 guys welcome to the channel today we are talking about a few pre-med study strategies that you can use to help boost up your grade and ideally do it in last time let's get into it. All right guys welcome to the empty journey a channel completely dedicated to help students just like you succeed on their medical journey with less stress. My name is Laksham an internal medicine physician and resident in training I've been making videos just like this for individuals just like you so if you are new to the channel consider subscribing hitting that notification bell to be notified for two videos a week that we're putting out for people just like you and also consider hitting that like button to support this video. Today this video is to help anyone that is a pre-med and needs a little bit of boost and improvement in their grades as well as their study strategies. I'm going to recommend a few things that I did as well as didn't do and wish I kind of had started that would have helped both improve my retention my grades and ideally make me study last so let's get into a few of the methods. So one of my favorite study strategies that I used in medical school and actually wish I used it as a pre-med is to use screenshots with Anki. Now many of you may have already seen a video I have here on the channel that walks you step by step on how I used Anki in medical school to basically get to the review and learning phase as quickly as possible and if you're unfamiliar with Anki it's basically a free tool to help you make flashcards but actually uses the concept of space repetition to ask you questions and flashcards that you don't know well more often than the material you do but to give you an overview of this method most people may use their power points that are syllabus and try to memorize it for an upcoming exam and many of you may use flashcards as a pre-med to help you retain information before test day but one of the biggest problems with flashcards is the amount of time it actually takes to make them by the time we go through our 20 30 or even hundreds of cards that we make we may not actually have very much time or motivation to actually review them so instead the specific Anki method I use actually involves screenshotting different parts of your power points and slides to make your flashcards easier and then get to the review phase quicker so if you're interested in seeing examples and kind of a step-by-step over my shoulder I want you to two places one there's a full video here on youtube that you can check out and I'll link that down below if you want an even more detailed step-by-step there's a free video course on the channel as well as amdjourney.com you guys can check out down below that kind of explains the same process but if you're somebody who likes to jump into learning and reviewing phase as quickly as possible as I would recommend you do then go ahead and check out this Anki method now technique number two is something I did do as a pre-med and it definitely helped me retain more information in a short amount of time and that is the brain dump technique now if you're a longtime follower of the amdjourney you already know about the brain dump technique but if you're new to this channel essentially what it is is you grab a blank piece of paper and you try to recreate the lecture or the topic based off of how you remember it from a all the way to z so for example you may have learned about the heart in one of your recent biology courses and you roughly may remember the structure you may remember the headings the major topics how things connected so this is your opportunity to basically see if you can recreate that and understand as much as you think you do and so the way the brain dump technique works is you grab a blank piece of paper you try to recreate the lecture that you think you remember and you see if you can go all the way from point A B and C when you'll find is that there's going to be some information that you already know you're weak at and that's going to be something you already knew you had to look at but the effectiveness of the brain dump is when you think you can go from topic A to topic C but for some reason you're forgetting that little bit of detail that you remember being in the lecture don't actually remember what it was and so whenever you encounter these moments these are known as gaps in your knowledge you go ahead and highlight it start it whatever may be on your paper and you continue and you move forward with information you do remember from the lecture now this is an activity that ideally just takes you about five to ten minutes again you're trying to regurgitate as much as you can in shorthand scribble on a piece of paper to help you identify what those gaps are and then the next step would be to go through your paper and identify all those gaps all the things you highlighted or starred and now go ahead and specifically review those this may involve you going back to your slides or your lecture material or going through an online resource to help you understand how two ideas make connects and then once you feel like you have a good grasp on things go ahead and grab that piece of paper again spend another five minutes trying to recreate the whole lecture at this time try to see if the previous gaps you had have now been closed this is a really effective method to identify the things that you feel you're confident with but actually don't know as well and that would have been bad in contest day and to help you strengthen those ideas first before you focus on reviewing the things that you're already good at and if you guys want to learn more about the brain dump technique or other strategies i use in medical school i'll link down below a blog post as well as a video for five study methods that really helped me out now study strategy number three that i recommend is a pre-med this is what i did for a lot of my busy classes like organic chemistry and a lot of all of my chemistry classes is really interesting enough and essentially what i would do is i would create a list on either google docs or one note or you know microsoft word and make a list of all the topics that i had learned so to usually do this at the end of a day or the end of a lecture now type out the different topics that i learned and sometimes if a course material or syllabus had the objectives i would just copy and paste those and kind of make a running list of everything i should know now as the test was rolling around essentially what i would do is i would give each topic a different color green would mean i think i know it well orange would mean somewhat and then red would mean you definitely need to review and then i resort that list and make sure i started with the topics that gave me the most difficulty and i didn't want to show up on the exam or i didn't want to feel unprepared for and then as you gradually move down the list you realize that your whole list with mixtures of colors from red yellow and green are slowly all becoming green and all becoming comfortable and how you review them you can do the various study techniques some of the ones we talked about some of the ones in the articles linked down below but just make sure you start with your biggest weaknesses first that way you're prepared come test day and my fourth study strategy as a pre-med and this is something that really helped me especially if you are somebody who has test after test kind of within the same week is to actually pre-schedule when you're going to start reviewing for specific tests now the nice thing about college and being a pre-med is most of us know when our test dates are for all of our courses as soon as the semester begins so one of the first things i would recommend you do within the first week for two weeks is to go ahead and list out all your test days on your calendar or google calendar and then go back about a week and a half to two weeks and go ahead and schedule when you plan on initiating your review for that specific test now the reason this technique works really well is one you can start breaking up all of your lectures for a test for example if you had 14 lectures and you have two weeks to review it you could roughly do about one to two lectures a day and still be prepared for that test but the second reason it's so helpful is that it's not unlikely that you may have multiple tests within a week so as soon as you start noticing that your reviews are not going to be realistic you can start moving up the dates and maybe start reviewing two and a half weeks in advance or somehow account for your obligations on the week of test day this is a great way to be prepared months in advance and avoid some of that stress of having two or three tests in a week those guys are some of my favorite pre-med study strategies that i personally use or i wish i used to help improve my grades to go ahead and comment down below with your thoughts as well as your favorite study strategies that you love to use and if you want even more help on your pre-med journey then consider checking out the pre-med journey which is 99 cents on amazon kindle and it's basically a step-by-step blueprint one of the things that i follow to get accepted into every medical school that i applied to hopefully can help you do the same also helps you reduce the stress of common things like how to study be productive and get experience as a pre-med in college so i'll link the book down below for you guys to check out and also at the very end of the video you can check out other videos that i have made to help you on your pre-med journey here on youtube but thank you guys so much for watching this video hopefully you guys enjoyed it make sure if you haven't done so already to hit that like button and i know you may also be a new member so consider subscribing if you enjoy the content and if you want more like this we're putting out two videos just like this one so hit that subscribe button hit that notification bell to know when our videos go live with that being said guys hopefully i've been able to help to you on your journey thanks for being a part of mine i'll see you guys in the next one peace