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Live Stream - Hangout

2018-05-29 · Livestream or live hangout · Ali · recording, 25:35 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Medicine and his doctor years (also: Learning and studying, Mindset, motivation and happiness, Tools, apps and tech) · mode: Answering questions · tags: Aimed at students, His own numbers

In a livestream Q&A days before starting as a junior doctor, Ali answers rapid-fire viewer questions: understand material well enough to explain it to a five-year-old, embrace distractions, exam stress has no useful function, apply to medical schools by whether you want medicine or one school, and use school free time to learn skills.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Opening the livestream: camera, microphone and the delay

00:01:11 — Several exams on one day; back from Germany; the apprenticeship block and his schedule

  • ★★ With several exams on one day, Ali revises in order: the morning exam the night before, the afternoon one at lunchtime; if confident he does no work, if not he tries to plug the holes in his knowledge. — 00:01:11
  • ★★ With his exams over, Ali is on the apprenticeship block: six weeks in a hospital learning the logistics of being a junior doctor, such as filling out the various blood forms. — 00:01:36
  • ★★ Alongside the apprenticeship block, Ali has been editing many videos, scheduled twice a week for the next few weeks. — 00:01:36

00:02:34 — Leadership skills, the junior-doctor start date, handouts, iPads, past papers, explaining to a five-year-old, Anki, distractions

  • ★★ To build leadership skills at university, Ali advises seizing the opportunities that come, such as taking a high position on a committee, and giving talks and teaching sessions, which develop public speaking and confidence. — 00:02:34
  • ★★ Ali officially starts as a junior doctor on 1 August 2018, but East Anglia, the region of Cambridge, has a week of shadowing first, so he will be in the hospital from 23 July. — 00:02:34 · Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali scans lecture handouts into OneNote when he is typing, or into Notability when he is handwriting on the iPad. — 00:03:18 · Notability, iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali says a student should get an iPad for studying if they can afford it: iPads are quite useful but by no means compulsory. — 00:03:18 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ For a student who cannot tell what is important among low-yield information, Ali recommends past papers as a good barometer of what matters and what does not. — 00:03:18
  • ★★ To a Year 12 student who works long hours but gets Bs and Cs, Ali says the revision strategy is probably wrong, such as writing out notes and summarising topics without understanding them. (hedged) — 00:03:44

  • ★★★ The key to a good GCSE or A-level grade, Ali says, is understanding the material well enough to explain it to a five-year-old: whoever can explain the whole biology syllabus that way gets an A*. — 00:04:10

    “really understand the stuff such that you can explain it to a five-year-old”

  • ★★ After university Ali wants to be a doctor, do YouTube on the side and do a lot of teaching, which interests him greatly. — 00:04:35

  • ★★ Medicine at Cambridge involves quite a lot of essay writing, Ali says: about two or three essays a week, at least in the first three years. — 00:04:35 · University of Cambridge, Cambridge
  • ★★ For using active recall in medicine, Ali recommends Anki. — 00:04:35 · Anki, active recall

  • ★★★ Ali embraces distractions when studying: he does not see studying as needing full focus, so if a friend comes in they chat, and if something happens he deals with it. — 00:05:00

    “I actually embrace distractions when studying.”

00:05:30 — Writing on screen with Notability, Cambridge essay titles, moving to the UK, college medic groups, paramedics, bad grades, his specialty

  • ★★ For the on-screen writing in his video on what happens after medical school, Ali wrote in Notability on the iPad: with a black background, the screen blending mode removes the black so it looks like writing on a transparent surface. — 00:05:30 · Notability, iPad Pro
  • ★ Ali's fast is going all right: he has been using the travel exemption while in Germany, so he has hardly felt it. — 00:05:30
  • ★★ Cambridge medicine essay titles in physiology, Ali says, might be the structure and function of the sodium pump, comparing the types of muscle, or how the body keeps its pH from becoming deranged after a can of Coke. — 00:06:04 · University of Cambridge, Cambridge
  • ★★ To a Damascus University student thinking of moving to the UK, Ali says go for it, but nothing is particularly amazing about the UK: the grass seems greener elsewhere, as people in the UK think of America, so do not move for that reason. — 00:06:32 · United Kingdom
  • ★★ Medics work together in a lot of Cambridge colleges, Ali says; he thinks Emmanuel's group is friendlier and more cohesive than average, and Christ's, Caius and a few others have strong medic groups, from what he has heard. — 00:07:00 · Emmanuel College, Cambridge
  • ★★ Asked whether young students should already think about universities, Ali says do what you like: he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge from quite a young age. — 00:07:25 · University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali says no one does a medicine degree to become a paramedic: those who want emergency work do it to become, for example, an emergency physician. — 00:07:51
  • ★★★ With bad grades, Ali tells himself he did his best, or reflects on why he did not, and that grades are not a reflection of him as a person and do not really matter, because no one cares what grades you get. — 00:07:51
  • ★★ Ali is leaning towards obstetrics and gynaecology as a specialty, though not quite sure; before that he was into plastic surgery. (hedged) — 00:07:51 · Obstetrics and gynaecology

00:09:14 — Foundation jobs, exam stress, the night before an exam, video games, why obstetrics and gynaecology

  • ★★ Ali will do his first foundation year in Cambridge and his second in Bury St Edmunds, both in the East Anglia region. — 00:09:14 · Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali says he does not get exam stress at all, and feels stress has no particularly useful function when it comes to exams. — 00:09:14
  • ★★ An exam result does not dictate who you are as a human being, Ali says, so there is almost no reason to get stressed unless you genuinely fear failing, which he never has. — 00:09:38
  • ★★ The night before an exam Ali mostly relaxes; closer to an exam he asks which topic he would be least happy to see come up, and revises that the night before if there is one. — 00:10:00
  • ★★ Ali no longer plays video games: he once clocked about 180 days of playtime on World of Warcraft, but now thinks video games are a bit of a waste of time. — 00:10:29
  • ★★ Ali became interested in obstetrics and gynaecology because it was the placement he enjoyed most in medical school, he did a couple of projects in it, and people doing it in Cambridge seemed to like it. — 00:10:50 · Obstetrics and gynaecology, Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali thinks his lack of exam stress partly comes from an arrogant streak that told him he would do quite well, at least at GCSE and A-level. — 00:10:50
  • ★★ Ali was only vaguely concerned about his biology A2 exam, the first time he walked into an exam not feeling fully prepared, and he did all right in it. — 00:11:15

00:12:05 — Choosing medical schools, work experience, using school free time for skills, junior doctor pay, the BMAT, the summer before A-levels

  • ★★★ Whether to apply to aspirational or safe medical schools depends on whether the aim is medicine or one school: Ali aimed for Cambridge and applied to Cambridge, Imperial, UCL and one more; to become a doctor, safer options make sense. — 00:12:05 · University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, University College London, Cambridge
  • ★★ Charlotte is coming over for a takeaway in a couple of hours, and she and Ali will discuss SixMed matters. — 00:12:31 · Charlotte, 6med
  • ★★ Ali took biology, chemistry, maths and physics at A-level, and English literature at AS. — 00:13:04
  • ★★★ For medicine work experience anything helps, Ali says, such as volunteering or shadowing a nurse; for GP experience, just turn up at every GP practice in the area and ask the doctors to let you shadow for a couple of days. — 00:13:04 · Work experience
  • ★★ Ali tells school students they will never again have so much free time: university brings less of it and work none at all. — 00:13:33
  • ★★ At school Ali spent a lot of time learning to code and playing World of Warcraft; he wishes he had not played and had started music earlier, which would have benefited him more. — 00:14:21
  • ★★★ Ali's advice for anyone in school is not to waste their free time but to use it to learn skills that will benefit them for the rest of their life, rather than browsing Facebook. — 00:14:21
  • ★★★ Junior doctor pay, Ali says, hovers around £28,000 to £34,000 depending on the jobs: about £34,000 a year for an F1 with many nights and weekends, about £24,000 to £26,000 in quieter jobs. — 00:14:53
  • ★★ Choosing between university courses, Ali suggests going for the one you would enjoy most, and perhaps working out what you want to do later in life. (hedged) — 00:15:22
  • ★★ Using American English in the BMAT does not matter, Ali says: no one cares. — 00:15:22 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ To a student about to start A-levels in maths, physics and chemistry, Ali says not to revise for them over the summer in advance, but to learn skills that will help later in life. — 00:15:48

00:16:20 — Second-year difficulty, why medicine, medicine against A-level sciences, task or time, the Student BMJ, Ibz Mo in the chat

  • ★★ Ali found the first year of medicine harder than the second: in the first you are still finding your ground, in the second you know what you are doing. — 00:16:20
  • ★★★ Ali chose medicine because he did not know what else he wanted: the choice was between medicine and computer science, and he feared that coding as a job would make him enjoy it less. — 00:16:42
  • ★★★ Ali is glad he chose medicine, which he finds really fun, and says a medic with skills in other domains, such as coding, is automatically in a different league from a plain coder or a standard medic. — 00:16:42
  • ★★ Medicine is much harder than A-level sciences only in the volume of content, Ali says: A-level science is just as conceptually difficult. — 00:17:13
  • ★★ Ali works by task, not by time: he does not believe in working by time. — 00:17:40
  • ★★ Ali finds the Student BMJ quite good to read through, though he does not keep up much with medical news, or with news at all. — 00:17:40 · Student BMJ
  • ★ Ibz Mo joins the livestream chat; in the previous livestream someone calling himself Ibs Mo with his profile picture had turned out to be a fake. — 00:18:05 · Ibz Mo

00:19:05 — BMAT scores, his GCSEs, clinical resources, the Notability video, days you cannot study, personal statement, tech combinations, grades

  • ★★ The average BMAT score of successful Oxbridge candidates is about six, in the low sixes, Ali says, so getting that is pretty good. — 00:19:37 · BMAT (admissions), University of Oxford, University of Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali got 13.5 A* grades at GCSE, the half being a short course in citizenship. — 00:19:37
  • ★★ For the clinical years of medicine Ali really likes the book Oxford Cases in Medicine and Surgery. — 00:20:23 · University of Oxford
  • ★★ Ali will film a video about Notability and how to use the iPad to take notes in medical school, at some point when he has a day to himself. — 00:20:46 · Notability, iPad Pro
  • ★★ On a day you cannot study, Ali advises asking what your goal is and whether a break is consistent with it: if it is, take a break; if not, battle through, as he wrote in his latest newsletter. — 00:21:27
  • ★★ To strengthen his personal statement over the summer, Ali volunteered and learned close-up magic, which made an interesting line item. — 00:21:27 · Personal statement
  • ★★ Asked whether medicine has more biology or chemistry, Ali says it has no biology at all and is mostly chemistry, at least in the preclinical years, so you almost do not even need biology A-level for medicine. — 00:21:55
  • ★★ The best technology for medical school depends on budget, Ali says; he uses a MacBook and recently an iPad, which he thinks a pretty great combination. — 00:21:55 · MacBook, iPad Pro
  • ★★ Whether to aim higher than a grade C depends on your goals, Ali says: grades are not everything, but a tool to get you where you want to be. — 00:22:25
  • ★ Asked whether he believes in to-do lists, Ali says yes. — 00:22:25

00:22:46 — Praise for Ibz Mo, finishing medical school, A-levels for medicine, the religion question, MacBook against Windows

  • ★★ Ali and Ibz Mo have done two collaborations on revision tips, and Ali would really love to do another. — 00:22:46 · Ibz Mo
  • ★★ Beyond his charisma, banter and humour, Ali found Ibz Mo really articulate and insightful, good at teasing apart interesting things, and learned a lot from him talking about YouTube. — 00:23:20 · Ibz Mo
  • ★★ Finishing medical school is bittersweet for Ali: it has been incredible, but like his first three undergraduate years he is glad it happened and would not want to do it again. — 00:23:20
  • ★★ The best three A-levels for medicine, Ali says, are biology, chemistry and maths. — 00:24:13
  • ★★ Ali dislikes being asked whether he is religious, because it is unclear what religious means and he feels people asking it always have an agenda. — 00:24:13
  • ★★ Ali really likes macOS and iOS and is very tied into the Apple ecosystem. — 00:24:39
  • ★★★ Ali was anti-Apple until he could afford it, seeing no point in a £1,500 MacBook when Windows gave the same specs for under half; after his mother gave him a MacBook Air at university, he found its user experience worth the price, at least when Windows was not that good, and premium Apple products worth it for him. — 00:24:39 · MacBook, Ali Abdaal's mother, iPad Pro

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

People: Ali Abdaal's mother · Charlotte · Ibz Mo · Katherine

Works: BMAT (admissions) · Student BMJ

Organizations: 6med · Emmanuel College · Imperial College London · University College London · University of Cambridge · University of Oxford

Concepts: active recall · Obstetrics and gynaecology · Personal statement · Work experience

Places: Cambridge · United Kingdom

Products: Anki · iPad Pro · MacBook · Notability

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