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Study With Me + 10 Productivity / Revision Tips - Cambridge University medical student VLOG #31

2018-04-18 · Study with me · Ali · recording, 8:45 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: Demonstration and walkthrough · tags: Aimed at students

In his second study-with-me vlog, Ali, a final-year Cambridge medical student, time-lapses a relaxed revision day of psychiatry history-taking and clinical examinations with friends, with ten tips: shower as a break, a tidy desk, someone taking the lead in group sessions, active recall as a way of life, colours and diagrams as recall cues.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A chill revision day, a late start and the shower as a break

  • ★★ Ali makes another study-with-me video, time-lapsing a day of revising psychiatry history-taking and clinical examinations, with ten study and productivity tips. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali likes revision days to be fairly chill: a leisurely pace with bursts of active recall and spaced repetition, without being overly concerned with 100% productivity. — 00:00:00 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali's first tip: he normally showers first thing to wake up, but if a specific task will take an hour or less he starts it straight away and uses the shower afterwards as a break. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Ali packs his broken drone to send for repairs and says there will be more on it in his vlog about the trip to Singapore and Bali. — 00:00:29 · Singapore

00:00:58 — A tidy desk, choosing the topic, and writing psychiatry history-taking down from memory in colours

  • ★★ Ali's second tip: before settling down to work he tidies his room and desk; it costs time, but a tidy room is better for his mental state than squeezing out 20 more minutes. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Having no revision timetable, Ali chooses each day's topic by asking which topic he would be least comfortable with if the exam were later that day. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Ali spends about an hour on taking a history from a patient with a psychiatric issue such as depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, mania or bipolar disorder, which he would not quite remember. — 00:01:27 · Psychiatry, Bipolar disorder
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth tip is active recall in action: after reading over something, such as Beck's suicide scale, he writes down from memory exactly what he learned. — 00:01:27 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali writes with different colours, arrows and spacing because they give recall cues: remembering three components written in green on the right of the page can bring back Beck's suicide scale. — 00:01:56 · active recall
  • ★ Ali says the iPad makes writing in different colours super easy, though he has used different colours for years on paper too. — 00:01:56 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali says colours make his notes more of a pleasure to look at, more of a work of art, and he cannot overstate the importance of that. — 00:01:56

00:02:26 — Psychiatry history role plays with Katherine, then lunch

  • ★★ Ali and his friend Katherine spend half an hour on psychiatry history role plays; Ali plays an asylum seeker with post-traumatic stress disorder who has taken a paracetamol overdose. — 00:02:26 · Katherine, Psychiatry
  • ★★ Swapping roles, Katherine plays a homeless young woman in a spiral of depression who comes to the GP with a social worker, and Ali, as the GP, works towards an action plan. — 00:02:55 · Katherine
  • ★ Ali's usual lunch is pasta with tuna and pesto; he has recently started adding peas to eat more green vegetables. — 00:02:55

00:03:20 — Thyroid, acromegaly and Cushing's examinations with Paul and Alex: taking the lead, active recall as a way of life, diagrams; piano practice

  • ★★ In the afternoon Ali and his friends Paul and Alex go over the thyroid, acromegaly and Cushing's examinations. — 00:03:20 · Paul
  • ★★★ Ali's fifth tip: in any work session with friends at least one person must take the initiative and say what the group is doing, as Paul did; the others will follow. — 00:03:20 · Paul
  • ★★ Ali urges students who do not see themselves as leaders to work on it: leadership matters in any workplace, especially medicine, and is better practised with friends than first at a cardiac arrest. — 00:03:58
  • ★★★ Ali's sixth tip, active recall as a way of life: in a group session, instead of being spoon-fed an examination, one person talks the others through it and they fill in the gaps. — 00:03:58 · active recall
  • ★★ Having partly forgotten the thyroid examination is, for Ali, the perfect state for active recall: retrieving something you have allowed yourself to forget strengthens its connections. — 00:04:28 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali's seventh tip is learning by diagrams, such as drawings of an acromegaly man and a Cushing's man: images, colours and position on the page can all cue recall. — 00:04:57
  • ★★ Ali's eighth tip: friends encourage one another to recall ("don't tell me"), because the more effort remembering takes, the more strongly the memory is encoded. — 00:05:26 · active recall
  • ★ Ali practises the piano with Sight Reading Factory, an app that generates random pieces at your level for learning to read music. — 00:05:26

00:05:55 — Cardiovascular questions in the active recall spreadsheet, quizzing with Katherine, four hours in total

  • ★★ Ali's ninth tip is his active recall spreadsheet: adding the cardiovascular examination, he writes exam questions in one column and answers in the second, coloured white so he cannot see them. — 00:05:55 · active recall
  • ★★ For writing questions into his active recall spreadsheet, Ali likes a big widescreen monitor and online or PDF versions of books rather than physical ones, because they make a split screen easier. — 00:05:55 · active recall
  • ★★★ Ali's tenth tip, for quizzing with a friend: one reads the question aloud, both answer silently, and they look only when both are ready, so each still uses their own active recall. — 00:06:54 · Katherine, active recall
  • ★★ Ali calls active recall literally the most efficient way to learn anything. (overstated) — 00:06:54 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali's revision day came to just under four hours, which he thinks were productive because they were built mostly around active recall and spaced repetition. — 00:07:23 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ In the past Ali would have read the textbook and made notes, spending eight to ten hours on the same topics and, he thinks, learning less, because notes and textbooks are so inefficient. — 00:07:23

00:07:52 — Evening: filming, pizza, the gym with an audiobook, comments, sign-off

  • ★★ At the gym in the evening Ali listens to the audiobook of The Wise Man's Fear, the sequel to The Name of the Wind, which he thinks he talked about in his February favourites. — 00:07:52

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Asked by a viewer for a video on his magical active recall system, Ali replies that he has made one, "How to study for exams with Google Sheets". — creator comment · active recall

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall

Also: Bipolar disorder · Cambridge · iPad Pro · Katherine · Paul · Psychiatry · Singapore · spaced repetition

Only in the description or credits: University of Cambridge

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