 To get into a medical school, a top residency, and then into a fellowship to be a cardiologist who needs many things, high grades being one of them, but that wasn't always the case for me. My first semester in medical school was absolute s***, I was filled with some C's, B's, and maybe a few A's, and took a lot of trial and error to ultimately graduate with 3.9 GPA. So to make sure that you don't have the same level of stress that I did, I'm going to go and break down step by step exactly how I was able to make this turnaround and how you can do the same. And by the end of this video, you'll know how to approach a lecture that seems like a bunch of random information to be able to sit for your exam knowing that information cold and understanding how everything gets connected. Let's get into it. Hey friends, if you're new here, my name is Lakshman, I'm a board certified internal medicine physician and currently a cardiology fellow and here at the MD journey, we make videos and content like this to help people like you succeed on their medical journey but doing it with less stress. So we're going to go through the same steps that I use to turn my grades around and also the same steps that we use for a lot of our coaching students if you're interested, I'll be linked down below, so let's get into it. Step number one is understanding that lecture is your question source. Now what I did wrong early in medical school and something you're very likely doing wrong right now is looking at a lecture completely wrong. Often we look at that one one and a half hour lecture session as a time to just consolidate what the professor is saying, whatever's on the PowerPoint and the syllabus into a form that is a little bit more easier to understand. This is why most students will spend that 60 minutes writing essentially a version of an outline of Spark Notes edition if you will of the lecture. Now while this may seem like the natural thing to do, there are so many problems with this. Number one, it takes a lot of time. Number two, after lectures, our notes and our outlines are still pretty sloppy. We need even more time to edit and make them nicer. Number three is you're likely having a constant influx of new lectures, preventing you from actually reviewing the notes you created. And number four, the most important is that your notes are not truly testable. So now you may be asking, well, those are the problems. What in the world is the solution? How should I approach lecture? And it's this idea of understanding that your lecture is essentially your test for your question bank. So personally, when I was able to make that shift of constantly getting A's, I started asking questions of looking at every slide and saying, what questions can possibly come from this? This idea was actually inspired by a book I read way back in high school before I was starting college by one of my favorite authors, Cal Newport, on how to become a straight A student. I'll link down below the book if you're interested. But essentially, he breaks down a very simple concept of taking your notes and turning them into a question answer or question evidence kind of section. So now using this in medical school, that's 16 minutes of lectures were no longer intended to try to understand everything the professor was saying, but instead saying, well, if this is recorded and I have the slides, let me just go ahead and try to create a list of questions I should be able to master over the span of the days and weeks before the quiz or the test. And so every time a new slide would come up, I would start asking based off the professor's comments and lectures of what kind of questions would he be able to ask from here? Often I'd be able to ask a question just from the heading of the PowerPoint, maybe from the bullet points, or maybe the professor does a practice problem. Maybe I should be able to write down a question very similar to it. But now during lecture, I'm no longer trying to absorb everything the professor is saying in the hopes to remember it for the quiz or test. Very likely you're going to forget everything within a few days anyways. So instead I'm asking myself, let's go ahead and try to collect as many questions as possible. Often as the slides are moving, I can use the headings, the bullet points to say, well, those are possible questions that could be on the test based off the PowerPoint or the professor is giving a practice problem. Let me write a version of that in my notes. And we'll go over that later in the episode of how you can do it. But essentially looking at a lecture of saying what collection of questions both big and small can come from this. And once you understand this important concept, let's get into step number two, which is understanding the tank. Now, let's say you've made the shift of looking at lecture as a question source. And so you go into lecture and maybe on your notebook or a word doc or something, you create a collection of the questions that you think you need to know. But then you look at them and you're like, I don't understand any of this. How in the world am I possibly going to master this before the quiz or the test? And this is where the understanding of the tank is super important. So to understand this analogy, imagine a tank that you're trying to fill. The more full this tank is before a quiz or test, the better you'll do. That's just the amount of information you feel comfortable with. So there's a few steps to making sure the tank is full. Number one is obviously to fill it. This is something that we're really good at, which is learning or attempting to learn new information. Number two is minimizing the holes. Like any piece of learning, you're always going to tend to forget things, especially if you don't come back to it or if it doesn't seem that important to you. And number three is getting some flow, which we'll break down later in this episode. But essentially not only do you want to understand the information, you want to have a full tank, but you want to understand how everything is connected. Now, again, as students, we're really good at attempting to fill the tank, but very few of us are very good at filling the holes. So as you can imagine, if you're always constantly trying to learn information and you're forgetting them at a roughly an equal pace, you start to have the standstill where you don't make any progress. You're probably at that C's or B's like I was as a medical student early on. And you're not able to make that progress you ultimately want. And so this is why for all of your coaching students, this is a concept that we try to drill in because it doesn't matter what study strategy you use, as long as you're able to approach those three things of filling the tank, minimizing the holes and having some flow, any study strategy will work well. So now let's get into step three, which is filling the tank consistently. Now, the bottom line of the step is that you need the repetitions. So going back to step one of creating your questions, you can do this in a variety of ways. And back in college, I would simply have a word doc for every single lecture and essentially write a bullet point of all the questions that I thought the professor would ask. And if I had time, I would type the answers as they were talking. If I didn't have time, sometimes it would go back into slides and type them in or simply just put the slide number or the page number of the syllabus that had the answer that I was looking for. And when I transitioned into medical school, I went away from the word doc and used another similar strategy of using flashcards to take my notes. As a professor is talking, I'd essentially make more flashcards from the questions that I thought would come from the slides and what they were saying. If you guys are interested in learning all of the study strategies I used in medical school to get the grades that I wanted, I'll link down below a video where I get more into detail of how all those work. But after you have your pool of questions, you need to pick a schedule that works for you on how you're going to review them consistently. For a lot of our coaching students, we'll often get them a schedule based off of their weekly timeline of when they'll review the lecture the first time and the second time. Most students will not schedule their second review into their weekly and monthly schedule. We like to make our students make sure they have at least two passes of material and then they'll get a third and a fourth one before they start reviewing for the quiz and test. And so go ahead and look on your weekly schedule of when it makes sense to review the lectures the first time. Often just make sense to review the lectures the evening of the day of the lecture, if not at the very least, maybe the next day and having them plugged into your calendar and saying, today I covered lecture 27 at Biochem, that's going to be reviewed. And as a bonus step, go ahead and just schedule it into your calendar. So for example, if you're learning something on Tuesday and it's lecture 27 at Biochem, just go ahead and look at your calendar and plug that in for Tuesday evening or Wednesday or whenever you feel like you have an open slot, so that way you have an appointment with that lecture to review the first time. And as a bonus step, if you can, go ahead and try to find when you'll schedule it for your second pass. Ideally the weekends work, if not a lighter day of the week, whenever you want to, but go ahead and just have those two passes kind of scheduled in, that way you'll know this is when I'll see the information first, second, and even the third time. As an alternate approach, if you're using something like Quizlet or Anki or RemNote, then a very simple strategy is reviewing everything just like we said, the day of the lecture or the next day. But after you've reviewed a lecture, you essentially move those flashcards or those notes into a pile of reviewed lectures. So if I had a flashcard deck in Anki for lecture 27 at Biochem, I would review it the day of and then once I'm done, I would put them into kind of reviewed pile of all the lectures I had already reviewed prior to that. Then every morning, sometimes I would just spend 20 or 30 minutes going through this pile of growing amount of flashcards, but just do it in for a time basis. So instead of trying to get through all the flashcards, I would say every 20, 30 minutes in the morning while I'm having my coffee, I'm just gonna get a steady review of all the lectures I've seen in the past days or weeks before the test or quiz. It's a very natural way of getting your second, third, and fourth passes of the material without forcing yourself to necessarily put it in your schedule. But the bottom line here is that not only are you filling the tank, but you're doing it consistently. Now getting into step number four, which is plugging the holes. Now this is frankly something that as a student, I know from experience that I stayed away from because it makes more sense as you're learning something that you just naturally tell yourself, I just hope this doesn't show up on the test. But as we probably know from experience, if you've been burned before, if you don't review something because you hope it doesn't show up, and then it does, even if it's like one or two questions, it just throws you off and it can cause a difference between a B or A or B and ultimately getting a C. So here's how you approach plugging the hole and making sure that you're keeping that tank as full as possible if you're gonna do all the hard work to fill it in the first place. After you go through your questions, through your flashcards, your notes, and you're reviewing them, you'll start to get an idea of which questions kind of feel uncomfortable, which questions are giving you trouble. Maybe it was this question that just needed a few repetitions during that evening study session to get down and still you don't feel quite comfortable. For these specific questions, go ahead and put them into a weakness pool using the strategy you're using. So for example, if you're using an outline method in a document, it's very easy to color code things. You can go ahead and just color code. The information or the questions that are difficult as like red or orange and things that are relatively easy as green. This gives you a nice visualization of topics that saying, well, next time I come from my second pass, I'm gonna start with the reds first because that's the topics that are gonna give me the biggest trouble if they show up in the test. If you're using something like flashcards, Quizlet allows you to start flashcards that you really wanna come back to. Anki has some great tools such as flagging a card or adding tags to it. If you're interested in my detailed video of how to use Anki, it'll link down below. It's been checked out by more than a million people now on YouTube, and I'll link it down below if you guys are interested. Regardless of what study strategy you're using, towards the end of that first pass, start to mark these questions just for later so it's easy for you to reference saying this one was hard, this one was kind of average. Maybe one more repetition will get me nailed down and this one is a piece of cake. I hope this shows up on the test. And now the second part of this is obviously showing up for your second pass. So again, you could do that version that we talked about, which is every morning just doing 20 to 30 minutes of old material just naturally presented to you via flashcards or simply having a scheduled session saying this is when I'll review these lectures for the second time. Now step five is the concept of creating flow. Almost every student forgets about this until it's too late and then you just give up on this concept. It's a simple concept of understanding the forest and the trees. You wanna make sure you master the details but also how everything is connected and interplays with each other. But for most of us specifically being in medical school, you're just so hyper-focused on learning the individual facts and details and then by the time the test comes around, you're just trying to memorize them as well as possible because you know you don't have time to create those connections. But the honest answer is this, to make sure you go into a test or quiz with confidence and making sure you actually get the grades you want, you need both. And this is where free recall study strategies come into play. Now I go into these a lot in more detail, especially giving a lot of examples of some of my favorite study methods in that 3.9 GPA study methods video. So I'll link that down below if you guys are interested, make sure you check it out. And there's also tons of more study techniques that we go into a lot more detail instead of our study programs such as our level up your study program. All of those are bundled into one program that is called the Med School Blueprint. Comes with so much more than just how to study. So definitely check those out. Now it's been checked out by almost a few thousand students over the past seven years and you guys can just check out the reviews in case you're interested. But one example of a free recall strategy that works really well is simply using your learning objectives to really understand, do you understand the big picture? Often your professors in the syllabies or at the start of a PowerPoint will give you a few bullet points of things that they want to have you master by the time you master that lecture. And so as you're getting closer to the quiz or test or even when you're on your second pass of material, it's very good practice to use your learning objectives to try out something called the talk out methods, which is if I'm looking at a learning objective and it says understand the medications to treat something like hypertension. If I'm gonna say, okay, Alex, go ahead and talk that out. And as soon as I start talking, usually my brain will start to go to things that you know very well. It's gonna say, well, you have calcium channel blockers and you have beta blockers and you have medications that work in the kidneys and these are a few names. But as I start talking more and more, here not only will I get tired of my own voice, but I also find pieces where I'm just not able to make that next step of the connection. Maybe I know the name of a medication, but not quite comfortable of how it works. Or maybe there's a medication where I know how it works. I know the dosages, but I don't understand the side effects and I know there was a PowerPoint slide about those classes of meds and I just can't remember it. Whenever you find these instances of you mumbling or failing to make a connection, that is that indication or a highlight should be a light bulb moment that I actually don't know this pretty well. It's a very good clue to go ahead and go back to your slides, go back to your flashcards, your notes and fill those gaps in. If it's not in your notes, if it's not in your flashcards, go ahead and learn it really quickly. Then add those to your reviews style of choice, whether it's flashcards or the notes, that way in the future, when you're doing your repetitions, now that whole is fixed. And essentially you're gonna repeat this for all the objectives of an individual lecture and do this for all of your lectures. As a pro tip, if you want, you're using something like flashcards or notes, simply copy your objectives and add them into your notes and just write them in the form of a question if they're not done so already. Because if you know, if you can answer those five or 10 objectives the professor gave you, then you likely will do well if they're testing from their lecture. So bottom line, if you can say it, if you can write it, likely understand it, likely will nail it when it comes down for test time. And to put the ribbon on this step, often when I get closer to the test or the quiz, maybe about five or four days away, I will often have a session where I just try to recreate the lectures if I'm going to teach it. So maybe I'll have a whiteboard run kind of talking out what the lecture is about and trying to identify those places where I just don't feel comfortable going to the next step. That means that my brain has convinced myself that I understand it, but clearly, I'm not able to put pen to paper and that means that's the gap in my knowledge and if it shows up on tests, I'm likely screwed. I'm glad I discovered it now. Step six is huge for your confidence as well as being able to really answer any question that can be thrown to you which is practicing those connections that you make. Now the easiest way to do this is after you've gone ahead and made your connections and your flows is to use practice questions to essentially enhance them. Because bottom line is that any test you take is really about the concept of knowledge application with pattern recognition. The better you get at knowing the information, filling the tank, keeping the holes, minimal as possible, the better you'll do, but the better you can get at identifying patterns, sometimes your tank doesn't have to be as full and you can already start to do better on exams. This is why some students are better test takers than others, not necessarily because they're smarter, but sometimes they've just been able to put themselves in enough situations where they've identified patterns and they can apply it to any question that they get. And so if you have a go-to source for practice questions from your professor, some review slides, your TAs, or from a question bank of something more broad if you're in medical school, things like U-World, USMLERX, tons of other tools that we talked about here on the channel, then those are great places to start for your practice question stores. If you don't, then sometimes just repeating your flashcards or using other pre-made flashcards from people, maybe a class ahead of you would be a good practice to see how other questions are being asked. And as a bonus tip, you have no sources of questions whatsoever and still want some practice. As a bonus tip, and we'll break this down in a future video, you can use the power of AI using things like ChatGPT to create you a practice question bank. Again, I'll break this down in a future episode, but often you can just go into one of these AI tools and say, I'm studying for my pharmacology exam, learning for medications and hypertension, create me a 25 question multiple choice exam. And when I found from quickly playing around with these tools, it actually creates a pretty good sources of questions. Again, more practice if you have no other source whatsoever. And as a bonus tip on the step, after you miss a question or you get a question right, but you did it because you guessed correctly, go ahead and add those questions and to your form of choice. So flashcards or your Word documents, now they're constantly part of your repetition. Again, making you have an easier time with pattern recognition if anything remotely similar shows up on the test. And so the bottom line is the more you repeat the cycle of filling the tank, minimizing the holes, moving the flow and practicing those connections, the better you'll do, the better you'll be able to approach any type of lecture with any study strategy you really want. But again, if you're interested, go ahead and check out that 3.9 GPA video as well as an Anki video where I go in a lot more detail of how I use flashcards in medical school to get the grades that I wanted. If you enjoyed the step-by-step breakdown and you appreciate the content, hit that like button to just support the channel and more videos like this. Drop your comments down below. If you want even more, I promise you this is just the tip of the bicep bird of the type of things that we teach here at the MD journey. A free resource that I love creating and updating for you guys on the weekly basis is something that we call the MedSchool Handbook, the free document that I've been updating for the past year on weekly tips on how to study better, be more efficient with your time, study for boards and so much more. Things essentially that I wish I got in my first day of medical school that I put together in one free document for you. I'll link that down below. And if you want all of the study strategies, pro tips that we have for all of the steps of the medical journey, things again that thousands of students have now tried, go ahead and check out a MedSchool Blueprint, something that we're constantly updating. And if you want an entire blueprint on how to just crush it on your medical journey from A to C in every single phase of the medical journey, we're still constantly updating it. Check out the MedSchool Blueprint which is now checked out by thousands of medical students, just like you. But as always, my friends, thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this episode, check out this 3.9 GPA study strategy video here and this video on how to use Anki Like a Pro. And as always, thank you for being a part of our journey. Hopefully we were a little helped to you guys on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.