4 Huge Mistakes I Made In My First 9-Months Of Medical School
(That I Could Have Easily Avoided).
Med School is like drinking from a Hawaiian volcano spewing lava and burning off your face.
It doesn’t have to be.
I made every med-school mistake in the first 9-months so you don’t have to.
Now I am a practicing physician with over 10,000 diagnosis made to sick patients across the United States.
4 Huge Mistakes I Made In My First 9-Months Of Medical School (That I Could Have Easily Avoided).
Writing out every word of lecture notes.
Writing helps, but it is not everything.
When you write out lecture notes, you absorb some of the information, but after 5-minutes you will become more focused on copying rather than learning key points.
For example: If you sit down for an hour to copy the lecture notes out by hands, first of call, consider how big of a lift that is. You brain will go on auto-pilot. If you are going to write stuff out, put it in a frame-work that is geared to either visual re-call or rote re-call.
You need to think like the person giving the lecture.
The lecturer is usually a mid-level professor. In the M1 year, this person is usually a basic scientist such as a biochemist, anatomist, or physiology scientist. Since they do research when they are not teaching, their lecture notes will have a bias towards their research interests. Skip over that content and focus on the sections relevant towards clinical practice.
Memorization pays dividends.
Learning the fundamentals of medicine don’t happen in the classroom or on a flashcard deck. The real learning happens on the hospital wards. But you have to make it through the first two years to get to those hospital wards. Create Anki Decks for memorization. This frees up mental RAM for deeper understanding of complex topics. Memorization is not practicing medicine, but it helps you relax. When you are relaxed, you can think through complex patient situations during your 4th year and into your residency.
Trying to understand without memorizing.
The courses move too fast, you can easily fall behind. When I was a first-year med student, I would sometimes slow-down for an entire day or two to read an extra 50-pages of background information about a topic of interest, such as physiology of the liver or pharmacology. I was following my curiosity.
Unfortunately, this type of studying is a trap. In M1 and M2, the main challenge is keeping up with a lightning-fast curriculum. You can follow your curiosity later. Make a swipe file of topics and catch up when the time is right. This sounds anti-intellectual and it is. There were some geniuses in my class who could mentally wander, binge drink and then get hyper-focused the week of the test.
Unfortunately, most people are not like this.
You need to stay disciplined and consistently focused for most days, averaged over a few years.
If you are a Pre-med student and you are reading this, you may be turned off by these tactics.
You may think to yourself, if becoming a Doctor is all about memorization, can’t medicine be automated? Perhaps. I love when billionaire investor Vinod Khosla trolls Doctors by proclaiming, “In 20-years, we won’t need Doctors.” Let the market decide.
Trust the process, you will understand more when you actually examine patients.
Not using a timer.
You can’t focus for 6-hours straight.
If you can, you’re probably on Adderall or Dexedrine. I know because I have been prescribed those medications in years past. They don’t do the work for you (but they help). And they do have side effects such as insomnia, mania and hypertension. Your brain works way better with medium intensity pulses of focused activity.
Med school is a marathon, not a sprint.
Break your study sessions into 30-40 minute pulses (Pomodoro Technique). You will find over a 6-hour block of time you will get through more lecture notes, more slides and more digital flashcards then if you try to sit down and power through. Separate your study blocks with a 5-minute break where you stand up, stretch and maybe hammer out some push-ups.
Reward yourself with exercise. Try to make it through 4 solid blocks of study before getting up to take a break longer than 5-minutes. If you are reading this article, you already know the neurological and emotional benefits of physical exercise.
Exercise increases the body’s supply of Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which is essential for building new knowledge and repairing neurons.
Not joining the medical school fraternity.
At my school there was an on-campus fraternity with a large house and apartment-style rooms. It was close to campus and had a meal-service. I was vehemently anti-fraternity. I used to make fun of frat-boys. I viewed it as lame and weak - the need to purchase your friends.
This was a flawed view of the world.
When your professional future is on the line, you should absolutely consider purchasing your friends.
This extends into into the classroom. The medical school fraternities usually have better notes. In fact, at my med school I noticed something peculiar. For the first year, I was barely hugging the bell curve, despite working my tail off. I wondered how all the other kids seemed to coast through the exams, smiling and chatty.
Mid-way through my second year, somebody handed me a special set of notes that was passed down from the medical school fraternity. They told me to study off it. I took the exam and most of the questions were some variation of the content of those review sheets. My test performance went up, but my faith in my colleagues went down.
Was this cheating? Technically no, but it pissed me off that half the class had access to these review sheets and up until then I didn’t.
Those kids from that medical fraternity always did better on exams and had better opportunities down the road. In my younger days I was trying to be virtuous. Don’t be like me in 2007. The reality is that medicine is a numbers profession.
Hard work is not worthwhile if you are not working smart.
My advice is to find out what the successful kids are doing and follow that. Join the fraternity while maintaining your own social circle and values. You don’t have to copy everything they do, but being part of the network will ultimately make your life better.
Don’t cheat. Just play the game smart.
There it is, Professors.
4 Huge Mistakes I Made In My First 9-Months Of Medical School (That I Could Have Easily Avoided).
Writing out every word of lecture notes.
Trying to understand without memorizing.
Not using a timer.
Not joining the medical school fraternity.
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