Thriving in the New School Year: Strategies to Help You Ace Your Exams and Excel in Your Courses

Hey guys thank you for joining us let's give it another minute or two before we get started in the meantime feel free to let us know where you're from and maybe something fun about yourself just so we can get to know the audience a bit and let us know where you are in your journey like what sort of career or profession in healthcare you've been considering and once again thanks for joining all right guys we're about we can we probably get started I'm sure folks will trickle in a bit as we get started but the first bit of it is more generalized and the way I sort of decided to go about this is a lot of times in similar talks a lot a lot of the content that'll get covered tends to be really Broad and generalized but for a lot of folks on this healthcare Journey sometimes it's helpful to get more into specifics meat and potatoes type approaches to graduate education that's how I'm approaching this mostly from The Graduate education side almost any of this is applicable regardless of education level besides maybe like high school so mov it's a little intense for that but I think it'll be helpful towards the end I left a lot of time for questions because oftentimes a lot of people have unique situations where it's difficult to curate to every possible unique learner student because everyone has their own approaches to learning and everyone has her own way of being intellectual because everyone is smart in their own way so let's get started I'm Mike Klug DO I'm a Psychiatry resident I help rate content for osmosis I have several years of working in test prep and a lot of capacities I did MCAT tutoring and helped generate MCAT content helped generate y content Comics content I did take step one step two Comics one two and three and I've worked in some capacity and education for around 10 years mostly in The Graduate education level and I've been through med school myself so that helps and I also was initially prep PhD so I have a lot of the exposure that like a first year PhD student would have to that part which tends to be for those unaware the first year of a PhD is a lot of courses and tends to be a little bit more extradited than college so I kind of cover some aspects that I learned along the way for that too so even folks that are on that route might get some benefit too so the focus on this session is that initially Brad advice to higher level healthcare professions in particular and then also to cover specific barriers and pitfalls as sort of examples of ways to problem solve a lot of the obstacles that people run into in graduate school and I separated it kind of like this it makes it a little bit easier to follow the flow of things I wish I came up with this idea as totally Stillness from a mentor of mine but I've always liked it ever since college so the first thing we'll talk about is like what is it really mean to thrive in education and I'm a big believer that thriving isn't an objective measure it's really important to set even a vague definition of thriving for yourself because that gives you a moving Target to work towards graduate school or any sort of higher level educ a tend to cause a lot of self-doubt you may have heard this referred to as impostor syndrome in different ways or different capacities it's actually been substantiated and research too using like doctoral level students as an example there's a significant amount of folks in doctoral programs where self-doubt impostor syndrome gets in the way of Education to the point of impacting academic performance grades studying habits Wellness all sorts of things and some of it can stem from self-comparison or trying to meet some objective measure of thriving that they may have heard in some capacity and a good way to avoid that is defining it for yourself and something I would add to that is that thriving should be a moving goal like thriving should be an Adaptive response right say you meet your first goal set another one or adapt a goal over time because that will be super helpful in terms of helping yourself push forward with your own definition of success often times a question will arise how do you define that and it can honestly be anything that you define for yourself I know being very vague and some purpose because it's a bit of a challenge to do this and a lot of folks have never tried something like that to Define what they mean as an objective measure of success especially like folks in graduate school programs right because all of us have been told the whole time like this is what makes you competitive do this thing but now you're already here you're likely starting school if you're watching this so at this point you can start to Define your own goals your own ways to kind of become the person you always want to be by approaching this sort of field which is a calling it's an honor you should congratulate yourself again this far I'm a big believer that thriving can really not only involve academic success a lot of folks going into graduate school more than ever actually already have families they may have responsibilities outside of school they may have kids pets lots of people have pets which is awesome they may have hobbies that they really passionate about lots of athletes wind up in mid School nursing school and a definition of thriving could be like maintaining a balance between something like their other passion in life besides Healthcare and being able to do that in an adequate way can be a really good way of maintaining a sense of self while going through this process because I think sometimes when people do something like my goal is to get a perfect score on everything to destroy step two be the best extracurricular thing ever and then match this program that's when burnout starts it's not down the process it's when that decisions made to pursue something like that and it becomes much easier to pull that off if you're not trying to force it which doesn't sound like it makes sense but it makes a lot of sense and of course every student has a unique Journey aspiration dreams definitions of success so my challenge to you is don't let someone else Define that for you okay I'm a big believer in this and this comes up a lot if you've ever been like tested this is relevant mostly to American folks but most countries have this in some capacity the American Disability Act if you've ever been tested and you're eligible for any sorts of accommodations whether that's extra time whether it's like late to some things based on a Diagnostics or testing or some sort of a thing that can make like your needs different than another student make sure that your school's aware of it and they have the paperwork do that before things start here's why almost every school when I've mentored people that have this sort of accommodation has like a two or three month processing time and what that really is like the school trying to figure out how to provide those resources for you actually have some legal guarantees for them to give it to you at least in America and they can't use it against you which a lot of people don't realize so there's no there's no like downside to having them on file if you're have them available to you the reason I'm recommending this is that some folks that have these things may have never had to use them until now and a lot of times it takes the first exam for some folks to realize I might benefit from that I might benefit from extra time I might benefit from taking an exam in a separate room so I can focus more and not worry about other people and graduate school tends to bring that neat out in folks so having it on file is really good for Peace of Mind especially if your first exam rolls around which in most CRI programs is in the first four weeks or so it's a it'll take a lot of stress off like trust me on this one I this is one of the advices I always talk to people about when I work with them and like I think very few follow it but it'll come up later so I'm just bring this up first the next approach is something I sort of call the toolbox approach it's more of just like organizational skills and getting a good bearing of things available to you I've also called it mean plus studying before but that's kind of a mouthful hard for me to say I'm not going at pronunciation sometimes but what does that really look like in graduate school you will have access to much more educational resources than you're probably used to so in college or High School syllabuses tend to be like you have this book you'll do these lectures for this content and graduate School osmosis of course is one of the best resources I use it all the time in mid school just why I wind up working for them the resources are probably like a thousand times more in variety than that like at any given point there several dozen different ways of learning content making a list of things that you feel like might be helpful for you is hugely important because if you don't do that you might wind up with like option paralysis where you might start one book read a few pages jump to the next book and then in terms of like a linear progression through a topic it can become very difficult because you can start to stress about well I thought this resource was good my friend's using this one I should use that resource to help combat that making a list of Essentials is super helpful the way I always have people do this is to think back on any sort of personal success you've done it doesn't have to be education related it can be a sport can be anything a hobby and try to figure out like what approaches made you successful at that and then use that approach like is so like for me for instance I'm really weird about pens it's like the most bizarre thing ever but I need really thin ink pens to like want to write and if I have like a pilot G2 or something that writes really thick unless likely to write because I can't read my handwriting so on my list when I did this I got super thin like Sakura Micron pens and made a huge difference in me like wanting to actually write notes it's little things like that that people don't think of before grad school that is super helpful like a good example for my list was like I write I like rewriting notes on yellow legal pad so I bought a lot of yellow legal pad I still am working on my stock from six years ago Costco has them really cheap stuff like that is good to have in mind it's quite literally like when you were a kid and your school gave you the like the materials for the year and you went out to like Target Kart if you're old like me with your mom and they bought all this stuff I'm basically telling you to do that but for yourself some people make a list a graph is a really good way to do this like an Excel sheet I've seen people do there's a lot of other like personal I forget God notion is really good notion is like a free resource we can B basically make your own Wikipedia sort of deal some folks really like that I'm not as organized as people that use notion but it's good here's like an example right of say we have a student that this is a pretty I would say not an average student it's a student that does well with rewriting notes which is a common approach a lot of people learn for studying which has a lot of benefits and they also have benefits in reviewing lectures right if you're used to maybe you go to a college where lectures are recorded I went to T they didn't do that when I was there unfortunately and I got a lot of benefit from RE listening to lectures so something essential for me was like a sound recorder to let me do that caveat always ask always ask if it's okay to do that before you do it but if your school doesn't record lectures allowing yourself to have access to that by getting a sound recorder can be a game changer if they like rewriting notes what they could do is in one column they could have all the things they already have right because I'm a big believer in like if you have it try not to buy something that does the same thing right so they have an iPad Pro from college maybe they're an artist they have the Apple pen that's already a great way to rewrite notes they have a favorite pen an organizing backpack that's good to go and the ADA accommodations they send that in like I mentioned before column two is like where you start to think about like what are things that I needed in college that I had to buy often and that's sort of the shopping list at that point hopefully that makes sense this is a good way of knowing what you might need to buy before stuff starts getting into some learning objective stuff and different strategies to curate a good study plan this gets more conceptual than I wanted it to but I think it's important to get into it because I talk a lot about an in this section because I have personal quals with how Anki is often used and the creator of an tends to agree with me right I think there's like a 40 minute rant of his on YouTube it's kind of interesting you guys want to check that out where he's like no one's using it the way I designed it and we'll talk about that a little bit okay it's best to think of studying in two broad categories and this is sort of similar because I'm a psychiatrist right so Psychiatry resident so I'm is prone to think of things in terms of like conditioning right there's a new stimulus and there's a response to the stimulus right so thinking of studying as exposure new material and reviewing new material makes it a more simple thing to approach reviewing is essential for any study plan in grad school the reason for that is that college courses tend to have a linear progression because of semesters and quarters so you're somewhat already reviewing with even if you're not intentionally doing that right like say you studied biochem one built on biochem 2 so the entire time you're doing biochem 2 you're still practicing biochem one med school nursing school these different programs the content comes out faster so you have to stay on top of things and a lot of schools like say we're using med school for an example that's doing a systems based approach you might do Cardiology first and then the next section is renal does is there overlap yes but not as much as people are used to so reviewing old content or current content is really important I would say for the most part when you're first starting school exposure to new material could be around like 60% and then 40% of your study time should be reviewing material and then the more school goes on it should be more like 5050 some folks benefit more from reviewing more often than learning new material because that'll make sure when that material comes around on a test data you know that really great okay a comment on like traditional Pathways in grad school so because there's so many resources available to people there's become like a very traditional approaches I would call them like more conservative approaches to grad school these are the resources that people probably hear about in term like for med school because that's sort of the bias that I'm aware of there's a few nursing channels for YouTube that I know are really commonly recommended as well and they tend to be like recommended to people over and over again throughout the years and the reason for that is a lot of people use them and a lot of people do well the truth of the matter is that most people at the grad school level got to grad school because they'll probably do well and we become comfortable with a lot of these resources that does not mean that I'm not saying that they're not amazing the resources are all incredible but always have that in mind that what works for other people might not be the best thing for you like first aid for a lot of people is kind of jarring because it's basically a t it's bunch of tables and bullet points some people don't learn like that like some people need paragraph format to learn but a lot of times people kind of like force themselves to use those resources because everyone's telling them to do first aid you world pathoma in that order or like what are you doing right and that's a trap some people don't learn that style so always keep that in mind like if there's a traditional pathway it's likely there because people are comfortable with it that's all I'll say on that don't be afraid to break away from the mold just like personal disclosure when I first started med school I kind of ignored my old study methods I would do because I wasn't sure that they would work in med school and then around halfway through I switched to back to what I was doing in college I ignored what other people were doing like the way I study in med school is like really atypical and I've like brought it up to students I've worked with and they've been like you did what now and it worked amazing for me and that's just like one example and I've heard that from a lot of folks that may feel like they're studying patterned or thinking patterned or way their brain works is a little bit different just cave out there so how do you approach new material most grad programs have some sort of lecture model the exception to that is problem based learning in like med school especially in do schools I'm a do so I can comment on this I would consider like active attendance of a problem based learning sort of similar to a lecture with a little bit more active participation so we're going to use lecture here as a broad category for there's an expert helping you work through something new lectures are really great attending them in any way is a good idea some folks like to do online the reason for that is some folks like to listen to lectures on like three or four time speed I'm four and a half time speed kind of person so I know my brain's weird I like that though other people sort of need to go in person for the accountability where or the experience because there's something to be said about active participation because of the experience in the environment like being in a classroom seat helps them pay attention better or it helps them identify more in the as like they learner versus if they're like comfy at home they might not be able to like actively consume the material the way the professor wants them to do it in other words this is yet another category where doing what other folks might not be might be doing might not be the best way to approach it like say you're an in person lecture person you've been that your entire life and your entire med school class like there's like two people in like the live lectures that that happens that's not unheard of for Med schools but you like you prefer being in person go to the in-person lectures there's nothing that you're if anything you're probably losing out if you try to force yourself to do something that you're not used to and that you're not comfortable with because we always do better with things that we believe works and that's important active participation is essential this includes active listening so a lot of folks feel like they can write do the best while they write notes during the lecture like a lot folks will print out PowerPoint lectures in advance and kind of annotate the PowerPoints I think that's a good strategy for the most part I would give the caveat of not trying to write down everything they say the reason for that is that writing is actually a pretty active neurological process it requires a lot of energy a lot more people realize and you might miss out on like the ability to think in the moment of what's being taught like say for instance you're talking about like Starling forces and like cardiac output which is a really conceptual thing that you have to actively think about to really understand it and if you don't know what that is trust me they'll teach you it and you're writing everything they're saying verbatim when you go back to reviewing your notes which we'll get to next you might have trouble understanding what you wrote that happens a lot and that leads like emails to the professor and then it sort of get some vague sent for my iPhone response and like four words like that's not helpful so finding a way like actively participate that allows you to still listen and think through stuff is super helpful I'm a big proponent of recorded lectures I think it's super helpful I for one went to a lot of live lectures and if they weren't recorded I would always get permission and record them myself and then afterwards my active listening would be listening to it at a faster speed and say I get to a topic I didn't understand the first time I listen to it a few times then I'll try to like explain it to myself in my own words and for my brain that's how I retain things okay at the end of a school day this is a habit that can take people really far in anything in life not just grad school the way memory Works without getting into neuro-mechanics because I promised myself I wouldn't do that to you guys by getting into cellular Neuroscience because I could do it I promise I wouldn't when you first learn new material it's active in the brain for a good amount of time it's there you're able to process it reviewing it right before bed is like a game changer for actually consolidating what you learned even if you review it for like 30 seconds it's better than not reviewing it the reason for that is R sleep deep sleep is where memory is largely encoded so say you learn something at 8 in the morning you don't look at it again for like three days it's going to be harder to remember what you learned about or may have thought of related to the content when you go back to review it so I would challenge most folks to spend at least a few minutes reviewing whatever you learned it's doesn't I think the longest I ever spent doing it was like 30 minutes like I don't I'm not saying like spend exuberant amounts of time like going through everything you can just rewrite you can just reread your notes that alone will help your brain out with storing it better and if there's any more questions about it I can talk about it towards the end about why that works but I'd rather focus on study strategies but I do love to nerd out about it so why I promise not to get into it okay the other reason this is helpful is that you'll become aware of what's hard and in grad school there's so much information but identifying what we need to work on is an essential skill and I'll sort of talk about some ways to do that coming up when I use a specific example but knowing what you need to work on is how you can make studying in grad school less daunting audio recordings for this is also great this is where if you can listen to things really fast and your professor like say your professor talks like a YouTube video at a quarter speed which a lot I don't know about you guys I've had a lot of professors like that I kind of lose track of attention because they talk so slowly speeding it up is like a game changer because you might listen better at a faster speed like you can get through an hour lecture in like a half hour on two time speed and you be most people can actually process like five times speed believe it or not it's there's a trick to it and the more you do it the better at it you get I'm not saying to go and try it but you can get you can listen to things faster than you might think okay review material okay reviewing should be the most active learning part of your studying it should be the thing that feels hard the exposure to new material should be relatively gentle and you should let your brain process things as they come up that's why I was saying like when you write notes the first time to like make sure it's not taking away from what you're like the actual sensory experience of what you're learning try and prioritize content that's less familiar and comfortable this is hard because people we like things that are comfortable but what happens is that people study things more than they already know super well and then when the test comes around inevitably because just how this reality works right the first question is the thing that you sort of avoided during the study time and that's never great so I always challenge folks to like if you're reviewing content and it feels super comfortable there may be something being left on the table unless you're really preparing super well which most people can optimize review better to be completely honest so when you review things every night and you review your lectures briefly you'll start to be able to identify like oh yeah that thing in that lecture was like really weird like for me lymphoma in med school was like so challenging for me to figure out like Bell T Cell all those things and it was something I poured like a lot of time into but that time was like hard man that was like burning it was hard to do but it really paid off because now I understand it pretty well and that's how we get good at things is sort of putting ourselves in situations that are healthy but challenge us it's really good for you in general like not even just education wise it's quite literally good for neurological health so that's helpful if you find yourself not having the drive to review after a whole day of lectures review before you do the lectures here's why learning new content tends to be less taxing than reviewing hard content so if you know you're the kind of person that like the idea of reviewing something from a semester ago is like not ideal not something you feel like doing do it first because it's more energy intensive anyway and then when you get to learning new content your brain it'll give your brain a break because it should be different right so say you follow this approach this is just like one approach to learning right this is my experience with learning and working with students but there's infinite variations on this when you start taking this approach of learning new material as letting your brain think about things really clearly it's an extremely different experience than the review process being really active and doing the review first your brain will actually potentially hang on to the news a bit better because it's a new stimulus and it wants a break from what it was just doing linking unfamiliar Concepts back to familiar Concepts allows for complete concept understanding Healthcare is intertwined there there's nothing in a vacuum at all like you think there is but there's not like even like the way a patient?s room is cleaned can impact their healthcare so say like your background was like renal and you're learning Cardiology linking like cardiac output back to renal will make Cardiology infinitely easier and anything like that is help like say you want do Oro and you follow sports like oh like I'm learning about this bone fracture my fantasy league got shattered because my favorite player got this exact fracture even linking it to that will make it stick in your brain better it's a concept called neural networking neural mapping concept mapping there's all sorts of ways to refer to it it's one of the most substantiated memory strategies that's ever existed goes back to like Greco Roman times which is kind of boggling so that's always a good thing to keep in mind all right how to review oh man I talked to big shop on this so let me give you some ideas of how to do this I think outside the box you can get really weird with the review to make it more entertaining there is this amazing professor at Tian I you guys are at Tian you probably have had her she's the best she will tell you she tell always said to teach your Cactus and you're like what is this man talking about okay being able to explain something to somebody else is the best way to identify deficits in your understanding because to understand something as people right because memory is a language process we use words to remember things so if you're find it hard to explain a concept to somebody there's some work to be though the other advantage to this is that the thing that you had trouble explaining is probably the part you need to focus on so there are quite literally days in my life where I was trying to teach my like adorable fat cat PSIs and you just look at me you're like I'm a cat like what do you want from me but it helped me identify aspects of it that I didn't understand you can also do this with like friends and family eventually like don't be surprised if they're like okay like even if they don't listen like you saying it out loud and that's another big part saying it out loud instead of thinking about something can also help you out with this part the low and short of it is if you can't explain something well and simply you can probably have a better understanding of it an and flashcards this counts as active review but I'll get into how I recommend using Anki I would imagine a lot of folks are probably at least aware of Anki that are participating in this or that watch this afterwards so I have some hot takes on it but I think they're good takes a visual aids creation if you're an artist this is amazing this is like a specific resource recommendation too if you're an art person neuro anatomy is hard like books like draw and neuro Anatomy is a gamechanger for a lot of people stuff like that like basically what I'm trying to tell you is the reason I had you do the toolbox method was now you know how to review right like you've you?ve read things in the past if you gotten this far you've learned things in the past and if you meditate on you'll be identify what really works for you and now you get to have fun with it and think outside the box and this also makes review easier to be active and a little bit more fun rereading notes is helpful but it's really easy to do this passively by accident passive learning for review isn't super helpful just even like even like reading your notes and trying to think of it in different words is better than just reading it for reading its purposes this is of why highlighting gets some Flack in some of the memory research and cognitive research it's because highlighting something isn't necessarily Active Learning unless you're like doing it carefully and rewriting notes is probably one of the best ways of doing this here's like a big part of how I studied in grad school which is why I'm using this example because I can talk a lot about it if you choose to rewrite notes it's best to do it by hand for m your attention I know it sucks we're all we probably all type faster than we write but the reason it's good is because it's slow and inefficient you have more time to actually think about what you're writing than if you're typing it a helpful trick to this that got me through like dual like basically dual majoring and med school is if you rewrite your notes don't rewrite things you already know like say you're rewriting something about like action potential and you already understand like the first part of it and then the one thing you're struggling with is like calcium influx just rewrite the calcium influx part definitely have like a little note before it about what it's related to where you're going to lose on conceptual learning parts of this but by doing this you create a really awesome tool and I I've had stents see this and like this is like lifechanging this is why I want to bring this up so say you do have to first rewrite often times if you only rewrite stuff you don't know you'll have about half the amount of total notes than you did for your first pass then you rewrite that rewrite then you have another half right and then eventually you have like two or three pages of only the content that you don't know and then when exam leg rolls around instead of struggling to learn all the content you just have to focus on two pages and then your stress level is much lower because you been studying it the whole time like rewriting is one of the best ways to force people to be active it can take hours I am not going to lie to you I there's times I took me like six hours but it never fails it's just something that has a lot of time investment so but it works which is why I want to talk about it because it takes away the thinking and sort of the motivation part because to sit and write you kind of slog through it and just works out okay it's going to I want to get into some more unique approaches to studying this doesn't cover everything it's a lot of stuff that people probably don't think about they may not be aware of it is the exception to this but I considered my approach to this a little bit different than most people an is more and more common if you don't know what it is it's magic flash card software it's what it really is it's flash card software that based on how hard you personally rate something it spaces it out in time it's for a concept called space repetition which is shown to be one of the best ways to learn something and for those playing along at home space repetition is exactly what I'm recommending you do in the review part of this so an is a good way of sort of building that into your schedule automatically it's good based on like actual research for how flashcard should be used which is good here's a here's the important part Ani was never designed to learn material it's design of review material learning something from Anki isn't super helpful for a lot of reasons because it's a flash card you're learning something in a vacuum which means it's harder to link it back to things you already know okay a pre-made decks for Anki this is where the hot takes come in in Spades for me honestly pre-made decks are blessing and a curse there's way less startup investment you have the deck right there you spend like three hours downloading all the add-ons or whatever is in the meta for preds right now for like tags all that stuff it gives you a sense of security because it's time tested early in the lecture might remember I'm like sometimes what's traditional isn't always best for everybody this applies here too there's some trouble here because a lot of times because you never you didn't write the card and you don't know what the card's going to contain you're basically learning new content for the first time and this will extend an ay session easily 4 to7 times longer than it would have been otherwise like I had classmates that would spend like six or seven hours on like Hy cards and I would always spend less time and I'll explain how I did that in a second which is where the hot take bark comes in I do want to talk about an exception there's some resources that provide ANKI decks for their content and there's ways to only like see the cards for the content you already learned those are amazing divine intervention incredible podcast I have no problems recommending that there's a really great Community made deck where you can watch one of his podcast episodes and then you can unlock those cards and now you're not learning the content for the first time you're only reviewing it that is ANKI at its best and what it should be used for okay so I got the most benefits from Anki when I quite literally deleted the deck and started over actually did this during step two dedicated so you can do it pretty late in the process I would recommend doing earlier if you decide to do this this allows you to have a really personalized deck and you will get through ANKI cards way faster than a lot of your classmates if you do this it's hard has a lot of startup cost and there's some Anki is kind of janky for the most part it's like open source software it's pretty Windows 98 sort of Vibes if you're familiar but it's not super complicated the best part of an is probably what's called a Clos card all that really means it's like a fill-in the blank that's what a Clos card is so a good example of a card that someone might write for like Psychiatry right because it's what I do all day is what I want to do this is if considering a diagnosis of schizophrenia form disorder anything in parentheses is what the card wouldn't show you in a patient they must have symptoms for greater than another Clos deletion great in one month or six months right so when you see this card on Anki what it will do is it'll show you one of those parentheses as blank right so if you wrote this card you'll notice it's only a sentence along and you can probably get through it in like under two seconds for the most part right a lot of ANKI decks that are pre-made like they'll put like a page of content on the card and then people feel inclined to read all of it and at that point you're basically reading a book page for every card you get through which really slows it down and I think gets into trouble because you're learning Concepts that may not be attached in like a vacuum and it's hard to link it back to something you already know by doing this approach you already know why you're making the card it's because it's something you found hard and you've already linked it back to something so that's why I think this approach is really helpful this is really great for question Banks like say you're working on questions like our questions or like any questions in general like you can make a really simple card out of what got you the question wrong like say like you didn't know an antibiotic to use when someone's like allergic to penicillin for like a specific infection like that's the entire card it's just a sentence it's like blank is a good antibiotic for these patients and then that you'll see that card like every time you do Wy and shorter time to use things in general across the board for anything means that you're more likely to do it every day which is also the big part of an is doing it every day so a lot of times I would have friends that would be like five days behind on an and a whole day catching up this makes it easier to actually get through it every day okay body doubling big believer in this one lots of folks probably benefit from this without knowing it has a name it's a really powerful study tool basically what it means is that instead of studying alone you study with someone else in somewhat proximity to you or over a video the video thing was a game changer when Co hit there's a few startups that made tons of money on this idea so there's something to be said about the accountability of working with a friend even if you're not working on the same thing so a good friend of mine growing up he was an engineer and I was Premed and we would do this and literally probably not talk to each other for like four hours but knowing the other person was working hard for whatever reason let you kind of push a little bit more it's sort of fun like it's like almost like camaraderie through the misery is studying so it works out great and it allows for like really wholesome breaks like study breaks are super important and if your study break is you get to like catch up with a friend and like they get you get to hear about their journey and kind of escape the grad school realm for a second it's super helpful it also seems to work well over FaceTime or Skype so say like you're maybe in like a long-distance relationship and your partner is in like another country and you can quite literally study while they work on like chores in the house and then just knowing that you're sort of connected to them in some way will probably make study a little bit better all right it can be difficult for folks that are outgoing in Social because you might be unable to suppress the urge to socialize more but hey I have that problem a little bit but most if you if you're like that and you know that find an introverted study buddy they'll let you know I promise all right sure we talked about this already it also gets into new environments which a lot of our amazing blog posts talk a lot about like sometimes getting at the house sitting in the coffee shop is great body doubling you you'll find yourself studying some new environments it's just refreshing highly recommend it movement underrated okay a lot of folks are afraid of this one but hear me out there's a ton of different study methods that you can do with exercise like podcasts like go on a walk outside like go on a hike and like listen to a podcast like you will pay attention way better than you think or treadmill is awesome for this I actually met one of my best friends this is a guilty admission I promise but I used to compete in powerlifting and powerlifting workouts are grueling and long and I had a laptop with me at the gym doing ay between sets and a good friend of mine in dental school was doing the safely so we became like best friends so in other words like to takeaway is like if you feel guilty about like missing exercise while studying try to combine them you might get a lot of benefit out of this there's some evidence suggesting that people think more clearly while their heart rate's higher which is really interesting and this allows you to find out if you're that kind of person a diet I talk about this like every time I tutor anyone it's really hard to study when your stomach's off like nausea Hing over some folks if you partake any sort of drinks or other things can be difficult to work through fruits and vegetables I know a doctor preaching about healthy eating hear me out they are amazing for Sati ability tolerability and affordability if you eat like more affordable fruits and vegetables it allows for variety in your week like something I think is really fun is like go to grocery store buy fruits and vegetable you never heard of by doing this I discovered dragon fruit which I have a dragon fruit budget not afraid to admit it and some of them even have cognitive benefits like fun fact about neuro stuff there's all these medications for like different forms of neurocognitive conditions and a of blueberries beats nearly all of them for improving memory and even healthy adults barely able to match it and adding like dark berries to your diet literally helps out with Shing and it's delicious if you can tolerate them so always like to plug that at U okay exam weeks it's best to maintain variables during exam weeks like do things that work that you know work try not to mix it up too bad if you want to try something new do it the stay after you take an exam like a new supplement new caffeine anything like that don't do it Dam trust me is it almost what can go wrong will go wrong cramming is really common in school it works for some people I'm not going to talk a lot I'm not the kind of person that's going to talk smack about cramming some people love it for like deadline crunch the research suggests that space repetition is better though so if you want to be like evidence-based like space repetition is better it's a hard habit to break though which is why I'm not going to try to convince you not to do it if you are going to do it please make sure you're sleeping okay that is what will make cramming pointless like find out how many hours of sleep you need to feel rested and stick to it and then the ultimate challenging grad school set at bedtime stick to it even wearing Zam wigs hear me up it's a game changer try to keep your coffee and caffeine intake consistent on exam days always give yourself time to wake up and get to the exam like traffic never seems to happen until you're about to take an exam so just accommodate for that after the exam don't compare yourself to others it's super easy to like trauma Bond over like the gr like grueling biome exam but it'll just stress you out more than anything most programs need time to give you the answer key anyway so it's good to just sort of like wait for that to come out before you do that and you're not going to retain a lot of what you review because you're so stressed after the exam so give yourself some time scheduling something fun like going to see a movie of friends is super helpful like right after a curating school I like to talk about this because people probably it's something that gets missed you can curate your school experience especially if you're someone like me that went to a school to do a specific specialty like I went to med school to do Psychiatry and med school don't usually focus on Psychiatry they really late so I wanted more exposure and sort of this is how I did it for myself a lot of the professional organizations have like free or discounted rates for students it's a good way to get involved and feel like you're doing something you're passionate about which will make you more passionate about everything you're doing in general identifying a mentor we have a really great blog post about this mentorship is like a really broad category it can literally just be knowing that you have someone you can send a question to even if you never send them a question will like give you peace of mind and some folks really like structured mentoring I know for my experience like I've always done well with structured mentors where it's like I meet that with them certain times of the year and I go over things it's helpful Wellness is crucial but set reasonable expectations like say you're a guitar player you might see that in the back that's probably why I'm biased and you want to play guitar in med school but right now before med school or grad school you play eight hours a day you might need to be okay of playing like an hour a day because if you try to do what you used to do you're going to run into issues with making sure it happens so just be realistic with things but and you'll be able to maintain a lot of the things you care about a lot more than you might think and being available for friends and family is super important I know this is like the most generic advice ever but there's actually if you're the kind of person that needs to know it's helping grad school some people are there's something amazing to be said about being around people that aren't in grad school like they help ground you a little bit because grad students tend to be stressed out if you're only around God students you're more likely to be stressed out right so call your parents call your aunt Uncle any sort of family or friends you have when you want and help out a lot and these are some references I kind of explained a lot of them but I'm just I feel like I had that references I guess I'll open it up for questions now and I know that there is the chat and I'll open this right away let's see okay I have looked for the question from MN I have looked into the question being is there evidence for using an iPad the apple pencil versus pen and paper the mechanism so here's my guess as someone that has a neural background and this is purely me interpreting what I'm aware of the benefit is from the actual motor activity of writing because it slows you down I would be very surprised if there's much of a difference between the two but typing the motor patterns lesser and it's more simple so it doesn't slow you down as much so I would probably argue the iPad and pen is just as good as pen and paper hopefully that's helpful how to manage time when you have to wake up really early and have classes till 300 p.m. okay it depends on how your schedule looks I would have to see things more specifically but trying to optimize like breaks if you I imagine a schedule like that they probably have brakes for you built in using The Brak time for sort of like recovery will help a lot a lot of times what people will do is like during break times you feel a need to study take it to relax like after lectures in med school I would like go outside and like literally just sit in the sun CU I'm like I need sunlight because I just was in a windowless room like take the recovery time and also if you have any concerns like sleep problems like sleep apnea get that checked out let's see okay the infamous oh man okay so what do you do if your lecturer doesn't really teach and gives a brief explanation with a PowerPoint okay this is a challenge for sure here's what I would recommend you do for every textbook for the most part there is probably content that someone else has hit so finding a resource you really like to sort of like it so there's two things that can happen here right you can have a school that has its own exams or you can have a school that pulls like practice questions so if you have a school with your own exams find a resource that you like to learn the material and then reference back to what he covers in the PowerPoint just to make sure you're not missing anything that he might care about right like say the professor doesn't teach well because he's obsessed with like QTC interval for some bizarre reason right which for psychiatrist probably care more about but that's fine I do care about it I promise focusing a little bit more time than most med school resources on that will pay off dividends but and you'll still learn the material for the most part but that's a great question and that can have an entire lecture on its own and maybe I will talk to osmosis about doing that because I would love to do a self-teaching one okay let's see the webinar is being recorded absolutely all right the best way to read a USMLE question there's two ways to do this in my experience the first one is reading the entire question then reading the question what the question's asking and the second thing is really important you need to know what they're asking you because they can so mean with that like trust me there's Infamous like Psychiatry questions like not getting into the shelf stuff that's not for like three years from med school like the question can seem like they want you to say SSRI but the question says reduce suicide risk there's a really specific answer so reading the entire questions you don't miss anything and then what the questions asking is the best way to read any practice question because that's how a lot of us write questions it's like we will write off with like what do we want to T test and then we developed a history based on what we're asking so knowing that you'll have all the history in your mind and know what the questions probably getting at and USM Le went away from a model where you can answer the question without reading it almost like completely so you have to read the question it's not like DM cat sometimes you can read the question what the question's asking and you can get it but for like grad school level stuff it doesn't work as well let's see if you're feel like you're overstudying it might be because the studying isn't active enough so or if you're overstudying it's because you're studying really well and you might be trying to force yourself to have more study time than you might actually need like so kind of weigh those options like are you tired are you over studied because you're studying so well that's so active that you need to relax you try to yourself to do more when you shouldn't or is it overstudying because it's really passive learning and then the clock is running it's been six hours because active studying can be like it's so active that it tends to be a little bit more brief and self-limited so sort of address that question dude hard transplant surgeries that's awesome that's actually in demand so good for you oh that's a long one let's see if you find it difficult to pay attention during lectures rewriting it in your own notes and pausing is really helpful especially if they're recorded if you get behind on the class schedule that can be tricky it depends on what sort of schedule you have but sort one of the best things to do is like so it's really rare to get more than like five or seven days behind but what you can do is add an extra like half hour to your study day and then like review like one of the lectures you missed each day and be caught up in like five days so say like you missed a week because you had covid which is super common when lot of people went to med school and you missed like a week about renal and now you're on Cardiology you can divide those five cardio lectures into like one lecture a day during that renal week and you'll be back on track it's sort of just time management skills preventing burnout is all about doing things you like to do and not being absorbed by grad school for real so many people like feel like they need to become grad school and they do not need to do it think about become class notes ah yes okay typing notes during a lecture I'm cool with it because it's faster but if you're going to review it I would recommend you handwrite it which I think is what you're getting at and that's what I did so it works great yeah that that's perfect I will say it might take you time but that sounds like a this is regarding Joshua's question who basically stated it would it be acceptable to like hand like type notes during the lecture because it's more time efficient then later on review it by handwriting the notes that is very good because it allows you to participate more active in the lecture because it's faster when you go back to review handwriting or using the iPad Apple pencil like we talked about before that'll help you review even better so that's a perfectly viable strategy that's common being motivated to study is all you need to form it needs to become something that it's an obligation and not something that you have to choose to do is mindset I hate to say it but something that can be helpful is if you're having struggle if you're struggling to learn something you really don't care about try to link it to something you love like for me I full disclosure I in med school like all the bone fractures and stuff it was just so minimally interesting to me so I had to link it back to sports or I just did care about it so that's one strategy of course L I hope this is helpful let's see I would love to do a self- teaching seminar I would do that would be something I could do better in this one probably let's see all right we have two minutes okay we covered behind the class one in oh God clinicals this is important so for clinicals you are learning every single minute that you're on a clinical so like the say like I'm guessing you're saying you're saying clinicals and most Med students say rotations I'm assuming you mean nursing school clinicals it's the time where unfortunately like listening to the people that's been doing it forever like telling you a certain things super helpful like in med school I would always listen to older attendings talk about weird basis and it would always show up on exams like clockwork so sort of studying actively by participating and listening to resources at your clinical site is the best way to study in clinicals you check to reviewing you're doing basically if it feels hard rewrite it doesn't have to be complicated so to keep up on class schedules if you follow behind I would just divide whatever you missed into even days so say you Miss five lectures do one lecture a day for five days to get caught up or if you miss like 14 this is two lectures the day it's a manual way to do it are we all cut up damn pardon my language I'm sorry let's see oh I see Joshua a routine is something that will naturally develop and you shouldn't try to force it taking noise during lectures acronyms just helpful learning shorthand is not hard how people think short hand's hard like actual shorthand but learning it helpful even if it's your own language and I also wrote the way I talk and I used a lot of memes to myself notes are cringey as heck I'm not going to lie to you but it works for me and of course yeah and giving osmosis a try for free like it's amazing I literally use it every single day in med school like I know I work for them now but I recommended it to people even before I worked for them it sort of takes a lot of what I'm describing to you it sort of does it for you like the videos teach you new material and then there's so many ways to review it that it's amazing so nothing but good things to say and you will see a sneak amount of your fellow students if they ever in PB use diagrams from Osos say because they're that good so you'll see a lot of the content we got great style so I got nothing get things to say probably could have worked for anyone but here we are anything else last minute probably a quick one absolutely I love to share it grad school is hard you guys are going to do really great these questions are like super insightful so yeah I think it about wraps it up so this recording will be sent out I will definitely look into maybe doing the self-learning sub webinar if they'll let me do it that'll be really specific and probably intensive it might have to be more than one because that's sort of how I learn is self-taught so I can talk a lot about that okay so before you go like there's a link in the chat to trials Moses for like two weeks that's a really good trial I highly recommend it to anyone the link to the webinar will be emailed out to folks and Steph are there any like outstanding questions that may have missed just to make sure there are no outstanding questions and we don't actually email it they have to follow the link themselves in order to be able to get that just to clarify all righty so please follow that link to get this webinar if you found it helpful because I threw so much at you guys that kind of like going back to review it like we talked about would be super helpful and yeah we'll take it from there okay helping current and future clinicians Focus learn retain and Thrive learn more