Study Smart, Not Hard

Ask any medical student, and they will tell you that the trick to getting through it is learning how to study correctly. The truth of the matter is that there is no way to possibly memorize every little fact that you are presented with in medical school. If you think about it, that is a little scary. We are going to be doctors, we should know everything, right? Well, to a certain extent, yes, we need to know a lot. But we cannot possibly learn everything. Thus why we have medical specialties and 3-8 year residency programs after medical school to train us to know a whole lot about one discipline of medicine. But even after spending years mastering the specialty that you go into, you are still not going to know everything. So how can we accept that fact and maintain and ethical practice? Well I believe that it all starts in medical school.

The amount of material that is thrown at you in the first two years of medical school is honestly insane. You have to learn to filter out what is most important to be able to succeed. The goal is definitely to learn it all, and that is what we all strive for, but you have to start with the “high yield” material and then follow that with all the little details in order to pass the tests. Everyone has their own study methods, but one thing that we all have in common is that we have figured out how to cram a ton of information in our head in a (relatively) small amount of time. This type of learning gives us a good base level of knowledge in order to pass Step 1 and enter the hospital, where the real learning begins.