Hi everybody, welcome back to my channel. I'm Yasha if you're new here and today I wanted to talk about how I studied in residency. So that just means this was my personal study style, like what I did and how I got to this point.
That doesn't mean that this is the right way, this is just the way that I studied and I think that it might work for you if you're anything like me. So to give you some background on the type of studier that I am, as a medical student and also in undergrad I was definitely the person who who studied like last minute. I was really good at memorizing.
I had like a way to do it and I knew how to do it and I could just pretty much do it in the last like one or two days before the exam and then I would spend a lot of time those few days just like writing you know whatever doing what I needed to do to memorize the material. That worked for me in medical school and an undergrad. However, it was definitely not about to work for me in residency, especially when you can't, you know, you don't have eight hours a day to study, you're actually going to work. And you and I both know that when you do get one or two days off, the last thing you want to do is open your books.
You want to do your laundry, or you have like a whole list of things to do. And after all of that is said and done, the last thing you want to do is open a book. So studying in residency is really hard, and I feel like the way that I studied...
Definitely worked for me in retrospect. I really wouldn't change a lot of what I did. So I'm just going to tell you straight up like this may not work for you, but this is what I did.
So let's just get into it. So the first year I really didn't study a lot. I didn't open a lot of textbooks.
I didn't go through like an entire book in a year. And I know that some people do do that. So if that's something that you would find useful or you think that you need to do or you should do for your own life.
for your own education then definitely you should do that but i didn't and i don't really think i did anything wrong like i spent as much effort as i could seeing studies at work i definitely did that i would actually like write down how many studies i did a day and i would try to beat that record the next day and for me that was like kind of telling myself i'm going to work as hard as i can while i'm at work see as many scans as many studies as i can and kind of ask as many questions as possible to the attendings when i'm reading out And that way I felt like I was getting a very solid knowledge base. And then I would pick a couple things, or my attending would say, hey, why don't you go look this up tonight or something, and I would spend maybe like 30 minutes, at the very most one hour I would say. Usually it's just as long as it takes to read a Radiopedia page to try to learn a couple of concepts here and there.
For example, it would be like, oh, you read an MRI, like a pituitary MRI, so why don't you go home and read about pituitary adenomas. And so I would just go home. I would open Core Radiology.
That was the main book that I used to do all of this looking up. I would look up, I would use Radiopedia. And then sometimes I would use StatDx, which is a subscription service that your residency might have. And so you can use all of those things. Like I said, all in all, it would take less than an hour.
And I would do that maybe a couple times a week. So it wasn't like I was spending a lot of time outside of work studying. And honestly, as a first year resident, I felt like I was very tired, like I was fatigued almost when I got home because you're spending so much mental energy every day trying to understand what you're looking at and talking to everyone.
I really was tired when I got home so it was hard for me to really study a lot. I was also in a long-distance relationship my first year so I spent every weekend off going to New York City on the train. You would think that, oh, you know, you should study on the train.
Yeah, I probably should have and I always had goals to do that, but I... pretty much would try and then I just wouldn't. You can see like in my book where I tried to write notes on the train and it was just so difficult because it's moving and the handwriting was so bad and I think eventually I just gave up. It was not working for me.
So first year really it was a lot of trying to study do as many studies as possible at work, understand the foundations of what I needed to know, and look up a couple of things every week and I think that was really solid for me and I feel like I ended up with a pretty good knowledge base after my first year. Second year, I actually, we do away rotations during our second year. So we do three months at Boston Children's and then we do three months at MGH.
And during those six months, I would say I definitely obviously spent three months focusing on PEDS, which is really helpful because PEDS is like a totally separate world than adult radiology or like, you know, what we normally see. So that was really helpful. And again, I looked up stuff that I needed to look up when I got home and we were... we had to do like the Cleveland Clinic modules which are a good resource for pediatrics it's free online and we had to put together a presentation but outside of all of that I don't think I spent that much time again doing that much studying outside of those like required modules and stuff so I again I can't say that that was the right thing to do but it was just what worked for me and I got through that I think I performed relatively well during that rotation And yeah, that was really all I did when I was at Children's. In retrospect, I think that would be a really good time to do all of the rad primer questions that are in PEDS or read.
We also got a copy of the Pediatric Requisites book, which is really helpful, actually. I actually... carried that book with me and I would look things up during the day because the volume wasn't as high as it was like when I was at my home institution so I actually had a little bit of time to do those things so that was really helpful but yeah other than that I didn't really do much at Boston Children's unfortunately and then at mgh i tried to study more because i really wanted to keep up and i wanted to make a good impression because i was still thinking of what i wanted to do my fellowship in and i was just like making sure i made a good impression while i was there and i read what did i read while i was there they gave me the thoracic requisites which i did try to like at least look at the pictures um and i just tried to like read again core radiology i think ultimately that was the main text i used throughout the last few years.
I did try to read Branton Helms and as a first year and it was like so overwhelming for me that ever since then I stopped reading it and I haven't even opened it. It's in the back of most of my videos you'll see it's like in the background but I really haven't even opened it since my first year which is really unfortunate. Maybe I should try to read it again now but anyways I never really read that.
I really used the requisites. I always say I use them but I really did. Those were like the main books outside of core radiology that I used and then In the second half of my second year, the pandemic hit and that's really when I started to get more serious about studying. I had a lot more time because we were not like on our normal rotations, it was really skeleton crew at the beginning and so I spent a lot of time doing all of the rad primer questions or as many as I could for like a subject. I would take thorough notes on them so I have like all these word documents which I can put in like image of what they look like I made these documents of pathology of normal anatomy of what everything should look like and that was really how I studied during my Excuse me the second half of my second year the second half of my second year And also came to the first half of my third year I was going through as much red primer as possible going through as many questions as I could repeating some of them that I had done as a first year which didn't even stick at all and That's really what I did with notes.
I have notes on everything every different like section every subspecialty that was kind of finally when I was like wow there's a lot of stuff I need to know that I don't know yet so that's kind of when I was like okay let me do that and then third year I continued doing that during the first half of the year I spent a lot of time going through all of the rad primer questions I didn't do any other cubings or question books until the second half of my third year and then you During the second half of my third year, I started to get more into gear. As you would say for boards, I was really like trying a lot more and trying to study a lot more in every like moment that I could get. Obviously, we went back to our normal schedule, so I didn't have lots of time to study anymore.
But I really tried to spend at like a lot of time outside of work studying, which is something I had not done obviously until now. Because if you've been following along, you know that I was saying I didn't really study that much. So here's what I did.
Kind of in that, it started around December until like June. So first of all, around this time was when the Discord, Rad Discord, started becoming a thing. So thanks Grace, that was awesome. I'm starting that because like it really helped. We started having board reviews.
And so if you remember our fourth years, when I was a third year, took the boards in February because they had canceled it for the year before. So there were a lot of word reviews for them and I actually just tried to participate in them and kind of start to hear the words, see common cases, see common pathology, and at least like kind of follow along. I wasn't really that active in it.
I definitely didn't know anything, but I just wanted to start to like get a lay of the land. I also, from the Rad Discord, got a set of Anki cards that were based on Crack the Core, which are the main books I use to study for the core exam. Those Anki cards, I started doing 50 new cards every night. It's not how you're supposed to do Anki.
I know that everyone who uses Anki is going to come at me and be like, that's not how you do Anki. But honestly, that's what I did. So I would do 50 new cards every night and also do like all the reviews that I had.
I honestly don't even know the settings I use. I know I mess with them, but like I did that for the sections that I was weakest in. So for example, I did it for Neuro. I did it for...
I did it for all the sections. Let me be clear. I did it for everything, but I started with the ones that I was most uncomfortable with. So neuro is one of the biggest sections in the book at least, and I started with that, and I remember I did neuro, MSK, GI. Those were ones I did early because they were kind of the bigger sections.
I don't remember what other ones I did. I know I left peds for the end. I don't know the order. But that's what I started doing in December.
I was like, let me do the things that I'm really not comfortable with. So that's what I did starting in December. And then when it hit like March, that was like when I really went into hardcore study mode. We're on lighter rotations, which is really nice.
make sure your residency program lets you be on lighter rotations. That's so important because you're really going to have to study a lot for this exam. In March, I really started doing everything like from the beginning. So I just like started from the beginning of the book and I just like.
went forward and I normally make a lot of flashcards when I studied for exams like this but I didn't I didn't for the core exam I did for certain things like for physics which I'll get into in a second but I didn't really do that for the core because I had these pre-made Anki decks so I just did a lot of Anki I just kept hammering things into my brain and I definitely saw every single page of both crack the core books so that's really how I studied during my did I really say I would say that during my third year I spent maybe an hour hour or two every evening studying and then on the weekends I spent like eight or so hours studying it's a lot of studying during third year and that's when I was not in my like lighter rotations and stuff starting in March this was like during the whole third year I was studying a lot so I think that was really helpful because I would say leading up to the exam I did not spend any. I didn't wake up extra early for anything. I didn't stay up extra late to study anything.
I was very like regimented in my schedule and like I said earlier in the video, I was very much a crammer until now, but no, I didn't do that this time and I passed. So clearly I did something right. It's a lot of work, but you know, I think that the way that I studied during residency made sense for me.
It made sense for my mindset and where I was at. I could have studied more. I feel like no matter how much I studied I could say that but I definitely could have studied more but I recognized that I hadn't been studying during my first couple of years and so in the second half of my second year I really tried to like get things into gear. The last thing I want to talk about is physics because I find physics really challenging and difficult but I finally figured it out I would say so in fit for my physics or whatever I started studying physics during my third year.
I really didn't study it that much during my first and second year. I don't have any regrets about that. I don't think I would have gotten that much more out of it, to be honest with you.
So during my third year, my program signed up for Tallyrad Physics, and it's amazing, you guys. It's my favorite physics resource ever. Bill, I mean, Bill is the teacher, and he's amazing.
I love all of the lectures. And I watched them probably three times through. I watched them once at the very beginning of my studying. And then I watched them again. And then I watched them again right before my exam.
And I think single-handedly that was the best physics resource at the core. But in any case, this was kind of my study strategy during residency. Now, I don't know if that was helpful for anyone to hear how I studied. I don't know.
But some people asked me for it. So here it is. In summary, if you want a summary, I guess I'm saying it now. I didn't really study first year. I sort of studied second year, but mostly in the second half of second year, and then third year I studied a whole lot.
And I passed my core, and now I have to figure out how to be an attending in a couple years, but I think I'm in a really good place knowledge-wise. I think there's definitely more for me to study in terms of like what I'm doing my fellowship and mini-fellowship in, but in general, I don't know. I think that this ended up working for me, and I hope this video was helpful for you.
And if you do have any specific questions about what I did or what resources are good or whatever, just you know where to find me. I live on Twitter. I live on Instagram at yeshagothamd. And I will talk to you in the next one. Bye.