 Alright guys welcome back to the channel and another episode in the TMJ show where I help students just like you on their medical journey and hopefully get some advice as well. Today we are talking to Christy on all about how to manage some of the biggest struggles as a brand new medical student including how to study for really hard classes like anatomy, histology, physiology, things that you may be struggling with as well so let's get into it. Christy how are you doing? I'm good how are you? I'm doing great thanks for asking so what can we help you with? I'm sorry I have some questions about how to like study topics for example like physiology or more conceptual topics where you have to learn concepts rather than just kind of memorizing facts so that was my first question. Sure absolutely so I'm assuming you're a first year since you're asking those questions that right? Yes. Awesome have you tried any resources or ways to study for physiology or those kinds of conceptual topics before? I have I use BRS but for me I think I'm a more visual learner so I kind of have to put them together and look at big diagram for instance to kind of try to learn how it works together. Gotcha so diagrams are personally great options. I think for things like physiology that are like I agree with you are definitely conceptual based and requires like a step-by-step understanding. The approach I usually take is you know especially being a visual learner is let's say you know what your physiology topic for tomorrow in class is going to be. I would personally go watch like a youtube video or find a resource that you really enjoy but video really works well for visual learners to understand essentially the conceptual map so like for step one to step four of how somebody would explain it to you and then you can you know go through a resource like BRS or if the video did a great job then try to create that conceptual map from memory on a piece of paper that you can ideally keep so that's kind of my definition of the brain dump so if you're learning let's say a great example is like the physiology of how the heart works and how it pumps and the pacemakers and the heart and the way the you know the different electrolytes kind of move back and forward to create that. It's really confusing the first time you read it so if you had a high real high yield resource the visual resource for you in this case like a video that you can watch and say okay like this is the conceptual idea of what I'm supposed to understand try to recreate it yourself on a piece of paper and then ideally ideally you would mark where you're not able to get from point A to point two to point you know see all the way to the the end where you can create that lecture again from memory and ideally create that conceptual map then you can go back to the resource that you're using so whether it be BRS or watch that video again but that would be my initial approach about study so if I knew my lecture was tomorrow is about pacemaker function of the heart I would watch that youtube video of things like osmosis does a great job there's also other resources that I will link down below or send to you to be able to understand that small bit of physiology but you know some people really enjoy just reading the text but for you watch the video try to create that initial framework yourself on a piece of paper and now when you're going into lecture you kind of know what the high yield information is going to be so you kind of have that conceptual map in your head instead of all the facts given to you at one time you have the conceptual map instead so you can pay attention for that in lecture and try to make the the connections a little bit stronger based off the examples your professor gives or the images that they put on their slides and then you go home and you try to repeat this process again you try to create that blank piece of paper in a conceptual map where you write things out and now you have a visual representation of everything you understand how does that sound yeah that makes a lot of sense so what i'm gathering is if i watch the video then i get sort of the big picture of what's going on and you understand the steps that it takes to get from point a to point b or step one to step five and then i can see where i'm getting confused as far as getting from step to step exactly yeah because often when we're reading even great resources like brs you know they don't necessarily connect the dots they just move the dots right so they show you all the dots that are there and so you can definitely end up reading a chapter and you're like i think i understand this and then by the time the test comes around the professor explains to you like wait there's something missing i just don't know what so instead if you start with a resource that can really just package it for you and saying man if i could download this would be amazing but obviously you just want to know what the finished product looks like the same way that when you go to like a key or something you know what the furniture looks like so now you have an idea of where things will go and then you look at their confusing instructions like it's like reading a brs or high yield textbook it still doesn't always make sense of how things to go together because you had that visual representation of what things should look like at the very end you can start re-asking yourself questions only how to configure the information or if you need to watch something else to be able to connect those dots so start with that big picture final product use that resource that you want to to understand it and then have your own conceptual map that you're adding and creating because ideally if you can create a nice like blank piece or piece of paper of like how the heart pacemaker cells work then you can keep that paper there have like a folder and then by the time you're getting closer to exam you just have to refer to that because that's you know that's christie's version of how the pacemaker works okay that makes a lot of sense um i'll definitely try that um in the next block because we kind of already got past that section in this block um so for another question i have is although i do use pithoma um to help with for example like pathology and histology um our professors do go into a lot more detail and we are responsible for being able to analyze like a lot more images than are in pithoma um so i was wondering about like the best approach for that um especially normal histology which is not really covered in pithoma as much um because we have like hundreds of slides sometimes gotcha but does your does your slides come with a bunch of examples that are similar to what shows up on the final exam um they do it's just a lot to kind of take in i think for this one we had like 150 slides of um examples from like possible like structures that were responsible for being able to recognize so we have second-order questions that we have to answer um so they'll ask a second-order question about a structure that we have to identify on like histology so how are you studying for at the moment um so we tend to have like histology quizzes so we have this program called like slide hosting so it has all the slides there so usually i put them into anki and then i try to like ask myself second-order questions so i can kind of get used to doing that sure so that forces me to identify what the structure is and then answer a question so if i'm not identifying the structure correctly then i won't be able to answer the second-order question right um totally makes sense um are you so what's the difficulty with currently using anki because that would be a great approach so what's the friction you're experiencing i think just the volume of it there's so many slides and they can also look really different from slide to side at least to me they do because histology is difficult for me yeah um so one thing i would do is so just to clarify um it seems like some of your questions are second-order but some of your questions are simply like what am i looking at is that fair yes that's good so you know ideally um if you're missing the like the if you're missing the actual structure and what they are um personally when i'm doing anki and there's a lot of information i have to ask myself how i can get through that onki slide um in the first pass to be able to get that first bit of knowledge so ideally for example if you have 150 flashcards for all of the things on the slide then the first focus should be not being able to get in the second order of things sometimes like subconsciously you'll be able to say i already know what this is let me just see if i can quiz myself on what that is um but if you're going to try to do first and second order everything on 150 slides with multiple lectures you're going to get behind so the first step is can you identify everything right so um the the way i would personally do it is if i had 150 onki cards i needed to do because it's simply do i know it or not not can i like quickly like figure it out um i would use a timer use a specific timer on your phone you know mentally and saying i have five to ten seconds to quickly look at the slide and tell you what it is or what it's pointing to now that may seem overwhelming but the good part of it is if you can't do it in five to ten seconds and it's not the the highest material in terms of strength for you it's something that you kind of know you need to spend more time on maybe take a guess on um the beauty bank keys you can just say show it to me again but your first focus is can i identify all these structures on 150 and just rapidly make myself do it five seconds 10 seconds 15 the time doesn't really matter um just pick something that's quick enough for you so yeah well you're not spending excessive amount of time on each flashcard now as you start to go through it you know you're going to start to see those flashcards that are structures that you just don't really click and stick home but over time it's going to with like you know one or two repetitions of onki now in terms of second order questions which you still want to prepare for ideally what you can start doing to do is let's say you are now finally getting the structures down because you've gone through a few repetitions um but you don't really know how to answer that second order part of it i would create a list of what that structure is that you really don't know how to overlay into a second order question so if it's like a specific type of cell type like you know columnar epithelians i personally don't always remember my my histologies so bear with me but if there is something that you remember from histology that is not clicking home i would create like a list on a word doc or google doc um an excel sheet of those structures that are giving you trouble either identifying um or answering those second order questions and then have a session in your week where now you can go to google you can go to youtube less so but google or um brs histologies also a text if you enjoy how the way brs works and try to answer and knock out those topics over time so if you're struggling identifying the difference between a columnar epithelium just google the different examples that google will give you to be able to say okay these are the similarities i'm starting to notice between the slides i'm getting possibly things that may show up in the test and here are examples from google so that makes i think just familiarity is key and seeing similarities is key absolutely so to avoid getting overwhelmed you know your first like idea just like you said you have to be able to identify it before you can get to a second order question so make that your focus the first time without making it stressful it's saying you know because it's simply can you identify it or not do it as fast as possible things that you can do quickly press that show it to again like three days four days and things that you can show it to me in a minute and now as you go to that pass if it's 150 you know slides um and you're doing them within a few seconds ideally it won't take a very long time to be able to answer those and then the second time you do that pass now you can say okay these are the structures i struggled with um so let me identify these first that's my main focus and these are the structures i know so let me start doing that second order thinking and as you're doing this create that list of topics or structures that you struggle with as well as structures that you're okay with but don't understand that second order level thinking like what is their function how do they work what would happen if you know it was displaced etc okay i think that's helpful i guess hopefully you guys are enjoying this conversation so far with christy if you are and you're watching this on youtube go ahead and hit that like button down below one helps support the video but two it may also get the video in front of somebody who really needs to hear it another thing i struggle with i'll do although i do fairly well on the practicals for anatomy lab for me it takes a lot a lot of time for me to get to the point where i feel like i have sufficient understanding so i spend like hours and hours and hours in the lab which ideally is great but then i it sometimes have to sacrifice other things that i have to do and so i wouldn't don't want to have to do that um so i have a hard time kind of transferring like the relationships that i learn like in lecture to lab especially because we learn all of our anatomy in lecture the whole first week but our block is a lot longer than that right and so it's hard for me to like recall things from the first week and connect them back to the anatomy lab and also connecting the diagram to the cadaver itself and then from cadaver to cadaver and it just takes me hours and hours of practice um and i just want to be more efficient about doing that just kind of connecting all of that together sure no that's a that's a great question um i will say anatomy is one of those things that will take hours um so you may not be completely uh distant from the right approach um though what i will say is that um when you're going into anatomy lab especially when the weird structure where week one is all the information and then the latter weeks are like the you know going into lab and like actually figuring things out is i would split your understanding or the the different you know areas of the body so let's say you're doing the arm so eventually you'll start with the muscle you'll do the brachial plexus at some point you may do the neck at the same time so you kind of have like these bits of how the lectures are organized so what i would do is when i went in silky or when i was excuse me when i want to go into to actual cadaver lab um i would have some mental model of what i thought that that would look like and then i would simply compare contrast when i would get into cadaver like into the actual cadaver of saying you know this is right this is like looks right here is uh internal juggler here's external juggler but i thought this nerve would be here so mentally i need to address that um and so you just focus on one kind of aspect of the body that you'll be learning it and focus on that that mental model and that diagram um and over time what you'll be able to do is you know ideally as you're going through anatomy you can just create a list i thankfully i had this list when i was going into um for my class but all the structures that you need to know and they won't take you a lot of effort to create those lists of all the structures you need to be able to identify um but ideally you can then group them so you can identify here at a list of all the structures you need to know for anatomy and then you can group them like here's an upper neck anatomy structures that i need to know here's a lower neck here is the brachial plexus structures etc and then each time you go in your idea is go in with the framework of where things should be look at a cadaver and reconfigure your mental framework and so re-correct and then ideally look at another cadaver um where you can say okay here is how things lay out i feel like i understand this better and move from structure to structure so then it's effective again it's not always the time saving but the idea is when you go into lab you should be able to come out saying i understand how the upper neck anatomy works and not only can i do it on one cadaver i can do it on the second one um and then you keep every time you go into the next uh session it should be let's focus on the next part so go on with the mental model whether it's watching a video on youtube using your diagrams from your lecture saying these are how things would look like if the cadaver was right in front of me go in see the cadaver and re-correct look at one more um and then do that self-correction and ideally as you do that with more repetition you'll have a mental model not just that's stuck in your head but something that applies to multiple different forms of anatomy in two different cadavers or more okay i think that makes sense i think with the actual identification itself i think i do fine i think my main struggle is like the lecture style questions is what i think i have most trouble with um but i think those also require a good understanding of not only how the structures are positioned relative to each other but also like relationships to other things that we learned in class and also clinical correlates right so i think that just comes with a lot of practice is what i'm just gathering at it's one of those classes that is frustrating but the the way i personally would structure is my first thing is to have like a picture of what things would look like and so usually i would do this before the dissection for you it's that first week go into lab and say oh you know crap like this is not how it looks like let me like readdress where i thought things would be and then fix my issues um and then ideally identify it on another structure either at that time or another session um and then using things like anki to be able to like use the image inclusions to be able to get those mental models a little bit better refined uh and those clinical correlates i loved using questions from like you rolled or us mlerx because they would ask questions like oh if you lost this nerve or if you got injured here what would be the symptoms you would be seeing or if somebody came in with like numbness on these fingers uh what would that be so ideally then you have a good group of like oh it's the ulnar nerve which goes here which i also remember from my clinical correlates like they love to ask a question about where it is in the elbow and that again is repetition but it's like a step-by-step repetition okay i think i'm going to try to make sure i have a good understanding when i'm in lab and then build on that information as i go yeah i feel like a lot of times the struggle is you go and see a cadaver and you're just hoping things stick but cadavers are not pretty you know you may cause the damage yourself so if you come in with a mental model and then correct it's much easier versus like saying i hope this sticks so maybe that initial approach may just be going in with resources anatomy zone 3d is great youtube videos that can give you pictures in your mind and then you can walk in and say oh it looks like that great it doesn't look like that let me fix that so how many times do you recommend i guess reviewing a lecture and over what period of time i think that's something that i'm still trying to figure out like i have a spreadsheet where i try to review each lecture at least four times within a block and so i worked on like what day i reviewed it out and like my comfort level with it so is it is it easy medium or hard perfect did i watched a lecture did i do cards for that lecture like all the information is in there nice personally i think the three to four repetitions is a good mix i would usually do it obviously the day of lecture you have a little bit of repetition if you do study anything before the lecture but you don't have to but the day of lecture is repetition one during that weekend i would break the first day of the weekend so saturday to do monday to wednesday's lectures and then the sunday to do thursday to fridays with a little bit of kind of preparations for mondays that's how i split us that'd be repetition two and then if you had a four-week block and then you know week three would be also let's start reviewing for those things from week one and week two and like each day i would be doing like two or three lectures in addition to what i was doing for class by just either doing my flashcards again or doing practice questions that would be repetition three and then a week four i'm really just going into like not cram mode but ideally you've seen everything you know a few times now and now it's more of like oh like let me look at everything really fast and saying oh here's a topic that's gonna give me trouble on the test for sure so let me spend time now reviewing this that's repetition four so as long as you do it in a structured way that's comfortable you don't have to go crazy so three to four is perfect but yeah thank you so much for being a part of this interview hopefully a lot of people get some help and advice that is applicable to you but also applicable to their journey but hopefully you have a good one and we'll talk to you soon i hope you did too all right i guess hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode in this interview that we have a christie she has a great head on her shoulders is gonna do great things but obviously she did some help here and there so also let me know in the comment section down below what advice you would have given to her what questions you guys have as a brand new medical student and speaking of advice if you do want more step-by-step advice just like this and you don't want to wait for our next episode then go ahead and check out 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one take care my friends peace