 Today we're in breakdown six ways to help you get better grades in 2023 and we're going to jump right into it. Let's break it down. Hey friends, welcome back to channel today. We're going to talk about six steps and three particular categories that you can use to get better grades this year in 2023. And we're going to talk about strategies in three specific sections. The first is going to be the method that you actually use to help build your retention. The second one is going to be overall on the planning on how you study. And the final one is how to improve your flow, your motivation to kind of get into it. So let's break it down. So let's get into the first category of how to improve your method or overall retention and your studying. So the first technique that we'll talk about is the daily test. And one of the biggest issues that students have, particularly in medical school is that so much of their day is just spent trying to get through all the material that there's very little time to just ask the saying, did I actually understand any of that? And I know the biggest difference between me when I was making season B's to a consistent A's was having what I call the daily test. This was a part of my day where it was specifically designed to say everything you've just reviewed thus far, whether it be your slides, your lectures, homework. Let's see how much of that you remember. This was one dedicated hour, usually in the evening, to just assess how much I've learned. Now, there's many different techniques that you can use during this hour. Some include doing things like flashcards, doing practice questions that relate to the class material that you're learning. Or for me, one of my favorites is the brain dump. Now, if you're a longtime follower of the channel, you know what the brain dump is, but if you're new, essentially the brain dump is what it sounds like. You use a piece of paper or a whiteboard and you basically try to regurgitate whatever you learned from a lecture or a lab and seeing how much you remember. But you do this as quickly as possible. Now, the main goal of this is to identify where, you know, there's a point A, a B, and a C of a topic, but you have difficulty going from point A to C. Maybe you forgot what point B was or you're not quite confident that whatever you wrote on the piece of paper is true. As an example, let's imagine you went through a lecture about high blood pressure and you remembered that there's three medications in particular you could use, but you only remember two of them, although, you know, there's three bullet points on that one lecture or on that one slide. Knowing this, now you can mark your brain dump, your piece of paper or your whiteboard, whatever it may be, and just put a bunch of markings everywhere you have a little uncertainty or have no idea how to fill in the gap. Now, go back to your source that you use in the first place, whether it be your slides, your lecture notes, the videos, recordings, and fill in that gap. And then erase your whiteboard, flip the piece of paper all over and do the brains up again and assess how many of those gaps have now been filled. Now, initially, when you're learning a new subject, there's going to be tons of gaps. So that's the benefit of the daily test is now on a daily basis, you'd say, even after learning everything, I'm still struggling with X, Y, and Z. I'm going to dedicate more time maybe on the weekend to come back to this topic. Most students, again, are spending so much time just trying to get through the material you never have in time to say, did I learn it? Doing something like a brain dump or a daily test through practice questions is a very great way to do this. Most students, again, are spending so much of their evenings trying to just get through their lectures, they never have time to ask themselves, did I actually learn something from all that review? Doing a daily test session really helps you say, yep, got this piece of information, these topics will need further review. Now, the second strategy within the method and retention that comes down to having a very simplified study plan. Now, this is something that we work with a lot of our students in our one-on-one coaching programs, which you guys can again check out below. But the main thing that we try to teach your students that I'm gonna ask you to do this yourself is what are the steps to go from an information being presented to you to ultimately being ready for the test? How many steps are involved from you getting exposed to any information in a syllabus or a lecture all the way to being prepared for the exam? If you feel like there's multiple steps, multiple resources being included, you have too many steps. And in 2023, you really need to make a commitment to saying this is step one, this is how I'm going to take a new piece of information and convert it to something that I can then come home to on a daily basis and start reviewing. And step three is to again, use something like a daily test session to say, this is a weak point. I'm gonna come back to this more often than my strengths. And if I repeat the process, there's gonna be very few weak points between now and at the quiz or the test and I'm gonna be golden. But really trying to make a commitment this year of not necessarily adding more, but adding less and asking yourself what's the best of the best of what you're doing. Often an extra resource isn't going to change the game, simply just changing how you flow from your lectures to the test is going to make a big difference. Again, if that sounds easier said than done, I understand that's why we help students do this on a one-on-one or any of our programs. If you're interested in working with us or what that looks like, those will be linked down below. If you're interested in some of our free study resources, those will also be linked down below in the description. Now, before we get back into today's episode, let's take a quick second to talk about today's sponsor which is Picmonic. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Picmonic and you're on your medical journey, they have hundreds and hundreds of videos for literally any class or material that you may need. And what makes Picmonic so unique is that in addition to having so many videos on literally any topic you need, so for example, here we're in microbiology, you can click on any video, so here's Staph Aureus, and the videos themselves are very short, so this video is about one minute, 54 seconds, but essentially will break down the most high-yield components that you have to know in this setting about Staph Aureus in this very nice story format using images. So here's a very nice Oreo cookie that essentially will link an image to your brain on an important concept about that. In the future videos, you may find that the same memorable image is included in another related video, so then you can link together concepts. For example, here, this venom jar with green represents food poisoning, so any bacteria that may cause food poisoning may have this image in their overall picture and video, so you can say, okay, I know all the different bacterias that have food poisoning. And then whenever you feel comfortable with a relatively short story, you can easily go into the review and quiz phase and actually quiz yourself on the various different high-yield components. Now, in addition to having a very unique and easy way to remember information for your quizzes and tests, you can also add all of the videos you're watching into a relative playlist. So if you're studying for a microbiology class, you can go ahead and essentially click all of the videos that you add and add it to those playlist. And then whenever it's time, you can come back to your individual playlist and either watch those individual videos again or ask for specific quiz questions related to the videos that you've now said that you've mastered or at least learned the first time. And that's just scratching the surface in terms of features that pick monocas to help you on your medical journey. Other cool things include having a weakness guide so you can see which topics you're the weakest in, as well as their study scheduler so you can actually say these are the topics I need to know and here's my test day and then it will essentially will give you a study schedule based off of that. So if you're looking for an all-in-one resource to your on your medical journey and you haven't quite found it, definitely recommend checking out Pickmonic if you're interested, there'll be a link down below. And our friends at Pickmonic have also been nice enough to include an extra 20% discount if you use the code, the MDJourney, at checkout. And so if you're interested in learning more about Pickmonic, that link will be down below. And as always, thanks to Pickmonic for being today's sponsor. Now we've talked about improving your actual methodology. Let's talk about improving your actual planning. The first thing that we can do is a 1% weekly check-in. Just how we talked about having a daily test session to understand how much retention you're getting from the material you're learning on a daily basis, a 1% weekly check-in is actually assessing your study strategy and not so much information. For example, you may set some time aside on a Saturday or Sunday to do a few things such as looking at your weekly calendar and saying, how many of the things that I want to get done this week that I actually get done? How many of the tasks did I have to spend more time or less time and how I'm going to make adjustments going forward to the next week? What study strategies that I want to do and which of them actually didn't provide any benefit or which ones did I not even get to, although it sounded nice. Which resources helped me out, which one didn't? Doing so, you can make small improvements of saying, just what are one or two things that you can do this upcoming week to make an improvement from the prior week? How can you improve your scheduling? How can you improve your study retention? How can you improve your motivation to avoid getting distracted? Find the biggest challenges of the prior week. Ask yourself what small commitments you can make to have that 1% improvement because again, over a span of 12 weeks, 13, 16 weeks, you can make a big dramatic change in how you're studying without really doing very much differently on a week-to-week basis. Next, let's talk about effectiveness planning. Now, this is great for somebody who has shiny object syndrome and I definitely will raise my hand in being a victim of this in medical school where there's always a new resource or a new study strategy or somebody just trying something that seems like it would be a good fit for me. But when push comes to shove, I need to make sure that if I'm just a few days away from the quiz or test that I'm only doing those key strategies, those key techniques that really will give me the biggest bang for my buck. Now, this is something that I've talked about extensively in prior episodes, as well as breaking down in some of our programs, including a rapid study accelerator. That's a great program if you want quick results in a few days, go ahead and click that link down below in the description to learn more. One of my favorite things that we talk about in that program includes having a study retention hierarchy plan. But essentially what this includes is that knowing that it's very natural for a student to have tons of study techniques at their disposal, mainly because of tons of experience as well as experimenting with study strategies because you just have to learn different classes in a different way, having a list of all the techniques that you may go to, maybe flashcards, maybe practice questions, maybe having an outline, maybe annotating on your slides, and making a list of these saying that all of them are acceptable and then giving a grade based off of how well they help you understand something and retain something. If I know, for example, that out of my list of study strategies that I've used, something like my flashcard system, which we talk about in our Anki video, I'll link that down below, would give a nine out of 10 for me and a retention, but something like mind mapping or creating outlines is more of a two or three out of 10 kind of task. I know when I'm crunched for time and I really need to get down to studying for a quiz or test, I'm gonna go to those flashcards and things at the top of my list compared to the things that they int. This is a great way to make sure that you're not doing techniques, like annotating on slides, if that's gonna be a three out of 10 task for you on your list. Having a visual list of all the strategies you could use is very effective, especially if you're finding that your motivation is low, which we'll talk about in the upcoming sections. If you're not wanting to use a specific strategy, maybe I'm sick of flashcards, but I know practice questions are just as helpful for doing a whiteboard print dump is also effective. I can make the right moves and shifts without making an effective decisions, like jumping to reviewing my notes or creating outlines when I know they don't work for me. And then finally to the last pillar is going to your flow and motivation. Obviously, one of the biggest struggles with studying is not just the strategy you're using, but actually getting to doing the work and consistently staying focused and motivated to do it day in and day out. So the first strategy that we'll talk about is something that we talked about in our psychology and medical school episode, which is the one hour fallacy. This is one of my favorite paradoxes of medical school, which is I always thought that I had to study longer. And if I did study longer, my grades would do better. And so I'd always tell myself that if I had the choice of studying an extra hour or not, I should because my grades gonna depend on it. I'm gonna get a C instead of a B or a B instead of an A if I don't study that extra hour every single day. But as I learned over the long haul of medical school, is that that wasn't true. In fact, often I was spending that extra hour, extra day, ineffectively just because it was there. But if I instead gave myself an hour or two less every single day to study, actually made better decisions on how I studied during those less frequent study times, and then was able to use that extra one or two hours to do things like just relax, or get some exercise in, hang out with my favorite people, and ultimately that made me a happier, more effective student. And one of my favorite pro tips that we give to a lot of our coaching students, especially once they have a study strategy they're happy with, is let's try to cut down your study strategy this week by 20%. It's gonna be a little overwhelming, but you're gonna start asking yourself, do I really need to do this? And does that extra hour really need to be there? Often the answer is no, and then you can find yourself having more time to really spend on things that matter to you. And ultimately that's gonna make showing up to study the next day much easier. Next, we're gonna talk about motivational planning. Now this is similar to our study retention hierarchy that we talked about in the prior section, but sometimes it's not the difference between studying effectively and not, but simply just getting to studying. If I had the choice of doing an effective study strategy versus not starting in the first place and then falling behind, sometimes it just makes sense to do the study outline knowing that it's easy to do. If you had to make the decision between doing some setting, even though it's an ineffective strategy or doing none and then having the risk of falling behind, obviously option one has lots of benefits. And so sometimes you just have to get to a study strategy that may not be the most helpful, but it's the easiest to start with. And so similarly to that study retention hierarchy, create a list of all of the study strategies you're using. And again, we break down exactly how to do this in that rapid study accelerated program. So if it's linked down below in case you're interested, but have a list of them and simply give them a score from one to 10. Again, for me, flashcards were very easy to get into because I didn't have to do all 100. I could do 10 and feel like I was having some progress. That would easily give me a 10 out of 10 in terms of motivation. Practice questions, on the other hand, took a lot more energy out of me and so those would give out five out of 10. So if I wasn't motivated, I wouldn't start doing practice questions. Similarly, outlines for me weren't effective retention-wise and they weren't effective for me to jump in. But once you have your list and your scores, now you have go-to study techniques that you can go to when you're not feeling the motivation to start in the first place. If I was having a day that felt like a drag where I didn't want to get into studying, it's very easy for me to say first of all, suck it up, let's get to work. But second of all, it is okay to do your flashcards or maybe do a brain dump because those are easy things to say yes to or maybe committing to just doing 10 flashcards and then ideally you'll have motivation to keep doing more and more. But those guys are the three pillars and particular strategies within those three pillars to help you get better grades this year in 2023. Now, if you want to understand the exact study method that I use to help me get a 3.9 GPA medical school, I'll link down below an eighth step process that I use, absolutely free video course for you on how I got great grades in medical school as well as our medical school success handbook. This is a document that I'm updating on a weekly basis with my favorite tips and strategies, something I wish somebody had given to me on my first day of medical school. Hopefully it helps you out as well. Again, as we talked about the two other things that I'd recommend you guys check out if you're interested in getting better grades and want our help in doing so. One, you can check out our very quick to easy use program or rapid study accelerator program. Takes literally one or two days to get through and you can find yourself making better decisions on how to study or you can choose to work with us one on one in our variety of our coaching programs. I can I'll link that down below. If you're just interested in seeing kind of results or students are getting, go ahead and click that down below. But as always my friends, if you enjoyed this episode then go ahead and check out this episode and all the study strategies I use to get a 3.9 GPA in medical school as well as this one right here on how I study for exams with confidence. Hopefully you guys enjoyed these and as always thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I was a little help to you guys and yours and I'll see you guys next one. Peace.