Think back to the glory days of high school where you could just do the assigned homework, maybe look a few things up in the chapter and then ace the test. Things change quickly! To do well on medical entrance and licensing exams you have to put in literally weeks if not months of solid studying. How can you make the most of this time? You must make the transition from passive to active studying. What do I mean by passive and active studying? Passive studying is what we all wish would work. We sit back, peruse through the text, go to class and at test time we have absorbed all the information we need to know by some specialized form of osmosis. This works to varying degrees. I got away with it through high school and bits of college. However, there will inevitably come a time when this is not enough. This is when you must make the transition to active studying to continue to succeed. I wish I could say differently but some of the shit we have to learn is downright boring. Reading through a text while continuously jerking yourself back awake is not a good way to retain information. Active studying is just like it sounds. It boils down to this: you must find ways to engage your brain. Just Absorb- Extremely Passive Ahhh. If only it were this easy! If you think back, this is how we all began our academic careers, sitting Indian style* while our kindergarten teacher read us stories. We all got away with it for a while but one by one we had to abandon ship and move on to more active learning styles. I still think this style can work when used appropriately. For instance, it is great when trying to garner the general theme, especially in the literary world. Unfortunately, knowing the general “theme” of acute cholecystitis isn’t going to get you through medical school. Study Guides and Review Books – Less Passive Remember the discovery of Cliff Notes and PinkMonkey.com? Some might call these cheating, I called them a way to get my shit done so I could go play outside. Regardless, our first introduction to study guides probably came through resources like these. In medical education you are likely to find review guides specific to your individual class. These are often passed down from class to class like some fabled ancient relic. They should be treated as such. These can significantly decrease the amount of work you put in as well as help you cut through the BS and get to the detail of what you really need to know. Another revelation of my academic career was the discovery of review books. These are essentially professional grade study guides complete with high quality diagrams and other pretty pictures. I found the Board Review Series to be extremely helpful for the basic science portion of medical school. Especially Question and Answer Format – Active The best study guides are made in question in answer format. This gives you the opportunity to give your brain a little exercise. Consider the following scenarios. You read: “The size of the common bile duct is up to 5 mm with an additional 1 mm being allowed for each decade in age after 50” versus You read: “What size, in mm, constitutes an enlarged common bile duct?” You actively engage your brain You answer: “Anything greater than 5 mm with an additional 1 mm per decade after 50” See the difference here? Which one do YOU think you’re more likely to remember? Obviously you must have some background knowledge to do this but I have found even the act of turning my brain on to try to come up with a reasonable answer helps me remember. The Cover and Reveal – More Active Who woulda thought, an effective strategy for strippers as well as studying! My mind has a wandering eye. When reviewing question and answer format or labelled diagrams I often can’t help taking a peek before really committing to an answer. This has to be avoided! In order to be as active as possible you must force yourself to commit to an answer. This is helping to simulate the test taking environment. Do yourself a favor and cover up the answer with your hand, a sheet of paper, or if you really want to get fancy create a power point with little clicky boxes. Flash Cards – Very Active This is my preferred method of learning. It is down and dirty, somewhat monotonous but it gets the job done. So much of medical education is rote memorization. Some would argue that you should be trying to “truly understand the topic for life long learning”. My point is this, I don’t give a fuck who you are, but I am not going to “life long learn” the fact that the mechanism of action of carbapenems (a class of antibiotics) is binding to penicillin binding proteins which in turn inhibits peptidoglycan synthesis in bacterial wall synthesis. That shit is getting memorized for the test and then forgotten. There is no need for your average doc to know this. Medical education is full of information like this, you gotta know it and the easiest way to stuff it into your brain is with flash cards. There are a lot of flashcard websites and programs out there and luckily for you someone has probably already made a set of flashcards that is relevant to the topic you are studying. Google that shit! My absolute favorite program, which I have been using since high school with minimal updates and is STILL awesome, is called CueCard. It allows you to create your own cards or import cards in .csv format (comma separated values). My favorite feature is that it allows you to first study cards in small groups so that you can learn them then you can study them as a whole set or in a quiz mode to help reinforce and cement your knowledge. Which one of these study strategies is the best? In short, all of them. I am constantly reminded of my 8th grade Social Studies teacher. Mostly because he was a perv and all the cute girls mysteriously were assigned to seats in the front of the classroom but also because of what he said about studying. Think of studying like a set of folders. Each one of those folders is a different study strategy or source from which you have gotten the information. The more folders you fill the greater fund of knowledge you will have on the topic It seems pretty simple but has stuck with me. I try to look at a topic from all aspects and “fill my folders” appropriately. As you progress through medical education you will learn that in order to fill these folders quickly and efficiently you will have to study in active ways. What modes of studying do you utilize to succeed? *Did you know we aren’t allowed to call it anymore? I told my nephew to sit Indian style the other day and I was informed by my sister that it is now called “criss cross apple sauce”. Are you fucking kidding me?! Source
