 So you're studying for your class and you're not sure what's high yield, you don't know what's important and you're freaking out because the information is getting a little too excessive. I get to you, I understand this video, I'm going to show you a few methods that you can use to help. Let's get into it. All right guys, welcome to the MD journey. A channel completely dedicated to help students like you succeed on their journey with less stress. My name is Laksham, an internal medicine resident and physician in training and I've been helping students just like you by making videos for the last two plus years on YouTube. So make sure if you enjoy this video or this podcast, you go ahead and hit that like button as well as that subscribe button. We're putting out two videos like this on a weekly basis and make sure you also hit that notification bell. I want to talk about the topic that I've been getting in my comment section a lot, which is I'm not really sure how to identify what's ideal, especially if you're a medical student like I was. It's very overwhelming when you have, you know, three plus lectures with 50, 60 slides for each lecture and then doing that five times a week for a test that may be coming up in a month. That's a lot of information. It's really important to learn this skill of what's important and what can possibly await for you to review later. So today I want to talk about five different methods that you can use to be able to identify what's high yield in your specific course and make sure you stay tuned to the very end because I'll give you a resource that can help you boost your scores by a complete letter grade. Let's get into one of my favorite methods to help you identify what's important. It's a method that I call the reverse method. Now basically what the reverse method is, instead of going to your class material or your syllabus or your PowerPoints, I actually recommend that you find a high yield resource for your specific class. So if you're learning about physiology, look up the different resources for the best physiology books. You can also check out the mdjrn.com to get some recommendations for various different classes. But once you find a resource that you think may be beneficial to you, what I actually recommend is the day before you go to lecture. Find the specific chapter or section that correlates with whatever topic is going to be discussed in class. And then go ahead and skim through that piece of material to just get an idea of what information you should expect to hear and see in your class material. And then step number two to this process is then go to lecture or go through your lecture material and now identify what similarities you see from the high yield resource to your class. So for example, if you saw a specific topic in the high yield resource and you hear your lecture also mention it, that's something that should highlight to you and your brain that this is fair game for something that may show up on both this exam as well as any forthcoming board exams that I may have. So if you're somebody who likes to pre-read or skim the material the day before, one thing I would recommend is completely going away from reviewing your lecture slides for the class and using the high yield resource and then going to class and paying attention for some similarity. Now this can help you do a lot of things, but most importantly, when you go home to review now that you've been able to highlight what's important, whenever you go towards your former review, whether that's flashcards, practice exams or making outlines, you can focus on those topics first and primarily. And as a bonus tip, if you want to even improve your long term retention, go back to your high yield resource after lecture to review kind of what you've learned and then find the similarities between what the lecture mentioned as well as the book. This kind of full cycle of going from high yield to lecture to high yield helps solidify this is important and this can wait before I have to actually learn it. I met the number two that I like to use to help understand what's important and it's a technique that I use in my flashcard method that I used in medical school. Now I'll link down below a full video as well as a course kind of shows you step by step about how to do that. But fast forward, you know, when I would do my flashcards I would need to know what's important and what's not. Usually I would do this before going to class. So one of my favorite ways of identifying what's important and what's high yield is I'd actually use the headings or the tables of content for a syllabus or a PowerPoint slide. So for example, your syllabus may have detailed headings on a specific section or your tables may have a caption. Your figures may actually have its own headings or your PowerPoint slides may have a heading that's consistent amongst three or four different slides. That gives you an idea that this category of topics may be important. I need to make sure I can connect ideas from all the little details that I actually discuss in the PowerPoint slides or the PDF. Now getting into method number three to understand what's high yield try to use practice exams from that course from prior years. Now this doesn't mean that you actually need to take the exam instead just look at the questions and get an idea of what topics you're starting to see. This can also help you understand if the test as well as the instructor for a specific course is going to be more memorization heavy or it's going to require you to be able to connect more ideas to answer the question. But go through the different questions before you start a specific course or if your course has various exams through it before you start that block just review the various questions that you may see to get an idea of this is what instructor and the class consider to be important. And then when you see that information during lecture as well as you're going through the class material you'll hear that ding ding ding I need to remember this and that gives again another clue that this is high yield and it helps facilitate your learning. Now in addition to past tests I also recommend using practice questions and practice question banks for a specific course to help identify what's high yield. So if you're a medical student there's various question banks that you can check out and I'll link down below. You can compliment with your class material and use those to help you quiz on what's considered to be high yield as well as your ability to connect different ideas. Now again you may not have learned the information or may not have had time to review them. That's not really what's important here instead is to be able to get the idea that these different ideas are somehow connected and that may be something my professor may ask. So if I see them discussing about the specific topic in lecture or if I again see it in my course material on my PowerPoint it's a good indication that it's fair game that I may show up on his or her exam as well. So for example for medical students you may want to compliment a question bank with your class material and it's not really about getting the questions right but instead getting an idea of what questions are asked how different topics within the specific course are connected because then when you see it in class you say okay I can see the professor asking a question about how these two things are related and again it forces you to give it more attention and actually helps you connect ideas much easier. Now before I get into my final method to help you identify what's high yield if you're again if you're enjoying this video and you haven't done so already make sure you hit that like button as well as comment down below and let me know what your favorite technique and strategy is to help identify what's high yield. I'm getting into our last method to help you identify what's high yield I recommend you find high yield videos. So similar to our verse method where I recommended finding a high yield resource usually this would be like a book or an online kind of learning system where they have videos instead go to a resource that's free like YouTube and type up a topic that you're learning about so maybe you're learning about GI bleeds and the various different types of GI bleeds somebody may have go ahead and find a 10-minute topic on it and watch it after you learn the lecture or before. This is a great way to understand how somebody who knows the topic very well how they consolidate it into a short amount of time and this is not an activity where you actually have to take notes instead just pay mental attention to what you see again on the video and also presented in your class material and similar to the first tip if you really want to boost your long-term retention then go to class after you've watched this video pay attention to what you see are similar and then afterwards go ahead and watch that video again maybe at an accelerated speed of one and a half to two acts but doing this technique helps you go from high yield resource to lecture again to high yield resource to just kind of fill and close the circle for long-term retention and I personally do this a lot both in medical school as well as now even in residency as I'm learning about a topic and I'm reading about it I then go ahead and find a video that can help kind of summarize everything and then I may go back to the resource and make the watch the video once more to make sure I can identify the key concepts between both resources but those guys were different techniques and methods that I use and I kind of use them together um in my study system I recommend a lot of the students that coach to do the same so hopefully they can help you identify what's high yield and I mentioned at the start that if you want a resource to help you boost your studying even more so you can check out level up your studying which is the course that we have on the mdjr.com it's a three week course helping you identify what's wrong in your studying what can be improved and in specific methods to help you perfect it and if you want to see different results and reviews that our students have gone through the course have already seen then go ahead and check the link out down below in addition to level up your studying I'll also put a playlist of different videos here on the channel to help you on your studying so you guys can check those out as well hopefully you guys have enjoyed this video again if you made it to the very end and you somehow forgot to hit the like button no worries just go ahead and do it now and support both this video as well as the channel comment down below with any questions that you guys have and recommendations for future videos otherwise thank you guys so much for being a part of this video being a part of my journey hopefully I've been a little help to you on yours I'll see you guys in the next one peace