Friday, August 12, 2011

My Advice: an oxymoron

By  at 12:42 PM  , , , ,  1 comment
So as this semester comes to a close I have been thinking about how I could have studied harder, better, more, and made better grades. I think about what I have learned and worry a little about how close I am to taking Step 1. In my examination of myself I have realized that I rely too heavily on others advice and opinions of certain classes with respect to their level of difficulty and what books to buy and how to study for them. The fact is that I am not those people that I am asking. While I greatly respect their opinions it is all too often not my experience.

So this is the part where my post is an oxymoron. I am about to give you advice to not take others advice. Do with it what you may.

You must know yourself first. Then use what others tell you to your benefit. For instance, I am an auditory learner. If someone will explain a concept to me and I can understand the concept and tell it back to them I will never forget it. I can read the same concept and it is never internalized, and pictures are worse. But if I ask a visual learner what book to buy or use, they will probably recommend a book with great illustrations and less words. That book will be not only difficult for me to read, but it will be very frustrating for me to study. I learned that this semester.

When you are researching which books to buy, thing about how you learn best. If you are asking an upperclassman which books to buy then you should know how they learn best and if you learn the same way. Otherwise their opinion is, for all intensive purposes, useless to you. I have learned this the hard way.

What works for others may not work for you and you have to know yourself well enough to know what you need to make the material "stick" for you.

Many students have very useful advice on what to buy and how to study. I am not saying don't listen to them at all, I am saying use it to your advantage and not to your detriment. If you find that a text book recommendation is not working for you, move on, find something else.

If you need to rewrite your notes for them to make sense then do, I would advice you to use your time understanding the material and reading it rather than writing a bunch of stuff. If notecards work for you then make them, they generally only work for me if I am looking at the notecard.

I love highlighting text. I love going back and reading what I have highlighted to see why I highlighted it. I understand it better that way, but that doesn't mean that it is the best way for you to study for medical school.

My gibberish is getting old, now and I hope that I have driven home the point. KNOW YOURSELF! Know what works for you. DO IT!!!

Best of luck to all the new students arriving at UMHS!

Until next time,

Amy Jones

1 comments:

  1. Susan Leipsner, Dir.August 12, 2011 at 11:29 PM

    That's a really useful oxymoron! I love that advice! While I don't have advice, I do have a couple of study tips. I read a good tip today on how to study for a test, and while it may not work for others, I think it will work for me. I've taken what I read and expanded upon it: Make a cheat sheet. Now, you do not take this cheat sheet into the test with you, of course! But, about a week before a test, write down what you would like to be able to take into the testing site with you. Of course, you wouldn't want to take all of your notes and text book and resources with you bec. it would be too much. And, the things you KNOW you know, well, you don't want to take those, they would just be extra baggage. But, say you know that you don't know a formula for an equation, or you get terms confused so you would like to have a short list, or perhaps you have to diagram something and certain parts are difficult for you. Make your cheat sheet, limit it to one page, front and back. Divide your cheat sheet into sections that work for you. So, if you have terms to remember, put all of the terms in one color (say Turquoise)(t-for terms)The terms you have the most difficulty recalling, put those at the top. You can even design your page to match your apartment.Draw just the most limited outline of your apartment on your page, front and back. Then, put things in different rooms, like terms might go into the Temporary guest room.. guests are temporary! When you study the terms that you need to know, go into the guest room. Equations might go into the bedroom (you can guess that reason on your own...because 1m+1w=3 in a family;)So, study equations in the bedroom--ALONE! It will help you to organize your thoughts into a familiar and safe "residence". When you get to the test, "walk quietly and peacefully" through your "house". You will remember where you put everything because you've organized it into a safe and familiar "zone". The second thing that I read which I will be using this semester is to re-write your notes the night of the day that you took the notes. Write them neatly, and make notes about anything that you don't understand. Immediately you will be able to begin working on your next cheat sheet! Hopefully, by test time, you will have whittled that cheat sheet down to one side of the page. By re-writing your notes the day that you took them, you will be able to identify items that you don't understand. You will also be able to organize your thoughts about the information.

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