today we're answering a long waited and requested video by some of you guys i'd love to see a video about study tips and how you studying mets please share more of how you actually study which resources you use for your how can you manage all the medical information without forgetting them i replied to these comments and promised that i would do a video about it so this is it and these are the timestamps if you want to skip to a specific part of the video hello if you're new here i'm zayha and i'm a fourth year medical student studying in the uk so through these three years of medical school that i have completed i have changed the way i studied a fair amount of times it's okay to change your study method and discover what works best for you i'm doing this video so you can actually learn from my mistakes and start one step ahead and this would be the guide i'd want if i could go to the day i started med school so that i could start using these study methods from day one recording voice notes this is the most underrating study method ever in my opinion but it's my favorite one my auditory intelligence is a lot more dominant than my visual intelligence i find it easier to learn and remember information through listening i found that out through my own trialing and error and also i took an intelligence test when i was in primary school which my school offered to all their students at the time that's why i do voice notes these recordings include facts that comes up the most in questions and also sometimes if there is a rhyme or a silly story that helps me remember that information or learn that fact then i add those into the voice recordings as well here's a snippet of a recording i took last year this was on oncology so cancer medicine breast cancer tumor marker most important one that came up it's ca153 three looks like breasts pair of breasts basically i do these voice notes on my iphone on voice memos app and when i listen to it to save time i choose skip silence and i increase the playback speed to two times or four times and the biggest advantage to voice notes is that you can listen to it wherever and while you do other stuff so you don't have to focus on it and read like you would for visual notes i usually listen to it when i do my skincare before i go to sleep or when i'm on the bus on my way to placement it's actually extra helpful if you get carsick like me when you read stuff on the bus because with voice notes you don't have that issue it doesn't cause car sickness and you can listen to it when you exercise or wherever and whenever you want it's amazing it's my favorite one do you not buy textbooks i know this might sound controversial and maybe you're used to using textbooks and highlighting them when you were at school while you were preparing for your a levels or any university entrance exams but save your money on that because most medical schools and universities actually provide you a free library account in which there are electronic and physical versions of any medical book you would need and that is if you would need any to be honest i'm in my fourth year of medical school and i don't remember the last time i use my library account to look up something in a medical book most medics actually save their money on those textbooks and use it for their subscription of question banks which have their own textbooks which also brings us to our next point subscribing to question banks this depends on how your medical school tests your knowledge so whether they do short answer exam questions or multiple choice exam questions and most of the time like 99 of the time that is multiple choice exam questions i know that through my own experience from my own medical school but also from my other friends who go to different medical schools so for that reason i've subscribed to two different question banks which have their own online textbooks which are past med and past tests for each of them i paid 25 pound yearly subscription fee there are also the question banks that i know some of my other medic friends use such as a popular one is quizlet in the online textbooks of those question banks you find information about the diseases that you learn so everything starting from symptom of a disease to management of a disease and if you get a question wrong they have the explanation of the answers just below the question as well which is very helpful and what i'm going to say now is a cliche i know but it's true the more you do practice questions the more you see different styles of questions it will stick better to your head and you'll actually learn to apply that medical knowledge into questions because you might know a medical fact and if the question asks you that fact in a simple way you'd get it right medical school exams they ask you that fact in such a weird way in questions it literally feels like a puzzle and you don't even realize that's what they're asking that's why it's important to get used to different styles of questions for example they usually give you a symptom of a disease and ask you to identify that disease through the symptoms and then ask you the management of that so it's like double question in one so they won't straightaway give you the disease and ask you the management of that that's too simple my next point is note taking is a waste of time but not voice notes i don't use paper notebooks or take notes anymore i've been there before i literally made my own textbook which looks like a work of art but i realized once i stopped that and use that time to practice questions and focus on only high-yield testable information i scored a lot higher in exams because i had so much more time to focus on what i actually needed to focus it can be scary at the start and you can get fomo when you see your other medic friend having all that pages and pages of study notes but actually this is the most time effective decision i've ever made and i stand by that i know it can feel tempting to write everything down and make it your own make it pretty i know it's a big change but i'd like to challenge you to stop writing your notes down use that time to do practice questions and if you want to read notes use notes that is already made for you for example from the textbooks in question banks watching lectures can be useless i usually don't watch lectures in medical school anymore guys because i don't find them super helpful there were times that i would do pre-reading before lectures and go through the lecture content ahead of time i did do that in the first two years of medical school but i don't do that anymore there's no time to do that and i realize it's not worth my time anymore i first started watching lecture recordings and two-time speed and now i completely stopped watching them because with the time that i watch lecture recordings i can do practice questions and i realize lectures do not really help me increase my exam score in the first two years of med school all i did was watching lectures over and over again and writing notes from the powerpoints and my scores went as good as it is right now because it just took so much time and in the end i realized it's just not worth that time sometimes but rarely they can be helpful that is only for you to put the knowledge into concepts for example if the teaching professor is talking about a patient that they treated themselves and how they did it then it sticks better with real life stories but you can make an information stick to your head by testing yourself as well it's a quicker way to do it than watching an hour long lecture but you know you be the judge of that yourself and see if it's a good use of your time and finally the last point is thank you cards making anki cards guys i started recording this video at seven a.m in the morning and now it's half past one i think yeah it's half past one if there are light changes and stuff in between clips you know why so i said writing notes is a waste of time for me but making anki cards is an easy and effective way to write a sentence or two and make a question out of it usually how i make anki cards is that i split my laptop screen into two i have the anki app on one side and pass med on the other to keep the anky card to minimum i only make cards if i get a question wrong or on the most testable information to remember that i make a question out of it typically whichever blog that we're in at med school at the time for example let's say pediatrics i would do questions specifically on pediatrics block on the question bank then i would make anki cards simultaneously i have a specific tag for each blog like cardio respiratory urology as you can see on the screen then ideally i review cards every day so i don't have any do cards left by the end of the day obviously this has not been the case since i started my summer holidays but i'm hoping to catch up on all of them before the start of the next academic year and also organize my anki cards as well some extra resources for you guys there are usually links to videos about that disease on the side of the questions on past med but if there isn't any then i go on youtube and watch a video on it just to get a concept of that information and actually understand it i especially like osmosis and zero to finals just to supplement my understanding or i use electronic textbook of clinical medicine by clark and kumar so i hope you found this useful please consider subscribing i'd be so happy to have you here until next time take care of yourself and i'll see in the next one bye