Here we go! Welcome to the first blog post!
I know first hand that student life is unpredictable, overwhelming and often stressful. But, it is also a magical time of growth, development and path finding. There is much more to being a student than the academic side! Whilst we will be touching on this, I hope these podcasts and blogs expand beyond and touch on everything from flatting, finances, relationships, healthy living etc.
I knew "How to Study 101" was going to be the first topic because it is something I have struggled with the most in high school, and in my early years of medical school. It isn't on the curriculum, and yet it forms the foundation of our academic lives.
There are so many different ways to study depending on your learning style, but at the end of the day, we all sit exams in the same way. It's this reason I changed my mindset around study. Instead of focusing on consuming and remembering information. I focused on understanding and producing. Unfortunately, a lot of exams test our memory recall, more than our understanding. I think that this is why we focus so much on trying to remember things, rather than understand.
I was recently asked by a high school student "How did you study?". It's such a tricky question to answer because everyone has their own ways and systems. But I thought of three big concepts/systems that have helped me excel and I wish I had used earlier. They are:
1. The study warm up
2. Study smart, not hard
3. Less consuming, more producing
The study warm up
Studying is a sport. Some of us have an innate athletic ability, and some of us have to train harder to go further. Just like playing sport, you have to switch gears into the studying mindset. I found a few things helped with this.
1. Happy space, happy brain
Before I start studying, I always make my bed and clean my room. I don't know what it is, but I always find studying in a clutter free space much more effective. Whenever I'm struggling to study, I always take a break and make my bed. I find it's a simple quick fix to a study funk.
2. The game plan
Athletes always have a strategy, and studying is no different. I find that if I don't have a game plan for my study session things go wrong. I jump between things and feel overwhelmed by the ever expanding to-do-list in my brain.
I almost always start my study session by creating a to-do-list of everything I need to do or study. This way, I can prioritise and plan to focus on one thing at a time. I also usually put the most difficult things or things I like doing the least at the beginning of my list. I find that I can use the first part of my study session to knock out big tasks that take up lots of energy. Then once these are done, I can do the things that take less brain power.
Having a plan also makes you enjoy studying more, because you are creating and meeting goals. There's something so motivating about ticking or crossing things off a list!
If organisation and planning is something you struggle with, the Will & Way Journal will be your best friend! It has assignment trackers, daily to-do-lists and space for planning your study sessions!
Study smart, not hard
I have been told this same sentence dozens of times during my life as a student. But no one ever gives you a practical example of what "Study smart, not hard" means. We all know that it means being efficient with your time. But how exactly do we do that?
1. The slide method
I'm guilty of being a perfectionist and re-writing the notes I took from the lecture. I would spend hours making them look perfect. I was so proud of them! They were colour coded and absolutely stunning. But it was so inefficient! I spent so long making them look beautiful that I never got around to learning them until it was time to cram.
I stopped doing this early in medical school and stopped making any extra notes. This was a big change for me and it took a bit of getting used to, but once I made the switch I never looked back!
The system I had, was to pre-print the lecture slides. I would print 4 slides per A4 page and make it double sided - 8 slides per piece of paper. Then in the lecture I would annotate the slides. This worked so well!
1. It meant that I only had to record one piece of information rather than two. I'm sure you've been in a lecture where all you can hear is furious typing as everyone tries to get down both what the lecturer is saying and what is on their slides. After 6 years of medical school I still can't do it and I don't know anyone else who can. Having the slides printed meant that I only had to annotate them with the points that the lecturer made. This usually only ended up only being a few sentences per slide.
2. I didn't make mistakes. It's easy to make an error when you transfer information. By having the exact slides, diagrams and concepts that the lecturer created I didn't make silly errors that I ended up learning. It's impossible to know you've even done this until the exam!
3. In the time that I would usually take just to write out my notes, I had already understood and learnt the material. It was so much more efficient and meant I had more time for other things in life. I was essentially making less work for myself and buying back my time. I can't tell you how life changing this was.
Once I had learnt the lecture I would put the slides into a clear file folder. Each pocket of the clear file had one lecture in it. For example the third pocket would have lecture three. When it was time to study this I would just pull out the lecture slides. Eventually I invested in an iPad as I felt bad about how much paper I was using. This worked just as well, if not better as I could take photos of the lecture slides and annotate them if the lecturer didn't upload their slides in time.
2. The A4 method
Sometimes I still got that itch to make notes. I knew that, whilst my beautiful notes were a huge source of happiness, they weren't sustainable, particularly in medical school when it feels like each lecture could fill several chapters of a textbook.
I decided that the best way to tell if you understand a topic is to explain it in the most simple of terms.
“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” - Albert Einstein.
I still believe this is one of the most important concepts in study. If you can't explain the topic to a family member or friend in a way that they can understand it, then you need to go back and understand it better. I decided that if I felt the itch to write notes, I would limit myself to one side of a blank A4 piece of paper which would become the "cover page" in my clear file folder for that lecture. Being able to reproduce the whole lecture on a piece of A4 meant that I understood the concepts behind it.
Less consuming, more producing
Variety is the spice of life and studying. A mistake a lot of students make is to learn by consuming. Learning by reading and watching is so important and the foundation of understanding the information. But, you need to be able to gather the information, and then produce it in an exam.
Reading can be very tedious and boring. I think it is also the worst way you can study. Let's go back to the example of the athlete. A runner doesn't train by watching people run, they train by running. Studying is like training for the exam. If the exam is going to ask you to write or speak, then you need to study like this. It also keeps things interesting and stops study feel like a bore.
I did this by talking to myself. I would learn by covering up sentences or definitions and saying them out-loud until I remembered them. I would pretend to teach someone else the concept. I had a study buddy and we would quiz and test each other. I would draw out concepts as diagrams on my A4 paper etc.
I hope that you found something valuable in this blog post! Learning the best way you study will take time, trail and error. It is always hard at first, but the more you practice, the better your skills become.
These blogs are summaries of podcast episodes from our podcast series "Beyond the Way". I hope you find them valuable and if you are interested you can listen to them here.