Are there any study tips from med students?
Thank you for today!

Hi @jemmaemma.j

This is a great question! I just want to get this out of the way now and say that the way everyone absorbs knowledge differs from person to person. So what may work for me may not work for you.

But by and large there some great techniques to explore and see what fits your style of study the best. I have listed a couple that worked for me personally and are widely used within HSFY.

1. Lecture preparation:

Prepare for lectures ahead of time: Download and read through the lecture slides ahead of time and as cliche as this sounds, do your readings ahead of time so you have an understanding of the lecture content. So now when you’re at a lecture with your pre-printed notes/notes on your laptop, you can easily keep up with the lecture.

From here you’re not done with a lecture until the notes are done. That is, they’re edited and ready to be printed, they’re not missing anything the lecturer said, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY I UNDERSTAND everything in the notes. Not remember but understand. So that when you need to memorise everything from them in a few days or weeks, you can. This is a very important step.

2. Break and share your notes:

For the actual study, you should read the whole lecture notes. Make sure you understand everything there. Something you can do to help your understanding is re-write everything from that lecture that you didn’t automatically remember (some stuff is really obvious and it just sticks in your mind).

Now take your notes and summarise them. Try to ideally fit your summary onto one page. When exam time rolls around you will eventually have ~30 one page summaries of everything.

Now you’ve read through your notes and summarised everything you didn’t know. Now you can move onto more intense study.

Which isn’t locking yourself in your room with your notes and textbooks, in fact it is the opposite. Get out and find a group of fellow students to study with. Teaching others is one of the best ways to gain and reinforce understanding of a concept.

It is crazy how much you will remember just by explaining it to someone else. Teaching is a really really good way of learning.

So find someone you can teach, find just one other person and take turns teaching. Divide the lectures into 2 halves and each of you will teach one half to the other. You can also correct each other. This is one of the most effective techniques I ever used and it’s so effective. If you can’t find someone to teach, get a teddy bear and lock yourself in your room and explain everything out loud to your teddy bear. NOT in your head - that’s bad and doesn’t work. Explain it out loud. I spent about 50% of my study this way because I couldn’t be bothered going to uni to find someone to explain it to.

These are just a couple things that worked for me and are reasonably popular, but the bottom line is that you should find what works for you because like mentioned at the start