simplyolat 1. You’ll develop strange study habits—like talking out loud to yourself, or repeating silly mnemonics every time you have to recall a certain piece of information.
2. You will learn that for almost any set of symptoms the answer could always be diabetes, pregnancy, SLE, or thyroid problems.
3. You will quickly learn a very long list of abbreviations and will soon use them in text messages and confuse the Bleep out of your family members when you text your mom things like “Did an H&P on 23yoF w/ MVP today”.
4. The words “high yield” will become your best friend.
5. You will learn that anything you ever needed to know about pathology is in Robbins and that all pathologists just copy right out of it when they teach.
6. You’ll learn to not waste your time—if a study method isn’t working, you’ll move on and try something else.
7. You will more than once find yourself at a table with a laptop, an iPad, two textbooks and several pages of notes all open in front of you and you will question your existence.
8. Look up the fancy medical terms you don’t know. And don’t use them if you’re not sure what they mean—it will just make you look silly in front of an attending.
9. You’ll learn just how short an hour of actual study time is…you can get almost nothing done in just an hour. It goes by SO fast
10. Don’t study the night after an exam. Take some time off to just decompress. Only gunners start studying the night after the exam.
11. My personal opinion is thatyou should be studying by hand!WRITE out your notes again, DRAW diagrams. Cover white boards, fill notebooks. Just write write write write—reading the material is no longer going to be enough.
11a. If you’re like me and take notes by hand you will go through more pens in a month than you went through in your entire undergraduate career.
12. Study a little bit every weekend. Not just exam weekends. That way on exam weekends you can actually still find some time to sleep. (But don’t study every hour of the weekend—treat yourself, buy food, sleep, hang out with friends, whatever!)
13. You WANT a big chalkboard or white board. You really do.
14. Invest in a giant desk—you will be thankful you did
15. Stop trying to get through the end of the week—just get through tomorrow.
16. Start ahead of time on things that you need to get done.
17. It’s better to sleep the night before the test instead of cramming an extra hours. Sleeping will make you perform better than that little bit of extra knowledge anyway.
18. Learn how to ignore your internet for a couple of hours at a time.
19. Don’t get behind whenever possible. It’s too hard to catch up—don’t think you can blow off two days of lecture and then wrap it up in a couple hours—it will take you 2 extra days.
20. You will learn that you can routinely sit in a library for six hours without a study break