 So you're struggling to study in medical school or maybe you just want to study better. In this video, I'm going to give you my five tips on how to study better with proven strategies and techniques that you can use to study better, give better grades, but spend less time doing it. We're going to get to all those tips after the intro. All right guys, what is going on? Luxury for the MD journey, helping you succeed on your medical journey with a little bit less stress. This video, I'm going to teach you all about how to study better. And in particular, if you are a student, whether you're a pre-med, a first year med student, and you feel like either you are not doing well or you are doing just fine, but you're spending excessive amount of time doing it. This is the video for you. I totally get, I used to be in your shoes where I was spending eight to 10 hours in med school studying and not getting the results I wanted. And then I found these techniques. I discovered them, now give them to not only you guys, but also my coaching students and the results have been amazing for all of us. So I want to just make a video about these are my five top tips on study methods for medical school. Tip number one. And this is by far my favorite technique. And you're probably seen in my other videos, which is called my brain dump. So it is not the best use of a name, but the brain dump is amazing to identify gaps in your knowledge. The worst thing that we can do as med students as pre-meds is study excessively. And then when the test comes around, we realize, Oh crap, I actually don't know this information. You want to minimize as many of those occurrences as possible. And the brain dump is amazing for it. So this is how it works. Usually when we go through lecture, we read the syllabus and we review after a couple of iterations of that learning phase, we start to understand the structure of the lecture. We know kind of how it started, how it, what the middle topics were and how we may not understand all the topics, but we know what the flow was. So the brain dump is a great technique because all you do is you grab a blank piece of paper. You may grab, you know, just a blank piece of paper, nothing written in it and use that memorization of the flow. You know, you may have started with stats. You may have then went on to the diagnosis of the patient, the treatment, and then, you know, future direction of how that disease will be treated. You kind of remember those directions. So now as you know the flow, act like you have to teach that lecture to somebody four years younger than you. So if you're in med school, teach it to somebody in college. If you're in college, teach somebody in high school, so you're forced to simplify it and not just regurgitate info. Just write out as quickly as possible, everything you can remember through the flow of the lecture. And you'll realize that most of the things you may do pretty well on depending on how well you reviewed, but there's gonna be things that you're gonna struggle from going from point A to point C. You're gonna know, okay, I know it starts here and I ends here, but I have no idea what that connecting thought is. And this is amazing use of the brain dump because it helps you identify your gap in your knowledge. That's the thing that's gonna get you on a test and you're gonna catch you right now using this technique. So as you're writing, you know, you will realize that, okay, I don't know how to go from here to here. I know there's a piece of detail here, but I'm totally missing it. Just star it underline and highlight it, whatever you want to do and finish the rest of the lecture. When you're done with the page, you're gonna have loads of marks on your first time around. Go back to your lecture, go back to your review material and fill in those blanks, you know, try to understand the material a little better and then do it again. Now the one thing that I want to tell you about the brain dump is you want to be as quick as possible. So it's not perfect handwriting. You don't need to make it look like an outline. You can scribble, you can write abbreviations, you can, you know, just write as quickly as you want. Mispelling is totally fine. You're just trying to identify your gaps. You want to tell yourself, okay, I really don't understand this. I need to go back and review it. So I try to spend anywhere from five to 10 minutes on a brain dump and spend more time reviewing and then come back and do the practice again. So the brain dump is an amazing technique, guys. I totally encourage you guys to check it out. So tip number two is what I like to call my review container. So again, going onto the worst case scenario when we hit the test, actually a couple of days before the test, there's usually some topics that start to give us some difficulty and we tell ourselves either we don't have time or this is probably not going to show up on the test. And if it does show up on the test, I'm screwed. You know, like that's usually the conversation we have in our heads. So the review container is amazing to solve all those problems. Basically what it does is as you're going through the lecture for the first time or during your review cycle, make a list on a Word doc, a Google doc of the topics that gave you trouble, or you can take it to a more physical level and you can just take scratch pieces of paper, you know, you can have a long piece of paper to shred it and write the name of the topic or the question. Basically after you have your list of topics from lecture, just put it in a plastic bag, put it in a review container, or if you're using a digital copy, you can keep it in your Word doc. Every night just grab two or three randomly for them, your, you know, your bag, your review container, and try to do a brain dump on them, try to answer and try out a diagram, whatever it may be. Basically you are working on your weaknesses from the very start. So versus waiting since, you know, day T minus two or day T minus one from the exam, you're working on your weaknesses day in a day out. If there's something for the review container that you're starting to get, you're starting to master it because you've seen it multiple times now, you can take it out. But if there's something that you take out and you struggle still, put it back in and, you know, give it another day or another repetition and see how you improve. Over time, what you'll find is that that a review container will get smaller and smaller because you're working on those weaknesses more and more. And by the test comes around, there's less and less that is going to give you difficulty. So I love the review container, especially for somebody that's has that test anxiety, like, oh, shoot, I actually don't understand this. Over time, you are going to work on those weaknesses, which is super important for your study. So tip number three, and this tip is for all of you guys that love group studying. And it's what I like to call strategic group studying. So instead of doing the typical format of group studying, which is if you just show up in a room, and you say, today, we're going to go over lecture two. And we're just going to read and maybe ask some questions here and there. Strategic group studying is where you do the learning first. You come up with the questions. So, for example, you go through your lecture, you think maybe five questions that you think the professor could ask about a topic. It may be something very difficult, maybe specific, or maybe more broad and like such as draw to diagram of this, have an Excel sheet or some type of collective place where all of your group members can answer questions. Excel sheet is amazing, because then all the members can just type in their questions for each of the lectures, then meet a couple times a week, maybe two times a week, maybe three times a week, and just do those questions. You know, your classmates are going to ask you their questions. You're going to ask them yours and see who gets done by what help each other. Again, identify their gaps. But this is a great way to assess what everyone thinks is going to be important on the test and start to learn from it. But first, you're doing the learning first. You're not doing that thing where you're using group studying as you're learning, because sometimes each group works differently. And you may not have gathered some info that you would have by yourself. So, gather info yourself, come over to the questions and have your group members quiz with your collection of question banks. So, use strategic group studying if you love that camaraderie of studying. So, tip number four, and this is probably my personal favorite, it's my Anki method or my expedited flash card method. I'm not going to touch on this too much, because I have made a full free video course for you guys. And there's a YouTube video, which many of you guys have probably already seen. So, I will link both of those in the description. The free video course, again, is a step-by-step on how I used Anki, and not only how I used it, but how I expedited the process from start to finish, so I could spend the most amount of time studying, reviewing, and learning. Those are the parts where we want to spend our time, and not making the flash cards, not going to lecture. So, I basically minimize as much as I could and maximize the parts of our learning that make the most results. So, expedited flash card is a whole process that I've created. Again, the link will be down in the description below. But to avoid making this video longer than it is, I encourage you to check out the free video course. And finally, tip number five. This technique I came across in college, and I tried it in med school, and it's perfect. It is called the memory palace. Again, I made a whole video on this process, but I will be a little bit more descriptive than I was on the expedited flash card method. So, the memory palace is great, because most of us are visual learners in medical school. There are a couple of us that are auditory learners, a lot of us who are tangible, tangible, practical learners that learn by doing. But the memory palace is great for those of us who can remember things through amazing visual kind of images. And so, basically the way it works is think of a path that you take to school. Maybe you're drive to school. If you walk, you know, here and from your apartment to the mailbox or something, or maybe just a room in your home. You know those images pretty well because they're a repeated kind of pathway. You can walk in, you know, picture your apartment as you're walking in. You know what's going to be on the left. You know where your couch is. You know where your TV is. You know where the windows are. And so, assigning a specific things in your apartment, for example, you can go doors number one, couches number two, windows three, TV four, and so on and so forth. That's your memory palace. That's something you're going to use. Then, when you have a list of things you have to memorize, maybe bacterias or drugs, then you know those are just a bane of existence for your medical students. Come up with a list and come up with a silly image for each of them. And again, if you want a more detailed example, I will put it in the link down in the description below of how you can remember. Come up with some creative silly things. But come up with some silly images and then put them at each part of your memory palace. You may have image number one at your door, image number two at your couch and so forth because then all you have to do is think about your memory palace and think about the funny images. It's very easy to remember things, especially for the long term. There are things and images that I created as a first year medical student that I still remember now because I used this technique. These are techniques that usually people use for things like remembering you know shuffled decks of cards in like 27 seconds. So we can do it as medical students too. We don't have to do it in 27 seconds, but try out the memory palace. Again, the link will be in the description video on a more detailed example where I kind of go step by step on how you would use it as a medical student. Those were my top five study methods to use in medical school. A lot of them I would like to think are pretty unique. They're not the typical make an outline, do this or that. So if you did enjoy this video, obviously make sure you give it a like. Comment down below with any questions you guys have on more study strategies that maybe you suggest or you have questions on them and I'll be happy to elaborate them on a future video. But as always, if you did enjoy this video, like I mentioned, give it a like, subscribe to the channel, join the community. If you want more videos like this, just let me know and I'll be happy to make them. But as I do and always all in my videos, I start battling. So I'm going to stop right now and I will see you guys in the next one. Take care guys.