 So you're struggling to learn all of the material needed for your first and second year med school. In this video, I'm going to break down how you can make it so much easier by just using one simple resource. Let's get into it. All right guys, welcome to the MD journey. A channel completely dedicated to helping you succeed on your medical journey with last dress. My name is Laksham, internal medicine physician. In this video, we are going to be talking about, as you can tell from the title, how to use Picmonic to help you succeed during your first and second year medical school. Now I made a video in the past of how you can improve your long-term retention and I'll link that down below. But in the video, I do use Picmonic as an example of how you can use one resource to help you cover all of the bases and struggles as a brand new med student. So I'll link that down below. And in this video, I'm basically going to be taking a step back, putting myself back in the shoes of a first and second year medical student and showing you, through my computer, through insight, kind of look of what I would do as a brand new med student. How I would use Picmonic to help me with all of the information I need to learn as well as some of the things that are coming up in the back of our mind like step one. And before I forget, if you do want to jump around to different parts of the video, feel free. I'll show the timestamps down below as well as place them here. And as you're going through the video, if you want to learn more about Picmonic or you potentially want to try it out yourself, I'll link down below a discount link for 20% off that the people at Picmonic have the gracious to give to me to give to you. So hopefully that helps you guys out. But let's get into the various features and how I would use Picmonic as a brand new med student. In case you're not familiar, Picmonic is basically a library of comprehensive videos and images to be able to correlate a very difficult to understand medical topic and to be able to tribute them to very interesting, easy to remember images and stories. That way you can remember information, not just for the short term, but also for the long term for board exams, as well as when you're actually a practicing physician. And so for example, here we have a video about the hypothalamus as you can see, it's a very creative and elaborate image. And as you kind of go through it, different parts of the image are associated with different things regarding the hypothalamus or the function that I specifically asked. So it's very easy for you to remember not only what the hypothalamus does, but the different hormones that are involved and how they're related to each other. In addition to the videos and images, you kind of have references on the left-hand side for you to be able to see the text that is associated specifically with the videos. And in addition to the images in the videos, you kind of have a nice paragraph and comprehensive text down below in case you want to put everything that you learned in your story together in one place. And it doesn't really matter of what topic you're learning or want to learn more about, there's a very good chance that Picmonic has a video specifically for you. And so getting into my favorite features specifically about Picmonic and how it uses as a brand new student is I would first go into the browse section because they have nice pre-made playlist depending on the organ system you're learning about or the course that you're in. So for example, let's say that you're in a cardiology rotation or cardiology four-week block, you can find specifically Picmonic videos that are made based off of the organ system you're learning about. So if you're in your cardiology block, you can go ahead specifically into the cardiology section and find different videos specifically on the anatomy, the physiology, such as heart murmurs and EKGs that would you definitely have to learn more about or things like the different medications that are involved for taking care of a cardiology patient. And because most of us will know our curriculum and we know what's going to be covered in the next few days, if for example, I knew that tomorrow we're going to be talking about EKGs, I can simply go into the different videos and start watching them a day before. So that's one of my favorite things about Picmonic is you can have these organ based systems and then if you know what your curriculum is going to be like, so for example, if you know tomorrow you're going to be learning about EKGs for the first time on your cardiology block, you can then find those videos in Picmonic and watch those videos ahead of time and then go to lecture and see what your professor deems to be important and then watch the lectures once more and when you come home, that way you get ultimate active recall on the things that are high yield as well as maybe the nitty gritty things that your professor may want for their final exam. And the beauty of this is that these videos are really short, so for example, if we're going to learn about EKGs for the very first time, Picmonic is going to be able to cover for me in two minutes and then I can learn about things like EKG interpretation and be able to get through a lot of videos in the night before and not feel like it's going to really impede on my review process afterwards because again, these videos are only going to take me a few minutes to watch before and after. And on a related note, as you're going through your class material, it can be overwhelming to be able to see all of the cardiology material at once, especially if you haven't learned it. So a nice way that I would approach it in addition to watching the videos a day before as well as after the lecture is as I'm looking through my curriculum, as I'm covering different things through Picmonic and through my lectures, you can add them to a personal playlist. So if you want to create a new playlist, for example, for cardiology block, then you can go ahead and say, well, tomorrow I'm going to learn about the fundamentals of cardiology or I'm going to learn about heart murmurs and those are going to be things that I know I'm going to be tested on. So I'm going to create the playlist that way in the future. I can go ahead and review all the material I've already learned in class and have those related Picmonic videos ready for me to watch. And once you have your personalized playlist and you're going through them with your classes, the beauty of Picmonic is that it doesn't stop just with the videos or the text, but you can actually quiz yourself. So you can see how well do you know the images, the stories that they presented, as well as the information. So for example, we're learning about murmurs and you recognize the murmurs specifically talking about aortic regurgitation. You can say, what kind of murmur do you think this is? And so I'm just going to go ahead and guess, but aortic regurgitation is diastolic. And so that's going to be something that's going to be related to the image. And so it'll be a nice way to quiz yourself on something that's very high yield for medicine, but in a very simple and easy way. So you'll be able to see that image and say, I know what that's mentioning, I know what that's related to, but ultimately it's going to help you do better on your exam for one, but also be able to help associate an image that's going to last much longer than just your exam for cardiology, but instead also carry you forward through your rotations as well as when you're a physician. So so far we've gone through a very simple yet effective way of using Picmonic, identifying what videos correlate with lectures you'll have tomorrow and throughout the rest of the week, watching them because they're very short the days before and also watching them after lectures and then having set time in your evenings or the start of the day to do these very quick quizzes. And as you could see, you can choose how many questions you want to ask yourself. So by no means does that have to be overwhelming. It can be five questions, 20 questions or more depending on the amount of free time you have as well as your motivation levels. Now I know one of the most common questions I get on the channel is how to better review, how to prep for exams and how to find the time to do it. So nice thing about Picmonic again is in one resource where you learn the material but you can also come in and do your daily quizzes in the evening, but as the test is getting closer they now have a new feature that's called study schedulers. So if you know an exam is for example, next Friday you can say let's do it, I need to put my test day and then it's going to be able to break down the different videos and quizzes that you need to be able to watch to prep yourself effectively without becoming overwhelming. If you want to do your own study schedule outside of Picmonic, all you have to do is find the videos you've already seen based on the class material and assign different days to watch them maybe a 1.5x to be able to get through them as well as do the associated quizzes. So through this approach you can see how you can watch videos before and after the lecture to learn the material, find some dedicated time in your evening to do the quizzes for those videos specifically as well as old material and then finally as your test day is coming around either use the study plan that Picmonic helps you or create one yourself to be able to prepare better for the exam in the last few days. Before we end this video I do want to point two more things about Picmonic that are really conducive and advantageous especially for some of those students that really want to learn everything about a specific piece of topic. So for example, let's say I'm watching a video on mitral stenosis and I don't think that everything specifically in this video are able to answer my questions or I feel like there's some pieces of information I just don't get. Nice thing about Picmonic is they're not stinging with their information. In fact, they actually do refer to a lot of other competing resources, things like online meta as well as the Osmosis YouTube channel and Luxurio that you guys can check out. So then you can find other resources in one single place in case the Picmonic videos aren't able to help you completely understand the topic like mitral stenosis. And last but not least I mentioned step one at the start and I know there's always questions of how do you prep for step one as a first or second year medical student without going crazy. The nice thing is if you go into the browse section of Picmonic you'll find that there are specific sections for first aid as well as various books like Patoma and you can also find a specific playlist and collection of materials specifically for USMLE step one. So on this channel I recommend always simplifying the amount of resources you use. So if you do want to start studying for step one you can find that if you're learning about cardiology you might as well go ahead and watch the videos that are associated with the Patoma as well as the first aid topics in cardiology and use Picmonic to help you do all of that class material as well as step one in one simple step. But those guys are the various different resources through Picmonic that I would use to help make med school so much easier as a first or second year med student. Again you want one resource that can really kind of cover all of your bases without stressing you out. You want things to be quick and efficient and all in one place and Picmonic does offer that. If you do choose to go ahead and try out Picmonic and use the link down below I'll also throw in the master of the boards how to get a 250 or higher on your step one exam. It's an e-book that we created here on the MD journey to help you simplify the step one studying process as both a first and second year medical student as well as when you're getting into your dedicated. And so if you do want a free copy of that e-book all you have to do is send me an email at themdjourney.com at gmail.com and basically attach a screenshot of your receipt from Picmonic. Now go ahead and happily send you that e-book. But hopefully you guys you found this video to be helpful especially if you're finding medical school to be overwhelming and you want one resource to help calm everything down. I really do think Picmonic is a resource worth to checking out. So hopefully you guys get some benefit from it as well. If you guys do have any questions about Picmonic or medical school in general go ahead and drop your comments down below. If you did enjoy this video and the content like this make sure you hit that like button hit that subscribe button if you haven't and we're putting out two videos just like this on a weekly basis. But thank you guys so much for watching and hopefully you enjoy this video. Thanks for joining me on my journey. Hopefully I've been a little helped to you on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.