm really happy with this charger. And then finally I always carry a snack because I can't stop eating. All I do is eat fruit, rice cakes, mostly fruit but this is a snack that I like to carry in my bag. It's nothing big, just a couple of rice cakes that are really light, almost zero calories so I can just munch these forever and not have to worry about it. Okay now for the fun compartment of my bag. This mostly just has like knickknacks and small things that I want to have easy access to really quickly. First and foremost most importantly are these AirPods. They are absolutely amazing because as soon as you open the case they instantly connect to your phone. What more could you want? So convenience at its best. I wouldn't have bought these myself because personally I think they're super overpriced but I got them as a gift and I'm extremely happy to use them. Next is my face gel lanyard so this is for when I'm at the hospital. I can wear this around my neck and I'm easy identifiable as a second year medical student. Everyone knows what my rank is, what my role is and that's just really useful to have in the hospital along with your stethoscope. So other things that I carry in the small pocket of my bag is basically a small pharmacy. I'm an asthmatic if you didn't know so I'm always carrying my two inhalers in my bag. It's generally under control but I do have exacerbations every now and again so I have my reliever and my management inhaler just in case. I've got my strepsils, I've got my Lemsip, let's see what else I have in here. Pills for back pain, hand sanitizer, chewing gum, always need chewing gum. And also antihistamines that I carry around in this contact lens case that I got from my mom but yeah antihistamines are super important because I'm allergic to basically everything. And last but not least the super holy grail of my backpack. Something that no one ever has and that I always have and is super useful is a headphone splitter. Don't underestimate the importance of this little thing. People always need headphone splitters and they never ever have them. That's pretty much an overview of what it is that I carry in my backpack. This is not as minimal as I would like it to be. It's not as minimal as I think that it should be but usually I always find that I just want that extra thing in my bag and if I don't have it there I feel like I'm missing it and I should have had it. Yeah so I hope that gives you guys a little bit more of an insight into what it is that I carry in my school backpack. A little bit more on how I take notes and things like that. I'll make a full video on that topic coming soon. But if you guys enjoyed this video, if you enjoy these videos that are a little bit more personal, a little bit more about me as opposed to the UK cat and the Beeman interviews and things like that, do let me know with a comment down below. If you guys want to participate in the Ask Me Anything on Instagram or just generally chat to me, talk to me, ask me questions. You can follow me over here. And yeah guys that's about it. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Peace!