 Studying for finals and the weeks leading up to it are nothing short of freaking stressful. In college it was normal for me to have three to four exams in a matter of just a few days and don't even get me started about the finals exams that I had in medical school. And while it took some time, here's what I learned that changed how I approached and did on my exams. If you want to ace your test then listen up. And at the end of this episode I'll also share how you can access me showing you this entire process of prepping for your final in even more detail. Step number one is planning once and planning well. Back in my college days, finals weeks would be super stressful because it would creep up on me. And this meant unfortunately realizing that I had too many lectures to review for too many classes and would too little time. It simply wasn't possible back then to really cover each lecture well enough without doing endless amounts of all-nighters. But thankfully in college I started this finals prep session which I continued to use in medical school and it worked wonders. About two to three weeks before your exam, earlier if possible sit down and do the following steps. Step number one is to open up your calendar, a digital version like Google or iCal works wonders. Step number two is in your calendar mark all of the deadlines for your finals, your papers, etc. that you have due at the end of the semester. During this step I also like to add in the respective lectures that will be covered in that test into the description and also count them. So for example you may add into your calendar physics finals lecture 21 to lecture 41, 20 lectures. Step number three is to mark your deadline for when you want to aim to finish reviewing all the lectures. Ideally doing this two to three days before works wonders. Now depending on when you start this process it may not always be possible so sometimes it's okay to do one to two days before. Now step number four is after knowing how many lectures per each test you have to cover is to add a start date for when you will begin your finals review. During this step you'll be able to see the practicality of covering all of your lectures for all the exams you have during your finals prep. And this may mean that you realize you have to start studying for your finals today or tomorrow that's better than you know that now versus later on. Because ultimately you'll now know how many lectures you'll be responsible for each day on average. To complete this process you're going to be doing this for every single test that you have. So now you know your average amount of lectures that you'll be responsible for. So for example you may find that for exam one you need to review on average three lectures per day. You may choose to do two on the weekdays and maybe three to four on the weekends to help even it out. For exam two you may realize that if you start earlier you can do one lecture per day and two on the weekends and exam three could be similar. If you find that the numbers per day of lectures that you're responsible for are getting crazy that may mean that you have to start studying earlier or do more on a daily or weekend basis or maybe perhaps even push your end date of when you'll be done reviewing all of your lectures. And again while this process may be stressful when you realize how much work you have to do at least you know the numbers you need to hit on a daily and weekly basis. Now the final step and this really worked wonders is adding the lectures that you'll be covering on those daily review sessions. You can do this numerically in the order that the lectures were presented or even based on the materials you feel weak is to bet about. And if you're interested I share a bonus method on planning your lectures in our finals playbook workshop which I'll link down below. And yes this may seem like a lot of steps for just the planning stage but if you do this well and you do this early you will now just be able to show up and do the work on a daily basis and avoid being stuck in this planning stage from day to day. Now step number two is what I call the checklist method. Now for any finals prep it's stressful for not just how many lectures you have to review but how many topics you have to master. Here is an easy way to build some confidence. Regardless of what study method you use to study for your finals if you're interested in some of the ones that I use I'll link down below the episode of how I got a 3.9 GPA in medical school and all the study methods to help me do that. But once you have a study method of choice I recommend keeping a running list of all the topics in that lecture or exam you want to master. Think of this as your hit list that you ultimately want to have mastered by the day of the exam. An easy way to do this is have a word document with all of the topics for each individual lecture and the entire exam and begin color coding them as you get through your review phase. So for example if I felt like a topic was mastered I would color coded green. If a topic needed more work and I needed to come back to it I would color coded orange and if something didn't feel comfortable at all I would color coded red. And the benefit of this checklist method is not only can you see everything that you have to master before test day but as you do more review you can ideally see this checklist become more green and less red and thus feel that confidence going into the next step. And the next step is step number three which is having a weakness review system. Now it goes without saying that some of these topics will simply need more reps and attention. So if you're using the checklist method from the prior step you can now go back and know what to focus on more using your visual color coding system. Then you can do one of the followings to your study techniques to review them. Here are three easy ways to implement the weakness review. Option number one is to start each study session with about 10 to 15 minutes of reviewing those reviewed topics that you have color coded to be difficult. Using our prior example these would be topics that we color coded red. During this 10 to 15 minutes slot you can just simply go to the next red topic that hasn't been touched yet and review those using your study method of choice. Again if you're interested in our finals playbook workshop I share a few examples of study methods that work really well for finals prep as well as just studying in general. That'll be linked down below in the description if you guys wanna see more details. Option number two is just set some time at the start of each day for a weakness review. You can do 30 minutes and split that time based off the exams you have to review or you can split the weakness review per exam depending on the day of the week. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday you may choose to just do weakness reviews at the start of the day for exam number one and then Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday you may choose to do this for exam number two. Option number three is incorporating our free recall method at the end of your study session. And that gets into step number four which is the free recall though. Now by this point in your finals prep you've likely done some sort of study method that allows you to memorize the facts and the details but not really help you connect the dots in the bigger picture. This is completely normal when we're reviewing and studying for finals but it also is stress provoking cause we still don't feel comfortable enough with the material. This is where the free recall session or the brain dump as I like to call it comes in. Now you can do this at any point during your study review. Often I like to do this after I review a lecture or on the weekend when I'm reviewing my red topics. But simply how the free recall session works is grab a blank piece of paper or a whiteboard and from memory try to recreate that topic or lecture that you want to review. This is super effective especially if you do this right after reviewing a lecture because now you'll start to identify things that you know are part of the lecture but you somehow still manage to forget. Perhaps there was a topic that had three to four bullet points and you still only managed to remember two of them. This is perfect because now you've identified a gap in your knowledge that you ideally would want to know now versus on test day. You can again do this during your weakness review time where you take things from your checklist and just do a free recall session of those. But regardless of when you choose to incorporate this brain dump or free recall session go ahead and identify those gaps and go back to your slides, your texts, your notes and fill in the gaps and then erase your whiteboard or flip your paper over and do this process for memory again. With more repetitions you'll find that your overall connection of the topics and ideas is better as you get closer ideally one to two days before exam you can even try to create a free recall of each lecture or just go through your checklist again to just make sure where you need more refining. Now step number five is the final pass. Now this is really a bonus step but a confidence booster that I just love using. If you follow the steps above you should be able to go through your checklist on the day before the exam as well as the morning of the exam and be able to simply say, yep, I got that one. I know that one. I feel comfortable with this topic. This step isn't really meant for an extra bit of studying or review. It's really meant for you to be able to go through all the topics you've learned be able to tell yourself, I feel comfortable if this showed up on the exam. It's that last bit of confidence that really can help make the difference between making a B or an A. Now if you enjoy these steps and you want more in-depth help in studying for your finals I put together a step-by-step breakdown of how to ace your finals and your finalist prep using our finals playbook workshop. It's the same process that I used in college and medical school to ace my exams. If you want to know more and want to see the step-by-step details I'll link it down below in the description. But if you enjoy this episode make sure you hit that subscribe and like button add your comments and questions down below. Super interesting to see what you guys think about this process. And if you enjoy this episode then go ahead and check out this one on all of the study methods that I used to get a 3.9 GPA in medical school as well as this episode right here which is our most popular on YouTube on how I use the onky method to study just five hours a day in medical school and still crush it. Hope you guys enjoyed these tips and strategies and as always thank you so much for being a part of our journey. Hopefully we were a little help to you guys and yours. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.