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How do you take notes and study in medical school?


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I am trying to figure out how I'll be taking notes and using a laptop, tablet, pen/paper, etc. in class and when studying at home. I have a few questions that I hope can get answered by medical students.

1. When you're in class or listening to a recorded lecture for the first time, how are you taking your notes? Do you use an iPad, pen/paper, laptop?

2. What exactly do you do with your first draft of notes? (e.g. keep them as is, re-listen to a lecture to bolster the notes, make entirely new notes, don't make new notes and go straight to making ANKI cards)?

3. Probably most important: How do you actually do your studying to prepare for a test? Are you re-reading your notes, doing flashcards, mind-mapping, doing practice tests, etc.? Like what does the lead up to exam-day look like.

4. Do you think flashcards (ANKI) are useful for all courses?

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  • ma17 changed the title to How do you take notes and study in medical school?
13 hours ago, ma17 said:

I am trying to figure out how I'll be taking notes and using a laptop, tablet, pen/paper, etc. in class and when studying at home. I have a few questions that I hope can get answered by medical students.

1. When you're in class or listening to a recorded lecture for the first time, how are you taking your notes? Do you use an iPad, pen/paper, laptop?

2. What exactly do you do with your first draft of notes? (e.g. keep them as is, re-listen to a lecture to bolster the notes, make entirely new notes, don't make new notes and go straight to making ANKI cards)?

3. Probably most important: How do you actually do your studying to prepare for a test? Are you re-reading your notes, doing flashcards, mind-mapping, doing practice tests, etc.? Like what does the lead up to exam-day look like.

4. Do you think flashcards (ANKI) are useful for all courses?

1. Laptop. I try to read through the slide deck before the lecture and add any Anki cards that aren't already in my premade deck so that way I take minimal notes during the lecture and can focus on listening. Another bonus is if it is a pre-recorded lecture I can usually play it at 2x speed comfortably if I've read through the slides once.

2. Straight to Anki (usually at this point there isn't much that the lecturer said that wasn't already on the slides or wasn't already in the premade deck).

3. I continue doing Anki according to schedule. If I feel like I need it I'll supplement by re-reading + making study notes on the areas I have trouble with and/or do practice questions on AMBOSS.a

4. For clinical skills courses it's more important to practice the physical exam on friends/family than try to turn it into Anki cards. After the systems based preclerkship curriculum was done I found Anki to be a lot less useful.

You will hone down your own study strategy in the first semester of school. I was still figuring out exactly what worked for me going into 2nd year. Now with clerkship approaching I'll probably need to find something new again. Best of luck and don't stress too much. The amount of content can seem overwhelming at first but you'll realize that you come back to it over and over again throughout preclerkship, clerkship, residency, etc.

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In the old days paper and pen, then review them "as is" before exam, sometimes reorganizing/re-typing, sometimes quizzing others/study together.

in retrospect that had a lot of inefficiencies. a lot of stuff on the notes were redundant, not important or poorly explained (especially anatomy, pharmacology). Should've used flashcards more instead, would've saved a lot more time. 

Later on I did rely more on youtube and online resources, but back in the day there weren't that many goodies on YT yet lol. YT and online resources did help tremendously with anatomy because I hate those diagrams on paper and definitely prefer 3D renderings.

UWorld and First aid book did help a lot later on. First aid series were great help for clerkship.

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  • 2 weeks later...

1. I specifically bought a surface pro for this as I wanted to use a device but prefer to hand write and annotate the slides in class rather than type. It's been working very well! 

2. I make new notes and try to be as concise as possible with them. Totally depends on how the lecturer's slides are organized but I found I could usually fit 30-40 slides of info on 1 sheet of paper, double sided. Most lectures ended up being 2 pages back and front handwritten. (yes there is a theme here and I definitely learn better when I handwrite vs type things out. These are what I used to study for exams and only went back to the slides for very visual topics like anatomy. 

3. Weekly review and leading up to the exams just making sure I am not falling behind on keeping up with my notes. If practice Qs were available then I'd do those. And used youtube videos to brush up or to get a different perspective on topics I found more difficult. To study anatomy or pathways, I just make a slideshow with the labels hidden and quiz myself. 

4. I've never used flashcards but I've tried and I find them a waste of time to be honest. If they work for you then that's awesome but I think sometimes people overhype them so if you don't find them working, drop it. 

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For a while I was doing anki cards (pre-made decks, for most part). But I droped the project about 2/3 through my first year because cards were piling up after weeks of adding more and more.... so I felt like I didn't have time for anything else. I was also doing hand writting note summaries for every lecture (tables, drawing, etc), but that also took a bit too much time after all. 

So I switched everything to computer notes, where I would still make tables to organize the info (if can't be put in table, I'd do bullet points). What's practical about it is you can copy-paste straight from the course ppt (time saving!), but you still have to actively think about how to organize the info. Also, it's much more easier to find information weeks and months after you did your notes with CTRL F ;-) Before exams though, i would go through my notes and hide parts of the tables on my screen to make sure I can retreive the important stuff from memory (same idea as a flash card), or I would write on a sheet of paper the things I remember from a certain topic and compare with my notes. 

Otherwise, during the courses, I didn't take much notes and when I did, I'd add the comments to my personal notes after. Maybe it depends on schools, but for us we rarely needed more than what was on the slides (even the slides were often too much haha). The most important info teachers would give was something like "please don't memorize this" or "this question often shows up in exams". If you really don't understand what a teacher is explaining in pre-clinic, it's almost guaranteed there's a video on Osmosis or Youtube that'll answer all your questions.

So, no matter how you choose to take notes and study, make sure you do active studying (not just reading notes/ppt over and over again). This way, you'll learn better in the long run, and you'll end up studying less!

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  • 2 months later...
On 8/20/2021 at 5:43 PM, dragoncat said:

1. I specifically bought a surface pro for this as I wanted to use a device but prefer to hand write and annotate the slides in class rather than type. It's been working very well! 

2. I make new notes and try to be as concise as possible with them. Totally depends on how the lecturer's slides are organized but I found I could usually fit 30-40 slides of info on 1 sheet of paper, double sided. Most lectures ended up being 2 pages back and front handwritten. (yes there is a theme here and I definitely learn better when I handwrite vs type things out. These are what I used to study for exams and only went back to the slides for very visual topics like anatomy. 

3. Weekly review and leading up to the exams just making sure I am not falling behind on keeping up with my notes. If practice Qs were available then I'd do those. And used youtube videos to brush up or to get a different perspective on topics I found more difficult. To study anatomy or pathways, I just make a slideshow with the labels hidden and quiz myself. 

4. I've never used flashcards but I've tried and I find them a waste of time to be honest. If they work for you then that's awesome but I think sometimes people overhype them so if you don't find them working, drop it. 

Hello, do you have any insight on how to learn/retain the triple I block (especially bacteria/antimicrobials) for year 1? Thank you for your input.

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17 hours ago, Stars2020 said:

Hello, do you have any insight on how to learn/retain the triple I block (especially bacteria/antimicrobials) for year 1? Thank you for your input.

Honestly I don't even know how I did this part of the block. I hated how overwhelming it was. I ended up memorizing as much as I could and it ended up being enough to score just at class average. 

Some resources people use are Bugs and Drugs, and Osmosis also has some really great stuff. I think lots of Osmosis videos are on youtube too. 

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4 hours ago, dragoncat said:

Honestly I don't even know how I did this part of the block. I hated how overwhelming it was. I ended up memorizing as much as I could and it ended up being enough to score just at class average. 

Some resources people use are Bugs and Drugs, and Osmosis also has some really great stuff. I think lots of Osmosis videos are on youtube too. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond and for your insight-microbiology is overwhelming. Osmosis is refreshing!

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