 But as soon as we make that small change of taking an hour a day to focus on the things that are most important to them, things suddenly just become a lot easier, more motivating, and they just have a lot more momentum going into medical school. So if you're already in medical school or about to start very soon, listen up because the tips that we'll cover in this episode can make the difference in whether or not you have a successful journey. Let's get into it. All right guys, welcome back to channel. In today's episode, I want to talk about tips that new first year medical students need to know. Now I know when I first started medical school, there was a lots of tips around how to study better, how to be more productive. And most of them were very superficial, but the things that we'll talk about in this video are things that I've learned hindsight 2020 as well as working with hundreds of students over the past six plus years on how to really have a successful journey. So number one is to make sure that you focus on simplifying from the very start. It's very tempting as a new med student to focus on pretty much all of the oceans of resources that are available. Maybe you want to try this because somebody mentioned that it really made a difference. You want to try these flashcards. You want to try this resource. You want to make sure you buy this book. There is a lot of things that come to it. And honestly, you don't know which one works and which one doesn't. And so before you go ahead and make both the time and financial commitment on all of these resources, just focus on understanding that you need to keep everything simple. That means when you first start medical school, really the only thing that you should be thinking about as a new medical student is what approach do you want to use for studying? How do you want to approach a lecture? How do you want to approach class when you have to go to it? How do you want to review afterwards? How do you want to prepare for your exams on the weekdays, the weekends, as well as the weeks from the exams? There is a lot that goes into simply figuring out how to create your initial study system. It's not going to be perfect, but there's a lot of energy and focus that should go into that initially. And if instead you make the mistake of thinking about the various resources that you should be using, you start to almost kind of squeeze those resources into your study schedule because you almost feel obligated because you spent money on it. So before you start asking complicated questions of what resources you want to use, focus on the simple things, how you want to study, how you want to manage your time, how you want to review. And most importantly, how you want to self assess how everything is working before you decide to add additional resources. And tip number two is to avoid adding layers of obligation. It's very easy when we start medical school to almost be in our pre-med kind of hat where you feel like you need to be doing extracurriculars, research, asking yourself what you should be doing, shadowing at the moment. But really your first semester when you start, your main focus should be how do I learn best because that is going to be a self evolving question and the answer session that you'll have with yourself. And if you can truly hone in on that your first semester at medical school, you're going to be golden for the next coming semesters. A lot of the students that I work with one on one through my coaching program are at various parts of their medical journey. But even if they're a first year medical student or a fourth year medical student, many of them still struggle on learning how they study best. Now it's okay if you're brand new because that's a whole idea of learning how to improve. Now this is very normal starting out, but for the students who are later on in their journey that's concerning because that means that they haven't really given dedicated amount of time to focus on that question answer of how do I learn best. And so that's why it's so important to avoid adding layers of obligations of research, extracurriculars, and everything else the medical school will throw at you and simply focus on let's learn how to learn. And before we get to the rest of the tips in this episode, if you are interested in learning how you best learn and how to study better in medical school, check out some of the programs that we have down below in the description, some of them that I recommend including the Med School Domination Bundle as well as the Rapid Study Accelerator. Now tip number three is to start backwards and particularly I'm talking about when exams and quizzes come around because one of the mistakes that most med students make is that even though that they're aware of when their quizzes and exams will be, they don't actually proactively plan on how and when they're going to start reviewing. So a good example is when I was in medical school it was very normal to know, hey, test is next Friday, but it was very common for me initially as well as a lot of my classmates to not really start prepping until the weekend before or the week day before. And that's when you have both the stress, the anxiety, and the feeling of overwhelmed, but instead you can work backwards and ask yourself, okay, test is next Friday, question one, how many lectures are going to be on this test? Question two, how many times do I want to go through each lecture before exam day? And then question three, how many lectures do I have to cover each day to appropriately get to my goal? So for example, if you had a quiz or a test with 14 different lectures and you had seven days to prepare, you think, okay, I just need to do two lectures a day, not too bad. But if you ask yourself, okay, I actually truly want to do two passes before the week of exam, that means you've now increased it to four passes, which forces you to ask yourself, do I need to move my review date when I initially start earlier? Or do I need to spend more time doing more lectures per day? Or do I need to dedicate more time on the weekends? Asking yourself to work backwards truly helps you have a plan. And just like they say, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Tip number four, and this is probably one of the biggest things that I truly hold important for all knuckle students to listen up. Tip number four is to have non-negotiable time. One of the biggest issues with medical school is that it feels like it needs to take up all your time because there's always more information to learn. And so, for example, it's very common in medical school to prepare for an exam and then realize that however many hours you've dedicated may not be enough to know every single thing. So the typical answer for most medical students is I neither either spend more hours in one day or I need to take some time away from my free time in the weekends or the weekdays and you become a medical student 24 seven. And even if you're one of those medical students that can use this strategy and still get the grades you want, the problem is that every phase of your journey, your time becomes more limited. And from experience for my own self, as well as working with hundreds and thousands of med students over the past few years, I do know that if you don't have time for yourself or the things that matter to most to you, including the people, the priorities, your hobbies, whatever it may be, you are creating a recipe for burnout. And if you don't want to be just another statistic in medical school, it's really important that you focus on that non-negotiable time. And a simple way of doing this is to grab your calendar every single week. And before you go ahead and plug in what time you want to review your lectures and do your flashcards and your practice questions, ask what one hour every single day is dedicated to you that's absolutely off the books for studying. And you can use this hour for whatever you want. It can be for your morning workout. It can be time with your family and be time watching your favorite TV show or absolutely doing nothing. I do encourage that after this video, you go and actually do this in your calendar because there are plenty of people that have watched my videos for the past few years have realized this is a good idea and then still chosen not to do it and then come to me at some point through emails or my coaching calls and told me I still have no time for myself. I'm super stressed. But as soon as we make that small change of taking an hour a day to focus on the things that are most important to them, things suddenly just become a lot easier, more motivating, and they just have a lot more momentum going into medical school. And before we get into the last tip of this episode, if you're enjoying this, you're watching this on YouTube, go and help this video out by hitting that like button down below. Tip number five. And I know they're all important, but this is going to be the most important for your own sanity. And that's to really focus on being tunnel visioned. As you go through your medical journey, you are going to be the cream of the crop, the creme de la creme. I think that's how you say that. In your medical journey, where you're going to be the top of your high school class, you're going to do really well on your SAT. Maybe you've done really well in college, you got a good MCAT score. You're in medical school. You're probably one of the smartest people out there because you are now approved to be certified to go into a training to become a physician. And so it becomes very easy for you to start comparing yourself with everyone around you. What grade does Sally get? What grade did Joe get? How much is Joe studying? What resources is he's using? How is he able to do this? How is she able to do this? You start to look at the successes of everybody else and use that to highlight your own shortcomings. And that is a recipe for disaster because I promise you, everybody has their own internal struggles in medical school. The students who look like they're the most confident are probably the most insecure. The students who look like they have everything figured out are struggling with probably the same thing as you are. They just may not be as vocal about it. And so understand that the best way to get through medical school is to use your period as a motivation, but when it's time for you to work, become very tunnel vision. For example, it's very natural for a med student to start with something they think it's going to work. And then they realize that a classmate that got a really good exam score is using this resource and they just decide to change everything. And after multiple iterations, they don't even realize what works for them and what doesn't, but things just don't work and everything falls apart and that becomes a recipe for disaster. So when you make decisions on, this is how I study. This is how I manage my time. This is how much I want to study or how little I want to study. These are resources I want to use. Don't look at what other people are using. Simply use your own results on your quizzes, your tests, your own comfort level with the knowledge to be able to say, okay, this is working. This is not. And if things aren't working, then you can open up your tunnel vision. Ask your peers who you respect, who are doing really well. It's like, Hey, what resource are you using? How do you study? Or how do you manage this? As soon as they give you a recommendation that you want to now apply, get that tunnel vision back on and get to work. Those guys are my five tips that brand new medical students and honestly, even veteran medical students need to know. If you're watching this and you're about to start the journey you're really early on or you're later in the journey, I promise you it becomes an amazing experience. If you truly focus on simplifying things from the very start, avoid focusing on what everyone else is doing. And as soon as you realize that things are working, focus on tinkering and improving those slightly instead of redoing the entire system. And if you made it to the end of this video, I just have one request really just like hit that like button down below. Really helps the video how also tells me you want more content like this. Keep going. I truly do appreciate the support. If you're listening to this on a podcast and go ahead and hit the subscribe profile on your favorite podcast platform and consider leaving a review on iTunes. And as I mentioned before, if you really want to improve your performance on things like how to study, how to become a more productive, check out some of the programs down below, including the med school domination bundle, as well as a rapid study accelerator. As always, my friends, drop your comments down below. If you enjoyed this video, you probably enjoyed this video of how I used Anki step by step and how you can use it to help improve your time in medical school. Guys, thank you so much for being a part of my journey. Hopefully, I was a little help to you guys on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.