Medstudentedge: Study Tips, Tricks, And Techniques To Help Medical Students Succeed

Study strategies that work, and those that just plain don’t.

How you might go about getting objective data about your study habits during medical school to help you score better in school and on boards.

In this episode I will talk about what makes a study group work. In preparation for this podcast I primarily read a 2017 review by Keren et al.  Just to be clear, when I talk about study groups, I am referring to a self-created group that meets to share information and learn together, not a group created during a certain course like an anatomy tank group or a Genetics small group where the whole class has a project or assignment over the semester. At my med school, the support staff would put you together with a study group if you wanted, and I was so amazed at how well that worked out. Two of us became dermatologists, one a general surgeon, and they are two of my closest med school friends to this day. So not entirely self-created, but you get the distinction. So let’s make some guidelines for what a study group should be doing for you. If yours is not meeting these guidelines, consider finding a new group.

Reviewing a 2015 paper that correlated concentration to Step 1 score; 5 tips to make it actionable for you.

I will talk about these two resources and the data addressing which is better.

Tips for using SketchyMedical and Picmonic.

How to use travel to expand your memory and build memory palaces.

How to memorize congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

Tips for catching up if you fall behind in medical school.

How to address 4 ways you might be feeling overwhelmed in medical school.

How to create a memory palace for immunology.

The "memory palace" is a technique that has been used since ancient times to memorize large amounts of material in a short amount of time.  I used it in medical school to score high on Step 1 and Step 2 and match into dermatology.  Since it completely changed my life, I created an online course to teach it to other people, and in this podcast I’m going to share some tidbits from that course.  You will hear the answers to 5 FAQs questions from listeners to my Med Student Edge podcast.

8 Tips for surviving anatomy

In this episode I answer 4 FAQs for matching into a competitive specialty.

  In this episode I’ll share a story from the ICU, and a lesson that it reminded me of, about concepts and memorization.  I hope you can take this lesson, incorporate it into your study strategy, and use it to reduce volume.

Tips and thoughts on using Anki.

8 tips to create better, stickier, more meaningful long-term memories.

Study tips for medical students

In this episode I will address the question “How can I possibly learn all this material?"