Studying…it’s quite the process. 

Like many students, I struggled with studying throughout my life. In middle school, I relied on  flashcards that were not very good. I spent countless hours passively studying by highlighting and rereading notes. 

Middle school was also beneficial in that my teachers were very specific about how they wanted our classwork and homework to be organized. We used to have “binder checks” to ensure everything was in place, and our notes were being done the way our teachers wanted them. (I also went to a public school in an upper middle class town if that gives some context).  Their crazy standards for organization are definitely why I am organized today. 

High school came around, and my studying was about the same. I was fortunate that my teachers really made us try different ways of note taking and preparing for class. For instance, my sophomore year history teacher made us read and outline the chapters prior to coming to class. He emphasized using the headings, subheadings, and making bullet notes. I loved this method, even though it is a bit outdated and not perfect.

Now, later in high school is when I really panicked about my studying techniques. I was not doing very well and learned that I needed multiple inputs of information to make the concepts stick. For instance, I spoke with my A.P. World History teacher and he asked me multiple questions to gauge how I learned. 

At the end, he looked at me and said “No wonder you’re struggling, no one input works for you”. He was amazing and explained that I seemed to take information in from listening, seeing, and interacting with it. 

He suggested I download Notability to my iPad (my high school gave every student an iPad when I was in my freshman year as a pilot program for all the high school students). This method was so I could write out my notes, speak them aloud through recording, and listen to those recordings later when I got confused.

That’s still not the end of my studying journey. I encountered multiple roadblocks in undergrad which included Organic Chemistry. By the way, Organic Chemistry still makes me very stressed out and I do not have it mastered like an expert so if you feel the same way, please know you are not alone!

College was a big learning curve and I was fortunate to have a physiological psychology professor (it’s basically an introduction to neuroscience) teach us how memory works best and which techniques to utilize. He was the best professor because he was very organized and he created assignments so that we were learning better. 

In addition to this professor, Youtube has been my best friend. In 2016, I learned about Anki and knew I needed to include it, but my true Anki journey started in 2019 when I was studying for the MCAT. 

From all my mistakes, I am going to list out a few techniques you should include in your study habits. However, I wrote all of the above to paint the picture that finding your techniques will take some time, trial and error, and mistakes will happen! So, please, be very kind to yourself and allow yourself some leniency.

For my friends starting undergrad, now is the perfect time to start keeping track of your strengths and weaknesses. If you are done with undergrad and you’re taking the MCAT, do the same. Most of my set up and techniques all came from the mistakes I made with MCAT studying. 

Organization

Before I go into Learning and Study Techniques, I want to emphasize the importance of organization. 

Figure out a system that works for you, but whatever that system is, make it organized. Whether that be planner, bullet journal, digital planner, Google calendar, or a regular desk calendar, figure out how to organize your time and when you need your activities. 

Also, make sure you know exactly which folders and notebooks will be used for your specific courses. If you are using a digital note taking tool, make sure you know exactly how you plan to use it before you sit in lecture so you aren’t lost with a new program/app. 

My biggest flaw in my MCAT studying was having hundreds of papers everywhere, and not knowing what piece of paper had the information I needed. I did have a binder from what I learned in middle school, but that method was too old for me and it failed me. 

However, if you are a die-hard binder or notebook person, keep that up! I just wanted to throw in a tidbit about being organized because it is essential to being successful in studying and being motivated. 

I made the decision to buy an iPad to keep all my notes in one place and I made sure to get the Paperlike screen protector to make it feel like writing because I loved notebooks. I love my iPad more than notebooks and I will be outlining my desk and Notability set up in another blog post at a later time. 

Learning

First off, let’s discuss learning. Learning is super important because your brain is actively making new neural pathways as you encounter new information. The more often you encounter the same information, the stronger that neural pathway becomes.

One very important aspect of this process is you always make sure you learn the information correctly the first time. This concept goes for so many aspects of life and not just studying. If you learn something wrong and strengthen that neural pathway, it becomes harder to break.

The second part of learning is to make sure you are using active techniques over passive techniques. 

This distinction is the key to being a successful student, but it is very difficult to learn this way of learning if you spend your entire life using passive learning techniques. My medical school faculty are always emphasizing to us to practice and engage with the material with active learning techniques. It’s that important and that difficult!

Active learning is a process in which students engage with material. Oftentimes, active learning involves struggling and utilizing different methods to fully grasp the material. These methods can be problem based learning, discussions with peers and professors, creating a project with that material, and so much more. 

Whereas passive learning is consuming the material without engaging with it. This process is often just listening to the lecture, copying notes word for word, and highlighting notes. In passive learning, there is no struggle. 

Some active learning techniques include the following: active recall, spaced repetition, creating questions, creating a project, and doing practice questions. 

Using these techniques in conjunction with each other and figuring out when to use them is very important and also very unique to the individual. I’ll explain my personal method after the Studying Techniques section. 

Studying Techniques 

Active Recall.

Active recall is when you test yourself on material by trying to think of it on your own without much help. Active recall can be done in a few different ways. One example is drawing out a pathway from memory on a blank sheet of paper or white board.

Another way is by asking an open ended question on either a flashcard or test and seeing if you can come up with the answer without any help. 

Another method, like in cell biology or anatomy, is getting a blank template of a cell and labeling everything you can from memory.

Each time you test yourself this way, you’ll see what you truly know versus vaguely remember. The point of active recall is to “recall” the information you have been exposed to and try to strengthen that neural pathway. 

Make sure you compare your answers to a template or notes with the right answers and see where you were wrong. To take it a step further, ask yourself why you were wrong and analyze your thought process.

Spaced Repetition.

Spaced repetition is by far my favorite studying technique especially when used in conjunction with active recall.

Spaced repetition was discussed by Hermann Ebbinghaus. He was a psychologist who studied his own memory way back in the late 1800s.. His “Forgetting Curve” is commonly discussed as it demonstrates how quickly new learning memories degrade over time. 

The main idea is that over time, your memory will naturally decline and you eventually won’t remember what you learned. Here is an example of a Forgetting Curve:

As you can see above, with time, the retention of information declines. With spaced repetition, you make sure this “Forgetting Curve” is not negatively impacting learning. What happens is that you learn material, and make sure to see that material again after some time BEFORE you forget the material.

To put this into context, say you learned that the ribosomes in a cell produce protein in your class. This is the only time you encountered that material. The first few days, you are able to remember that. A week later, you kind of remember that ribosomes are associated with proteins. In another week, you know that ribosomes exist. Another week later, you have your exam and you have no idea what ribosomes are or what they make. 

Through spaced repetition, you would encounter that material at each time point your memory may forget it. Say you learned about ribosomes on Monday, you would make sure to review that after class on Monday. The next time to review that information again before you forget it would be Wednesday. After that, a slightly longer period of time can pass, so you review it again on Friday and so on. Each time you recall this information and see it again, you are consolidating that information.

In case I did not explain spaced repetition well, here are some more resources: 

Thomas Frank: https://collegeinfogeek.com/spaced-repetition-memory-technique/

Ali Abdaal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-zNHHpXoMM&ab_channel=AliAbdaal

Med School Insiders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XVc8a0mrLo&ab_channel=MedSchoolInsiders

Testing Yourself.

Testing yourself is certainly just like Active Recall, however, I am thinking about making practice tests for yourself. In undergrad, we learned to think of potential test questions so that we could practice answering questions we think our professors would ask us. 

You could come up with these questions and meet with your professor in office hours to ask them if these questions are reflective of how they would test you.

In addition, you can also find practice questions online. My school gave us a Boards and Beyond subscription that I am planning to use for this very reason. 

If you test yourself, you’ll truly know if you have mastered the material. 

 Multiple Passes.

This technique is more to keep track of how many times you have seen the material. It is very similar to spaced repetition in that you want to make sure you see the new material a few times. There are some people who make an Excel sheet pass tracker with the lecture/unit and then mark down how many times they “passed” over that material.  

Each pass in this sense would be the number of times they encountered it whether it be lecture, flash cards, practice questions, etc. I am trying to set one up for myself for the second block. 

Note Taking.

I will be quite honest, I don’t really take notes any more. My main “note taking” is downloading the slides to Notability and writing on them when I get confused or if there was an important piece of information the professor mentioned. I wish I did because it helped me retain information, but it’s no longer an activity that I can put time into. As I mentioned above, I used to do the textbook heading outlines with bullet notes. I loved that method. I have tried Cornell notes which doesn’t work for me, but it might for you. Because I do not have much experience here, I linked Thomas Frank’s blog again and the Cornell Method from Cornell. 

There are so many people on Youtube who can show you how to take notes. Check it out. Also, do not bother trying to make them look “aesthetically pleasing”. The dean for one of the research courses literally told us not to bother because it is a waste of time especially as medical students. Focus on the learning, not making it pretty. 

Thomas Frank: https://collegeinfogeek.com/how-to-take-notes-in-college/

Cornell Method: https://lsc.cornell.edu/how-to-study/taking-notes/cornell-note-taking-system/

That being said, the key part to taking notes is to rewrite the information in your own words rather than copying what the professor is saying word for word.

Teaching.

If you know it, you can teach it. That is the most important saying ever. If you have a group of friends you enjoy studying with, teach each other concepts. If you know and understand it well, you’ll teach it well. If you don’t have a group of people, try teaching it to yourself and see where your missing gaps are. For my Clinical Arts and Sciences course, I shamelessly use my Stitch plush toy (from Lilo and Stitch) and practice going through my interview. When I mess up, I look at my guide and see where I messed up. You can do the same for a physics concept, talk to yourself or a plush toy and see where you need to improve.  

Taking Care of Your Body 

This last one isn’t exactly a study technique. However, it is essential to make sure you are learning the information. Inadequate sleep, poor mental health, poor nutrition and exercise are all variables that lead to disaster for students. You really need to make sure you are getting enough sleep for your brain to consolidate what you learned and actually create memories of the information you poured hours into. 

You need to take care of your physical wellbeing with nutritious foods that fuel your brain and exercise to help your cognition. Not only do these activities optimize your body to work at peak potential, all these activities just make you feel good. 

For that reason, you’ll notice I always include a section about my well-being at the end of my Weekly Thoughts. 

If you don’t believe me about spaced repetition and active recall, here is another article specifically explaining why it’s important for medical students. 

Article from Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4031794/?fbclid=IwAR1ONSJsZRksgxg4GEqcYAley5aLqCkk5hcwbFNH4UXePcLiUfebF1Lxhio

My Current Strategy

To be very clear, study strategies will and should change based on subject. The methods I am using should work for most of my medical school blocks, however, as time moves forward I am very ready to change and adapt. 

My current coursework is Foundations of Sciences which means I am going over all the undergraduate level work along with some pharmacology and histology thrown in. My school starts us on our first human body system block in the third block which I think will be sometime in December for me. 

That being said, what do I currently do? 

I heavily rely on Anki which is a spaced repetition software that is free to use(unless you have a mobile device by Apple). I am writing a whole Anki blog post and will link it here. 

After trying to go to class and taking notes exclusively through my iPad and then using Anki, I decided I could not continue that method. I was behind by 10 lectures by the first Wednesday and spent all weekend catching up with making my Anki cards. The benefit to this problem was that I became super good at Anki to the point where one classmate called me an “Anki ninja”.

My final plan for these first two blocks is to go to class in person to get used to being back in school. However, I had a hard time paying attention in class and note taking was not really happening. I also did not want to get stuck making cards all weekend as opposed to reviewing them. 

Instead, I spend my lecture time making my Anki cards as the professors teach. How do I do this? I have Anki open in a split screen with a PDF version of the lecture slides on my Macbook. Next to it, I have the lecture slides downloaded and open on my Notability app.

While making cards, I think of open ended questions, occlude images that I know my professors will use again (like for histology), and I use cloze deletions for pathways and definitions that I know I will struggle with. I also make cards based on the Learning Objectives.

The Learning Objectives, as every M2 at my school emphasized to us, are essential. I make sure to read the Learning Objectives right before class and start making cards based on those objectives. Throughout the lecture, I will go back to check what extraneous information that is just for fun versus what is actually important. 

 If there is a moment where I am lost or need to go back, I mark it down on the lecture slides that I have opened on my Notability app on my iPad. 

I typically try to re-listen to those parts and make any cards that I missed during this time period. 

I make sure to do at least 30 to 45 minutes of Anki every day no matter how exhausted I am. Spaced repetition really only works if you do it every day, especially with Anki.

For topics that are more detailed like RNA transcription, I take time going through the slides and drawing the processes. I will also make sure I practice recall by drawing those out again until I get it. 

I am fortunate that my school has activities throughout the week that focus on these lectures as well. We have Active Learning Classrooms or Asynchronous Lectures that usually have a related activity. Some of the Asynchronous lectures have felt like busy work but I will admit I do learn from them.

We are also super fortunate that every Monday there is a Review Session from 1pm to 2pm for the previous week’s material by the professors who taught those lectures. I try to make sure I do those questions and listen to the review session (at two times the speed because I can’t deal with the slow recordings and I finally adapted to listening at that speed). 

Our peer fellow program also had a review session that was immensely helpful. The Peer Fellow Program are essentially M2s that work together to create questions that reflect the test materials. They are really good resources and excellent at explaining some topics. 

The bottomline, use all the resources available to you when you need them! I did not seek out help until it was too late in undergrad and my grades reflected those mistakes in the worst ways possible. Go to the peer review sessions, go to the office hours, ask questions, and just reach out to someone for help when you start to feel uneasy about the information. 

I have some changes I am going to make starting this weekend like reading the textbook beforehand and reviewing the slides. I know that I need to make sure I know what material is coming up in the lecture so it’s not the first time I am seeing it. Hopefully, that method will help me avoid feeling weak in the current week’s material, especially the week of my summative exam. 

My Suggestions For an Undergrad Student

If I could go back in time, I would tell myself to do the following:

• Make a schedule for the week, and block out time. The Learning Commons at my school had an advisor that explained to me that I should schedule my studying and specific learning and studying activities first and then schedule any other obligations or fun around that studying to ensure I do it. I was scheduling fun first and then studying, prioritize your education! 

*If you are doing this, make sure that you give yourself reasonable time frames and breaks. Try following the Pomodoro method which is typically 30 mins of work and a 10 minute break. I personally do 45 minutes of work and then 10-15 minutes of break.

• Preview Material Before Lecture
  • Look at the Lecture Slides
  • Find a Youtube video that could introduce that topic
  • Read the Assigned Textbook Pages or find an outline

For the above, it would depend on the amount of time I have but do something so that you have some background on this topic. It makes it easier to place that information when you already have context for it, especially in conjunction with lecture slides because that is material your professor wants you to know!

• Make Anki cards during class OR if you hate Anki, take your notes by summarizing in your words AND creating open ended questions (highlight those open ended questions when you review them if you are writing on slides)
• Go through Anki/questions after class and review any concepts that didn’t make sense. If there were especially difficult concepts, schedule time with the professor or with peer tutors. 
• Use practice questions. Whether these be official question banks or practice sheets from the professor, find questions. If the professor doesn’t assign, ask them if they know where you can get some. Usually the end of textbook chapters have some or you can search online for free PDFs from other universities. 
• Test myself through active recall (especially as test day nears)
  • I know I used Anki for active recall but this one would be for anatomy, organic chemistry, physics formulas or biochemistry. For instance, for glycolysis, I would practice writing it from memory on paper, white boards, and even mirrors (I will be doing this in two weeks, so it never leaves you). Or find pre-made PDFs that have these processes and anatomy labels blanked out.

TIP: Your school’s library may have free anatomy coloring books as eBooks. I was able to download some as free PDFs and print them out. Just pay attention to how many free pages you can get from each coloring book. Many of them also had accompanying worksheets. 

Overall

These are just some techniques to consider. All of this can be very overwhelming and time consuming if you try incorporating all of them at once. I suggest thinking about which techniques will work best and which ones you will need to make time to learn (Anki is a major learning curve). 

Do your best and remember to enjoy learning! 

Comment below if you have any questions!