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Study Tips for First Year Medical Students

2018-09-15 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 33:22 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing, His medical past, Family

In the first video of his How to Survive Medical School series, junior doctor Ali gives ten study tips for first-year medical students: befriend the years above, keep the exam in mind, understand the big picture, use active recall and spaced repetition from day one, work a little every day, avoid flashcard overload, pre-read for lectures, skip textbooks and work together, with his resources for each preclinical subject.

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 new series, How to Survive Medical School, and ten study tips for the first year

  • ★★★ Ali, a junior doctor in Cambridge, starts a series called How to Survive Medical School: at least 20 videos in which he and friends he has interviewed over recent months give advice on surviving parts of medical school. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Ali's first video in the series gives tips he wishes he had known as a first-year medical student, on studying and the workload rather than the social side, which he says kind of takes care of itself. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Every medical school runs its syllabus in its own way, Ali says, so he is probably not the right person to give very specific advice on the best resources: at Cambridge, for example, physiology exams asked for essays on the sodium pump. (hedged) — 00:00:58

00:01:17 — Every medical school is different; make friends with your seniors

  • ★★★ Ali's single biggest tip for first-year medical students is to make friends with people in the years above you. — 00:01:48
  • ★★ Unlike at secondary school, a first-year at medical school has in a way the highest social capital they ever will, Ali says: the second and third years will want to be friends with you. — 00:02:13
  • ★★ Ali says seniors have been through exactly the same course and can give you all their resources; making friends with the years above made his own medical school experience a lot easier. — 00:02:42

00:03:18 — Begin with the exam in mind

  • ★★★ Ali's second tip is to begin with the exam in mind: in the first year the aim is to revise as efficiently as possible for the end-of-year exam, not yet to become a good doctor. — 00:03:38
  • ★★ To keep the exam in mind, Ali advises looking at the past papers you will get as early as you can. — 00:03:38
  • ★★ A big anatomy textbook such as Grey's Anatomy or Clinically Oriented Anatomy holds far more than any exam will test, Ali says, so knowing what questions your exam asks lets you tailor your learning and revision. — 00:04:07

00:05:03 — Understand the big picture: explain it to a five-year-old, "why is this bad?"

  • ★★★ Ali's third tip is to understand the big picture of your subjects and not obsess over details: rely on understanding the general concepts rather than memorising facts. — 00:05:05
  • ★★ Ali's litmus test for whether he understands something is to ask whether he could explain it to a five-year-old, which he thinks has something to do with the Feynman technique. — 00:05:34

  • ★★ To test his understanding of a disease, Ali asks "and why is this bad?" again and again: HIV lowers the CD4 count, so you cannot mount an immune response, so the next infection could kill you. — 00:06:04

    “asking yourself the question, and why is this bad?”

  • ★★ Ali's second question while learning a disease is how annoyed he would be to get it, which shows how serious a condition is in a way textbooks and revision guides do not. — 00:06:29

    “how pissed off would I be if I got this particular disease?”

00:07:43 — Active recall and spaced repetition from day one

  • ★★★ Ali's fourth tip is to build active recall and spaced repetition into your study routine from day one. — 00:07:45 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali first learned about active recall and spaced repetition in a lecture in his second year of medicine; it blew his and his friends' minds, and he wishes he had known about them ten years earlier. — 00:07:45 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali says rereading, highlighting and taking notes are quite ineffective revision strategies, as judged by scientists who reviewed the research on university students, who found spaced repetition and active recall by far the best. — 00:08:14 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Active recall just means testing yourself, Ali says: the more often and the harder you work to retrieve information, the better it is encoded and retained, so testing yourself is the most crucial part of learning, not only something done in the exam. — 00:08:44 · active recall
  • ★★ For spaced repetition, Ali advises writing down the date you covered a topic and reviewing it three days later, then a week later, then two weeks later. — 00:09:13 · spaced repetition

00:10:07 — Do a little bit of work each day

  • ★★★ Ali's fifth tip is to do a little work every day: even 20 minutes a day, such as reviewing your own practice questions or pre-reading for the next day's lectures, is infinitely better than nothing. — 00:10:09
  • ★★ In Ali's experience, the two groups who struggle most at medical school are people with a history of mental health problems that its atmosphere makes worse, and people who reach exam term having done no work all year. — 00:10:38 · Mental health
  • ★★ Asked on Instagram how to use his active recall spreadsheet to cram all of anatomy into two weeks after no work all year, Ali says you can try, but spending the year doing nothing completely hamstrings you. — 00:11:07 · active recall
  • ★★★ Doing 20 minutes a day consistently is so much better than cramming for the exam, Ali says: cramming is only good for short-term retrieval, while spaced repetition, spreading work over a long period, is by far the better way to retain information. — 00:11:07 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Asked how much work to do each day, Ali says an hour a day is pretty good, but what counts is how efficient the work is, not the time. — 00:11:37
  • ★★ Highlighting and copying notes out of Grey's Anatomy can take five hours for what someone does in 20 minutes with Wikipedia and Anki, Ali says; the narrative that hours count is common, especially among parents from India, Pakistan and the subcontinent. — 00:12:06 · Wikipedia, Anki, Pakistan

00:12:49 — Avoid making too many flashcards

  • ★★ Ali's sixth tip: one of the biggest mistakes is making too many flashcards, especially at the start, before you have a big-picture understanding of a subject. — 00:13:01
  • ★★★ Ali recommends avoiding making flashcards for at least the first few weeks of medical school, until you have a better idea of how everything fits together. — 00:13:30
  • ★★ Starting clinical medicine in his fourth year, Ali decided to memorise the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine without first taking time to get a big-picture understanding. — 00:13:30 · University of Oxford
  • ★★ If you feel overwhelmed by Anki or any flashcards, Ali advises making fewer, stepping back to understand the big picture, and not making flashcards about every little detail. — 00:14:29 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali will make a much more specific video on exactly how he recommends using Anki for medical school. — 00:14:29 · Anki

00:14:54 — Pre-read for lectures

  • ★★★ Ali's seventh tip is to pre-read for lectures: spend 20 minutes the day before reading the lecture notes or slides, or skim the topic on Wikipedia or Google. — 00:14:56 · Wikipedia
  • ★★ In his first year Ali kept dozing off in lectures, finding it easier to sleep there than in his own bed, and got his college friends to poke him awake. — 00:15:34
  • ★★ Ali pre-read lectures far more from his second year on, and when he did he understood the lectures much better. — 00:16:03

00:16:33 — Textbooks are massively overrated

  • ★★★ Ali's eighth tip, which he calls very controversial advice, is that textbooks are massively overrated, though medical students love carrying and highlighting big heavy ones. — 00:16:37

    “Textbooks are massively overrated. And I know this is very controversial advice”

  • ★★ Textbooks are good only for finding specific information or understanding a topic, Ali says: they encourage a linear way of looking at things, chapter one to chapter 84, while lectures and medicine are not organised that way. — 00:17:12

  • ★★ Ali recommends Wikipedia and Google over thousand-page recommended reading such as Voet, Voet and Pratt's biochemistry textbook, since everything in the exam comes from the lecture notes anyway. — 00:17:42 · Wikipedia
  • ★★ Ali's mother, a doctor, glamorises textbooks too: he bought Guyton and Hall's physiology textbook, and her theory was to read five pages of it every day. — 00:18:11 · Ali Abdaal's mother
  • ★★ Reading a textbook is not how we retain information, Ali says, the evidence points to spaced repetition and active recall, and the culture of relying on big heavy textbooks, and of thinking it does good, is counterproductive. — 00:18:52 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali recommends no textbook: Guyton and Hall is quite good for physiology, but Osmosis videos on YouTube, Wikipedia or Google cover it, and medical school libraries hold the textbooks, so there is no need to buy them. — 00:19:21 · Wikipedia

00:19:30 — Resources for anatomy, pharmacology, biochemistry, physiology and pathology

  • ★★★ For anatomy Ali recommends first Instant Anatomy, a website created by Bob Whittaker, one of the Cambridge anatomy teachers. — 00:20:02
  • ★★ Instant Anatomy simplifies anatomy, Ali says: where Grey's Anatomy and other textbooks have very complicated diagrams, Bob Whittaker draws his own simple hand-drawn ones on the website and the podcast. — 00:20:31
  • ★★ Ali uses Instant Anatomy for the general rules of anatomy, such as all the muscles in the posterior compartment of the arm being supplied by the radial nerve, which spares memorising a textbook's big table. — 00:21:00
  • ★★ Now a doctor, Ali has forgotten most of his anatomy, but the anatomy rules he repeated with spaced repetition have stuck. — 00:21:53 · spaced repetition
  • ★ Ali calls anatomy mnemonics, such as those for the brachial plexus and the branches of the external carotid artery, really good. — 00:22:23
  • ★★★ Rules alone do not cover anatomy's specific facts, Ali says, and for those Anki and flashcards in general are incredibly useful. — 00:22:23 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali recommends no anatomy textbook: Clinically Oriented Anatomy is all right and he used it for his essays, but textbooks are totally pointless if your exam is multiple choice. — 00:23:26
  • ★★★ For the long list of drugs medical students and doctors must learn, Ali says Anki is by far the best way. — 00:23:55 · Anki
  • ★★ In his second year, living with his housemates Callum and Paul, Ali started an Anki deck of all the drugs they needed to know for pharmacology. — 00:23:55 · Paul, Anki
  • ★★ Going through the pharmacology flashcards together in Ali's room, Ali, Callum and Paul had learned all the drugs by exam term. — 00:24:24 · Paul
  • ★★ Doing the drugs with Callum and Paul is one of Ali's fond memories of medical school: fun, efficient and only an hour a week, and Anki is by far the best way to learn pharmacology. — 00:24:53 · Paul, Anki
  • ★★ If you want a pharmacology book, Ali recommends the small Medical Pharmacology at a Glance, with great diagrams, which he used to get first classes in his pharmacology essays. — 00:25:23
  • ★ Diagrams in Oxford and Cambridge essays are a big plus, Ali says. — 00:25:23 · University of Oxford, University of Cambridge
  • ★★ For biochemistry, such as the Krebs cycle, Ali advises drawing out the diagrams over and over, as with A-level chemistry reaction mechanisms. — 00:25:23
  • ★★ For physiology, Ali says Guyton and Hall is quite good but Wikipedia has many of the explanations; the key is explaining each concept to a five-year-old, often as a flow chart. — 00:26:06 · Wikipedia
  • ★ Ali, now a junior doctor, has forgotten all his kidney physiology and is doing cardiology at the moment. — 00:26:35
  • ★★★ For pathology, Ali advises first understanding the general principles, such as inflammation and the immune system, then using Anki for the specifics together with rules. — 00:27:04 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali learns the Gram classification of bacteria as a rule with exceptions: Gram-positive cocci are staph or strep, Gram-negative cocci Neisseria or Moraxella, Gram-positive rods A, B, C, D or L, and everything else a Gram-negative rod. — 00:27:04
  • ★★ For clinical pathology, Ali calls Baby Robbins (as heard), the little Robbins pathology book, quite good, and the big one a bit pointless because it holds too much information. — 00:28:39
  • ★★ Ali will make a more detailed video on study resources, from interviews with many of his friends about what they recommend. — 00:28:39
  • ★★ Most of Ali's friends say you don't really need textbooks: they all bought loads of them, wanting to be good medical students. — 00:28:39

00:29:12 — Work together: medicine is not a competition

  • ★★★ Ali's tenth tip is to work together, because medicine is not a competition: share notes and resources and help each other, since there is nothing to gain from withholding information from friends and classmates. — 00:29:32

    “Medicine is not a competition.”

  • ★★★ Grades in the first and second years of medical school really don't matter, Ali says: no one cares whether you got a first in anatomy, just as you hardly care about your year-eight history grade now. — 00:30:00

  • ★★ Working together makes friends for life and medical school a much more fun and pleasant experience than a competitive mindset of you against everyone, Ali says, since everyone is going to be a doctor. — 00:30:48

00:31:50 — Wrap-up: the rest of the series and looking back on medical school

  • ★★ The other 19-plus videos of How to Survive Medical School will cover publications, essays, revising for OSCEs and written exams, work-life balance, working hours, notes and apps; Ali filmed friends in his room over the last six months of his final year. — 00:31:51
  • ★★ Being a medical student is hard work but a lot of fun, Ali says: as a junior doctor looking back, you want to be glad you spent those six years, had a wonderful time, made great friends and learned a lot. — 00:32:48

In the description and comments

  • ★ Asked for papers on the effectiveness of active recall, Ali points to the many studies linked in his video How to study for exams - Evidence-based revision tips. — creator comment · active recall

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · Anki · Instant Anatomy · spaced repetition

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's mother · Bob Whittaker · Callum · Matticus · Paul · Richard Feynman

Works: Clinically Oriented Anatomy · Fundamentals of Biochemistry · Grey's Anatomy · Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology · Medical Pharmacology at a Glance · Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine · Robbins Basic Pathology

Organizations: Instagram · Osmosis · University of Cambridge · University of Oxford · Wikipedia

Concepts: Feynman technique · Mental health · mnemonics

Places: India · Pakistan

Products: Quizlet

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