How do you study in med school?

[Egg_McMuffin]

Hearing about the large volume of info they throw at you in med school has got me concerned. That, and a little bit of the imposter syndrome and the fact that I've been out of school for 2 years. So:

1. What is your note-taking/organization routine?

2. What is your study routine? What additional resources do you use aside from lecture notes?

3. Anything you wish you'd done differently?

I'm asking this mostly with pre-clerkship in mind...but if you have any tips for studying in clerkship, throw them in too.

Thanks in advance

 

[FailureToThrive]

What I learned is that how you study in med school is very dependent on your med school curriculum and way of teaching.

For instance, my med school does not have lectures/notes/presentations and, instead of having a traditional systems-based curriculum, we have a symptoms-based curriculum. What's worse is that we are the first generation to go through this curriculum, and so there was no guidance from upper years. As such, I wasn't able to study the same way as students who get lecture notes are able to study.

You'll be able to adapt yourself with time and practice, there really is no way to anticipate what you'll experience in med school.  

 

[End Poverty]

Check out the Girly MD channel, she answers a lot of your questions

[Sauna]

1 hour ago, Egg_McMuffin said:

1. What is your note-taking/organization routine?

See this post.

1 hour ago, Egg_McMuffin said:

2. What is your study routine? What additional resources do you use aside from lecture notes?

This will depend a lot on your background/what type of stuff you're more or less comfortable with as well as the course. For stuff you've never seen before, Queen's already has a great system in place that will make your life (and studying) really easy:

1. DIL (interactive online module to introduce the topic to you and cover everything you need to know, this is scheduled into your weekly schedule). Sometimes it will be a DIL+Quiz for you to see if your independent review of the material was effective.

2. Lecture (to help reinforce what you covered in the DIL, there is a lot more of these in first semester as a lot of the topics are brand new for most people).

3. SGL (to apply the DIL+lecture information in your small group to cases and for you to see if you actually know the material well). In 2nd semester (and 2nd half of 2nd semester especially) it will transition to mainly DIL --> SGL (without a need for the lecture component).

4. Review (there will be reviews usually close to the test dates to help sharpen your focus on what you should know)

5. Peer Support (we all pool our resources together so I will usually go through 1-2 of my classmates' notes to make sure I didn't miss anything. People also make Quizlet flashcards which can be pretty helpful to go through.

Honestly if you go through all these steps and put in a reasonable amount of effort in each, I've found that there is no need to study that much (maybe read over the notes 1-2 times before a test?). The only time I've had to study for reals is when I didn't pay attention in class or if I half assed the DIL. Or during finals because that's just what you do during finals. 

[Sauna]

On 6/15/2018 at 11:34 PM, Egg_McMuffin said:

3. Anything you wish you'd done differently?

I guess just paying more attention in class would've saved me a lot of time later on

[End Poverty]

15 hours ago, Egg_McMuffin said:

2. What is your study routine? What additional resources do you use aside from lecture notes?

One of my relatives gave me Toronto Notes for my 24th birthday gift saying that I will need it in med school but I'm not sure if that's true.  It's a humongous book, but apparently, it is really helpful