 So I've been studying for about nine years now And I think it's fair to say that I've made my fair share of mistakes before getting to a point where I feel pretty good with my Studying habits. I've been sharing these habits that I've built over all this time with you here on this YouTube channel And I think it's time that I took a deep dive into everything that I wish I would have done differently Things that I wish I knew earlier that would have helped me save a lot of time and headache and effort going forward for a lot Of my time in education. I would hand write notes and I would write a lot I would distill my lecture notes into a shorter like little booklet And then I would review that booklet and distill it down into a single page document And then I would just read that over and over and over and over again as time went on throughout my university career University became more demanding especially in my clinical years when I had spent a lot of time in the hospital And I just could no longer keep up with this form of writing notes and distilling it down and writing them again and again Of course in between all this time I got my iPad which completely changed the game for me and meant that I could annotate on lecture slides I could take digital notes. I could carry them everywhere. I've got plenty of videos about my pads here on the YouTube channel But it didn't really fix the problem that I had where I just needed to take a large large volume of handwritten notes So when I eventually got deep into my clinical years in fourth year of medical school I made a huge change to my note-taking style and basically what I did was I stopped taking notes I just didn't have the time to sit down and listen to lectures and write out all the notes from those lectures Because of just how much there was to know up until this point I had relied on this skill which I didn't realize that I had and I had acquired over my time in education Which was just distilling information into what was useful and what was examinable and what wasn't when I stopped taking notes And I just used past paper questions to distill the most important information I found myself really only saving or writing down the very few things that I thought were most most important most high yield and Most likely to show up or be tested on for our exams and so a couple of months into my fourth year I stopped taking notes all together and I just started saving those most important pieces of information from past paper questions into my notion database Looking back I just wish that I had trusted this idea that not writing notes was a viable option I had been doing it for so long that I had this idea in my head that because I've been getting the grades that I wanted Using this technique and it's gotten me where I want to be that it must be a good way of studying And it must be the best thing to do and that if I was to change my note-taking style somehow that I might risk everything And start performing poorly if I was to give advice to anyone now I'd say that changing up your studying style is key And if you think that there's something that can be improved upon or something that you could be doing better then Test it do it go for that change these types of changes could make you more efficient with your studying And it can give you more time to do things outside of school that you really enjoy that you love and you want to get done Looking back on it now instead of being scared to change my studying technique and do something different I could have just trialed it for one or two weeks or for one exam and tested myself and see if I was still retaining the same Amount of information that I was with handwriting notes You can always try the new technique and if it works then great And if it doesn't you can just make adjustments go back to where you were or try something else and move on Looking back on some of the most difficult exams of my life like the MCAT trying to get into medical school in Canada And the USM at least step one which I wrote more recently that allows you to practice medicine in the us I realized that I've put a lot of pressure on myself I put a lot of time and energy into working on these exams because I felt like so much was writing on the outcome of them And the truth is that so much was writing on those exams I operated under the assumption that if I work incredibly hard then there's no way that I could perform badly Which would mean that I would get my desired outcome either getting into medical school in Canada or passing the USM at step one and being able to practice medicine in the states And although I really do believe that there is a correlation between how much hard work you put into studying for an exam And the outcome there's also a balance and looking back I don't think that I needed to put so much pressure on myself for these exams And if you look back to some of my videos when studying for the USM at step one I mean, I was really into hard core studying mode for 10 hours a day for about five months And it took a huge huge toll on me usually with normal exams in my previous degree or now in medical school I'm pretty much completely relaxed I go into the exam hall knowing that I've done everything that I possibly could have done in order to do well And if I don't end up doing well then it's not really down to something that I did because I did my best But these bigger exams where I don't really have another chance to reset them without significant difficulty or delays and Just how important they are and how much emphasis and weighting there is on them for the desired outcome meant that there was a lot of added pressure This was hard to ignore and it led me to just Overwhelming myself with the thought of working harder and harder than I ever had before Maybe this also had something to do with the fact that these exams are just so vastly different from your normal exams at University because they're so vast with the amount of knowledge and material that you need to cover There's this big unknown and it's almost like the fact that I didn't know what to expect And I didn't know what was on it added to the fear of it just being unknown and making me want to study harder What this eventually led to was me putting more and more pressure on myself to study and learn absolutely everything I could about the exam and honestly looking back it just became too much And I wish I would have gone easier on myself before taking on such a huge studying project like one of these big exams I would really advise just thinking about and reflecting on you know Where your limits are in terms of studying and before starting one of these exams Think about whether it's going to drastically change your life And you know how important that is to you think about how this is all going to factor into how stressed you might feel Both for the exam but also in other aspects of your life when dealing with your relationships your family etc And how tempted this might make you to put lots of extra pressure on yourself with all of this in mind Consider really how you can alter your routine to reduce pressure on yourself or mix in and put into your schedule Lots of studying breaks lots of fun things You know big holidays or things to look forward to when it's all done Just do your best to try and reduce the amount of pressure on yourself if you can You want just enough pressure to make sure that you actually do the studying and get all the work done But not so much that you completely burn out and just become a different person during that studying time Number three is about studying solo And I honestly wish that I'd made the effort to study with others sooner and more often in my university life When we think of studying often we think of it as a solo task You think of yourself chained to a desk getting on with the lecture work And you know there's rarely anyone else around you studying alone is an effective way to study But studying using lots of different methods I think is probably the key to keeping things fresh keeping you excited about the work and doing well over long periods of time Without burning out looking back on my university life You know spending so many hours studying by myself in my room or in the library I don't think was the best thing to do throughout medical school when studying for my oskies I worked with other people on my course shout out to kenji and georgina and we tested each other constantly We work together constantly and it's such a good idea because you've got a resource in your friends Your friends are themselves a studying resource They know things that you don't and you'll be able to explain things to them And they can tell you whether you've understood it well enough or not And it's just a really active way of learning and it means that you'll learn and you'll retain a lot more Information than if you were just studying alone. This is something that we do a lot of in the karma club We have a study with me discord channel Which means that people who are equally as motivated as you can jump in there and study together We push each other and motivate each other to get work done. Sometimes we have our cameras on sometimes we have them off We chill we chat send memes and it's just a great time It reminds you that you're not doing this alone That there are other people who are going through this studying experience with you And I think that's such an important and invaluable Intangible part of studying if it's something that you might be interested in check out my patreon to join the karma club I'll leave a link in the description down below when we study alone We rarely talk out loud and check if we understand the things that we're studying We don't have people around us that can challenge our understanding of different topics that might not quite be right Studying in groups I found also helped me fine tune the way that I was speaking to patients And it better prepared me for the questions that doctors might have for me when I'm on the wards It's really a win-win and I just wish that I'd started doing this sooner So number four studying passively. This is something that I spent a lot of time doing especially in my first degree It's so easy to get stuck in a routine and not think about how changing that routine could make things more efficient And a better use of your time when studying and also sometimes when you sit down to get work done Just choosing to do the easy thing of passively reading over your notes or listening to a lecture can be a much easier choice Or decision than realizing that you have to sit there and test yourself and really learn the material One of my biggest mistakes by far has been spending too much time on passively learning going to lectures and just sitting there Listening passively whilst making notes that aren't really helpful in the understanding the concepts or helping me pass my exams But the act of being there and doing those things feels like you're working it feels like you're studying So it's easy to trick yourself into doing those things instead of the actual work that you need to do We all know by now that active recall and space repetition are really important and have been shown to help us Do really well in exams and I really wish I would have focused on this active recall and doing questions more often From day one rather than relying on these passive techniques because at the time I just thought that's how I should be working I had been taking notes since I was in high school and since my first degree and I just thought Let me just keep taking notes that must be the best way to study I had this mentality of it's worked for me in the past So I shouldn't change anything now because it might risk, you know My future exams are my future performance But in reality that wasn't a sustainable way to work and as my university demands got larger and larger And I spent more time in the hospitals I just didn't have the time to keep studying like that reading my notes over and over and over again To somehow wrote to memorize or squeeze the info into my brain just isn't the best use of my time It's easy for me to see this in hindsight, but it was difficult for me to change when I was going through it I think evaluating where you're at on a regular basis and thinking about what is actually useful And what is working for me and what's really not working for me and fine tuning that and reflecting on it Is key to your studying routine. I would honestly recommend doing this as regularly as you can You know, maybe once a semester every two semesters once a year Just sort of reflect and think back on how well your studying techniques have worked for you Whether there's something you could have done better and how you might be able to change that Instead of doing what I did which is just continuing to do the same thing that you've done for a long time Because you think that's just what you should be doing and it's what's worked Another thing that I wish I would have done from the start of medical school or just in education in general To be honest is to be guided by past papers in my studying Instead of seeing them as something that you do in the final days or final weeks of your revision Starting to go through past paper questions earlier on is useful because you start to learn the style of questions That get asked and you're exposed to the content that is most high yield in a way that is active And it can be a guide for which parts of the syllabus you should be spending more time on Sometimes you'll find that there are things that rarely get tested Sometimes you'll have a lecture which you spend forever trying to understand because you think it's really important But then you come to do all the past papers and you realize not a single question gets asked on it And so you can just skip it You can forget about that lecture because it's probably not going to come up And then you'll have other modules or topics that come up over and over and over again And so you better know those really well inside out because you're guaranteed to have questions on them in your exam The thing is you only know what these topics are when you start doing the past papers And so the earlier you know what those are the earlier you can focus your revision on them If you wait till the last minute or the last couple of days before deciding to do past papers Then you're so close to the exam by that point that you might have spent a lot of time revising topics That aren't really all that important for passing your exams Of course your school could examine you on anything they teach you but the reality is the exam only has so many questions And so they're limited to what they can ask you and they want to ask you the most important questions The ones that they think are most applicable to hospital life here in medical school for example Or the topics that are most applicable to your future job in other professions I think there can be sometimes be a bit of a mental block with this and I've definitely had this mental block in the past Where it's so ingrained in my head that before I do past papers I should make sure to cover every single lecture every single tutorial Let me cover all of the material and then test myself using past papers And I hope that this channel and my videos have been able to show that you know Sometimes we need to flip our ideas on their head and be led by sort of the evidence And what's actually going to make a difference instead of what we think is going to make a difference Or the ways that we're stuck in or things that we're used to it's really valuable to sort of reflect and look back And make those changes and decisions because they can have significant impacts on both your mental health your exam grades Your efficiency in your life just everything and that is it guys That is everything that I wish I had done differently throughout my time studying You know, I hope this gave you some ideas on how you can maybe change your studying routine But I also hope that it shows that even someone like me who talks about studying and productivity all the time You know has made lots of mistakes in the past and we're all in this together We're all trying to do the best that we can in university or in school and you know Be as efficient with our time as possible so we can enjoy our life outside of academics and just studying If you think of something that you wish you'd known sooner, then please do leave it in a comment down below I'd love to read through them and see what else I could be improving in my own studying and that's it Catch you in the next one. Peace