The first chunk of medical school is over, which does indeed bring with it tons of reflection on tons of different things. These 2 years have been a busy, busy and I’ve learnt an awful lot, and not just in terms of academics, but also about myself. If you read one of the posts I wrote about halfway through my first year here, in which I wrote about things you might not know about medical school you may remember a mention about changing study techniques many times. And guess what, this post is a zoomed in closer consideration of that. In other words, I thought it’d be fun to go through my journey of finding new ways to study and learn throughout the years…
The very beginning
I didn’t go into medical school with a lot of plans, I didn’t plan how I was going to study or buy any stationery. (When I say this you can think of it as an extreme; the only pens I had at uni at the beginning were the free ones everyone throws at you in fresher’s week!) We have training PBL cases here at Manchester, 2 of them to get us started. For the first case we just read through it and practised picking our cues and creating a learning agenda; for the second case we went a step further and attended a few lectures and answered the questions in the learning agenda. This was really helpful for me as it started getting me thinking about how I’d like to work and kickstarted the process of exploring learning techniques.
Right from the beginning, for training case 2 I tried typing up my PBL notes. I typed up the questions in Comic Sans and used the online resources provided by the university to try and answer them as best as I could. I used 2 accent colours for the case (pink and green it was). For the case lectures, I just went and sat and listened – I really can’t remember trying to make any notes (I don’t know what I was thinking!) After the lectures I remember going to the library, struggling to find a seat and trying to decipher the lecture to type some of what was mentioned up in my PBL notes.
This week we also had an introductory Anatomy session where we were told to prepare by learning the planes and other anatomical, which I did with a friend. I remember how mind boggling I found simple anatomical terminology. Words such as anterior, posterior, medial, lateral, proximal, distal which I wasn’t used to using on a day-to-day basis. But like we were told, these become second nature in no time.
Semester 1
Still right at the beginning but now we’re out of the 2 weeks of “training cases” so we start to get more of an idea of what this first semester would entail. A recommended reading list was mentioned to us so I went to check it out to find a page with an endless scroll of textbooks. I decided pretty early to ignore that seeing as I couldn’t see myself reading through all those 50+ textbooks anyway and I certainly wouldn’t be able to afford all of them.
I did go to the library though and blindly take out a pile of books that had a mention of any words that seemed remotely familiar to me. Anything that said Anatomy, Physiology, or any mention of reproduction (as semester 1 is on “life cycle”). Me and my flat mate went together and loaned about 20 huge thick textbooks that we dragged out of the library and waited at the bus stop to take back home with us. Needless to say, we didn’t open a single textbook for the whole time they sat on our bookshelf to gather dust. Before the summer holidays after first year, we dragged all the unopened books and returned them and never looked back.
I did speak to a then 2nd year student about textbooks and which ones to get pretty early on and she told me that you don’t really need textbooks for Medicine and it’s certainly not necessary unlike other courses where the recommended reading is practically compulsory. She said you can get everything you need from the internet and the only textbook she’s used is Moore and Daley’s Clinical Anatomy (which is one that’s freely provided as an eBook by the university). It from this day onwards that I held on to my “no textbooks” mantra and what a relief it was.
I used the Internet, YouTube videos and resources given by the university to find all the information needed for my PBL cases and it all worked out. Hand on heart, you don’t need textbooks. There are so many incredible free online resources and reliable websites out there and I’m just so glad I exist in the internet era, I cannot imagine trying to learn anatomy or understand physiology without the use of videos. I’ve linked some of my favourite YouTube channels for medical school here for anyone interested.
For Anatomy, I initially started by trying to make notes using Moore’s and Snell’s (I had a free eBook). I actually started by trying to handwrite my Anatomy notes and now that I look back on it I cannot believe how crazy that was. We have to know a huge amount of anatomy, I’d say that makes up the greatest bulk of work we have in a week: I can barely just about type it up never mind write it up using lots of fancy pens and colours.
I soon switched to just typing them, but I did make flashcards so I was still handwriting something. I just felt as though for Anatomy the physicality of drawing a diagram or writing out the weird muscle names with a pen helped to remember them.
https://instagram.com/p/BhTqmI_F2dx/
View this post on InstagramTime to get started with some work…kicking myself that I’ve practically wasted the whole day again! I’m probably going to try to spend the evening going through my flashcards and testing myself – hoping I can get myself to focus!
I also started accumulating quite a collection of flashcards so I found some cute A6 popper wallets that I used to store them all, topic by topic.
I typed my PBL notes, but for lectures I’d print out the handouts and annotate around them. I considered taking a device with me to type up notes during the lecture, but then I decided the effort of physically writing would help me to stay more focussed and prevent zoning out. I did manage to concentrate in lectures, but I often fell behind on them because physically writing things up by hand is sloooowww. Here’s the big arch lever file I stored all my lecture slides in, using dividers for each case.
I also handwrote myself a couple of pages to summarise each PBL case. I used the 2 colours that used for the case to create the summary because colour association works for my memory! I just thought I’d find it so much easier to learn from a physical sheet of paper (which I’d been used to doing all my school life before then) rather than a laptop screen.
Semester 2
Not a lot changed between semester 1 and 2. At some point along the way I discovered TeachMeAnatomy which has 100% been a lifesaver. My anatomy notes are practically derived from there. The diagrams are so useful and it breaks things down in simple easy-to-understand language which I can’t say the same for any textbook. Here’s a little peek into me working on some anatomy notes.
I continued to use flashcards for anatomy, but for some topics with lots of vessels I decided to draw out a detailed diagram. It’s quite hard to learn blood vessels and their branches sometimes, especially when there are lots of branches such as with the aorta so drawing this out numerous times to make it all neat and perfect certainly helped with embedding it in my head.
