Study And Management Tools In Medical School

[statsin]

I realize that everyone has a method that works best for them but I am interested in learning about tools that med students find particularly helpful to manage the volume of studying and workload (more thoughts the better!). Particularly interested thoughts on:

 

- Preference for printing notes vs. keeping everything electronic

- Laptops vs. ipads

- Programs and apps for note taking; I hear OneNote is a favorite among many.

- Thoughts on using flash cards that you can carry on your phone or program for drawing flow charts, programs for learning anatomy/histology etc 

- Is taking notes using Acrobat Reader on a PDF (like I did much in my undergrad and grad school) still efficient? Any pros and cons of other methods?

- Tools for managing time on clinical practicing, shadowing, research, class time and extracurriculars? I use iCal atm and suspect that it should work well in the future too. 

 

Myself and Med 0s would really appreciate to hear from current/former med students. Thank you!  

[GH0ST]

Hi =D, 

 

Preference for printing notes vs. keeping everything electronic

 

I like to have both since I'm old fashioned and prefer a hard copy of relevant material. 

Laptops vs. ipads

 

I use a laptop but recently tried Ipad... I prefer to use Ipad for reading but not necessarily note taking. That said there's a significant proportion of people that use either or both. 

 

Programs and apps for note taking; I hear OneNote is a favorite among many.

 

OneNote, Word, PPT, tons 

Thoughts on using flash cards that you can carry on your phone or program for drawing flow charts, programs for learning anatomy/histology etc

 

Can be helpful, but eventually you'll not have enough time to constantly make flash cards given the volumes of material + self-study outside of lecture content. 

Is taking notes using Acrobat Reader on a PDF (like I did much in my undergrad and grad school) still efficient? Any pros and cons of other methods?

 

I see people doing this too, but it's not much different from taking notes on a pad or tablet + stylus. 

Tools for managing time on clinical practicing, shadowing, research, class time and extracurriculars? I use iCal atm and suspect that it should work well in the future too.

 

Anything that can also sync to your medical school schedule. 

 

Good luck, 

 

- G

[criselda]

Preference for printing notes vs electronic

I personally did both, my medical school gave us paper copies of notes (at the time) so I would write on them during lecture which helps me focus. Then I typed up summaries of the main objectives for studying, printed hard copies for studying off of. I kept the summaries in my Dropbox and still sometimes refer to them in residency. 

 

Laptops vs iPads

I found my laptop too heavy to carry around in med school (MacBook Pro) and I didn't get an iPad until mid-third year clerkship. I think I would have preferred iPad for portability, ability to take notes by hand on it. I definitely use my iPad at residency academic days now. 

 

Programs and apps for note taking

I have seen OneNote on others' devices and it does look sweet. I love organization and it looks effective. I think I couldn't get as much functionality out of it on my iPad when I first got it, so I ended up downloading Notability which allows me to type, write, highlight, import PDFs etc. and still organize notes by subject/folder. And I couldn't live without my Dropbox for notes and textbooks. 

 

Flash cards on your phone

Never was a flash card person... A good friend of mine wrote stacks and stacks of flash cards in high school though, I don't think she liked the electronic ones. I did try one of the iPhone flash card apps (Study Blue) and while I liked the idea of typing them out (faster than writing) and the portability, I ultimately stopped using it. Try a free app for this, and see if you actually keep up and use it. 

 

Notes on Acrobat Reader / PDFs

Again I preferred writing on paper notes in med school but in residency and clerkship I took notes on PDFs with the Notability app I mentioned. Worked for me. 

 

Managing time

As long as you have some sort of calendar, and update it and look at it often, you'll do well! I use Google calendar, and have different calendars for rotations, professional meetings or sessions, extracurriculars, personal, and so on. I echo the ability to sync to the med school schedule. 

[katakari]

Preference for printing notes vs electronic

Always electronic. For pre-clerkship, you have extra copies of assignments/whatever if you lose it, your computer breaks etc, I was always able to access my notes externally.

 

Laptops vs iPads

Galaxy Tab S for the ward. Since hospital internet access is sporadic when you are not at your home site, I have an offline copy of UpToDate, MedScape, BMJ, Wikipedia and many other medical resources and textbooks on my tablet. This is only possible through the addition of microSD cards to the tablet. It also fits in my scrub pockets, not that I recommend it though. Laptop is preferable for any other location.

 

Programs and apps for note taking

OneNote. Automatically uploads to your account so you can access notes from anywhere. Interface is entirely based on keyboard shortcuts so you save tons of time on formatting, if that's your thing.

 

Flash cards on your phone

Anki. Build on laptop, send to phone.

UWORLD mobile app

Quick reference sheets from OnlineMeded

 

Notes on Acrobat Reader / PDFs

No.

 

Managing time

Google calendar.

[btdubs]

This may be slightly random, but in terms of note-taking, what quantity of paper are we talking about? I always write/wrote out my notes in undergrad (ie. I re-copy from PowerPoints during class in order to pay more attention to the slide content --> kinesthetic learner), but from what I've been reading, this method is probably not going to be realistic in medical school due to the sheer volume of content. I've heard that even printing all the slides is a crazy idea. Is this actually the case? So, is adding notes to online versions of the slides the only realistic method of capturing everything, or are there actually people who still hand-write everything?

[Pistachio9]

This may be slightly random, but in terms of note-taking, what quantity of paper are we talking about? I always write/wrote out my notes in undergrad (ie. I re-copy from PowerPoints during class in order to pay more attention to the slide content --> kinesthetic learner), but from what I've been reading, this method is probably not going to be realistic in medical school due to the sheer volume of content. I've heard that even printing all the slides is a crazy idea. Is this actually the case? So, is adding notes to online versions of the slides the only realistic method of capturing everything, or are there actually people who still hand-write everything?

 

I can provide one perspective. Starting with the most manual to least manual:

• Recopying powerpoint slides live during lectures probably wont work. There is just too much content, especially pictures, that it would be very difficult to keep up with the lecturers. I guess if you were super quick you could keep up but we regularly have slides which we spend just seconds on and I doubt anyone could copy down those slides in seconds. You could do it if you just need to write down key notes from slides probably!
• Printing all the slides is not that crazy of an idea. There are a number of people in my class that do this. At Western we even have "course reps" that put together slide packages for each block and print them out for people that want them. The packages are around $15-25 in terms of printing costs. As an example, for our current block (genitourinary) the slide package was 430 pages (at 6 slides per page, but it also included a substantial amount of non-lecture material, ie. homework and readings etc). From what I've heard this is on the lower end of the spectrum for course package length. While that is a lot of pages, there are a number of students in the class that take this route.
• You could consider getting a tablet or a surface laptop. This is what I use. Its basically the slide option from above but you dont have to print the pages (yay saving trees) + you get full slide size etc. It's pretty easy to take notes on OneNote using the surface pro. The other nice thing is that it makes your notes searchable if you want to look up something specific, instead of having to look through pages of printed notes.
• You could just take notes on your computer. Most of the class probably does this. Variations include taking notes on the pdf slides using a pdf annotator or some people make completely new note sets (to help them pay attention as you mentioned). This second option is similar to re-copying powerpoint slides but since you're typing it is a lot faster + there are ways to take screenshots or to quickly import slides into your notes so that you dont have to redraw complicated pictures etc.

Hopefully that helps a bit.

 

[btdubs]

That actually helps a tonne, thank you!

[Cytosine]

This may be slightly random, but in terms of note-taking, what quantity of paper are we talking about? I always write/wrote out my notes in undergrad (ie. I re-copy from PowerPoints during class in order to pay more attention to the slide content --> kinesthetic learner), but from what I've been reading, this method is probably not going to be realistic in medical school due to the sheer volume of content. I've heard that even printing all the slides is a crazy idea. Is this actually the case? So, is adding notes to online versions of the slides the only realistic method of capturing everything, or are there actually people who still hand-write everything?

 

I know some people in my class started out by taking notes by hand. Everyone quickly switched to electronics because it was absolutely impossible to do it by hand. There's just too much.

[amichel]

I really really like Evernote. In preclerkship I'd take notes from lecture/podcast and screenshot in any important diagrams or tables. Like OneNote, it makes these diastema searchable. It's so easy to access and search that I've continued to use it in clerkship.

 

Now I scan in any notes I take on a topic or handouts I get and then I have them all easily accessible!