What resources do you use for studying outside of lectures/your school, if any?

[gnocchi]

For US medical students, my impression from reading posts online is that the majority of people rely on 3rd party resources to study, especially for the USMLE. Specifically:

-Premade anki flash cards (Anking)

-Boards and beyond

-Pathoma

-Sketchy

-Picmonic

etc.

A lot of these services cost money. Textbooks cost a lot of money too. And in Canada, we don't have the USMLE.

Have you tried any of these, and found them helpful? Are there any other good study resources designed for Canadian students that you use? What's your go to, or do you just use lectures and your textbooks to study? If you rely a lot on textbooks, did you purchase anything beyond the booklist for your school that you found helpful?

[bearded frog]

A lot of these are specifically made as USMLE prep, so less relevant to Canadian students. There are resources for NMBE exams if your school uses them. The main general resource for Canadian students was Toronto Notes, although I'm a few years out now.

[shikimate]

Personally I was never a fan of Toronto notes, kind of bulky, not to mention no pictures or color. I have always been a fan of the FirstAid series.

I was never a fan of lectures and lecture notes, because it's all different people talking about different topics. All disjointed, no consistent style of delivery. 

I would not recommend purchasing textbooks according to school's book list. Again too many heavy books without specific focus. Maybe good for reference once a while, but if you have access to UpToDate you probably don't need those books.

I mean if you buy them they can cost quite a bit, but usually your school's library keep copies around. Some hospital libraries keep copies around too. 

You might even be able to get by with just free stuff on YouTube. 

[kronos]

I'm only in first-year, so my experience is still pretty raw, but I do use external resources quite a bit. My school (UBC) is on a spiral curriculum so it is a little harder to use them since we jump around systems so much but I do find them very helpful. This blog post is worth reading: https://www.zhighley.com/how-to-use-anking-with-lectures-medical-school/

Resources I use: AnKing, B&B, Osmosis

Basically the Sunday before every week, I'll watch the relevant B&B videos to what we're covering the coming week (2x speed, passively and not taking notes or anything). I'll then unsuspend the AnKing cards tagged to those videos and add them to my rotation to learn in the coming week. 

The Anking cards will usually cover about 90% of what we learn, so to cover the remaining material, I supplement with a premade deck that an upper-year shared that covers our lecture material. This usually ends up being about 4-500 Anking and ~100 school new cards a week. 

I do find that B&B is sometimes a little bit too much board-exam focused, so I supplement with Osmosis videos fairly regularly to explain concepts we covered in lecture, but are much better explained on Osmosis. +1 for Osmosis practice questions too. I have a pdf copy of First Aid (look on Google, you'll find it) that I sometimes refer to if I see a diagram I like on an Anking card and want to save the diagram into my notes to reference later. 

Let me know if you have any questions! This is definitely something that's sort of come out through trial and error, and I expect that I'll refine the process as time goes on. 

[pyridoxal-phosphate]

c

 

[gnocchi]

Thanks everyone that's great advice.

For anki, do you keep cards from earlier modules in your deck (eg. anatomy) active all the way through school, or do you remove them and focus on newer more relevant cards as you go?