Hey! I am doing a research project and would love to hear your thoughts! Any responses to the questions below (even if they are just bullet points or keywords) are SUPER helpful! Thanks!
- What does a day in the life of a medical student, medical assistant, PA, etc. look like for you?
- What tools and techniques do you and others you know use to study for medical school exams?
- What are the hardest things about being in medical school or pursuing your career?
- How do you learn best?
- Have you heard of Sketchy? Do you know of anyone who uses Sketchy?
This explanation is pretty uniform for medical students and you won't see much variance so I'll type something exhaustive.
1.) Medical school is divided into preclinical and clinical education. With many exceptions, there is M1-2 which are preclinical and M3-4 which are clinical but some schools have blurred that line for the sake of more integration. During M1-2 (preclinical) we are attending lectures from morning to afternoon and spend the rest of the day studying/recooperating. In some classes like anatomy, we may have practical components and in others we may have group-based learning opportunities where we are led through a series of cases by an instructor in a socratic manner. In M3-4 we are put on rotations where we assist medical teams and learn medicine from various attending and resident physicians. The rotations are from early AM to evening in the hospital. We usually go home afterwards and spend time reading up on our patients/cases for the day or preparing for shelf exams specific to the rotation by doing USMLE Step 2 CK practice questions.
2.) Exams are administered by the school and most of us use the distributed lecture notes as they are often what instructors who write questions draw their ideas from. We supplement these with a variety of USMLE specific resources as these are more relevant to our USMLE exams, are professionally done by educators, and thus easier to digest. USMLE World (UWorld) Test Bank, USMLE First Aid for Step 1, Pathoma, ANKI- spatial learning tool, SketchyMicro/Pharm, Boards & Beyond, USMLE Rx Lectures, Lecturio, and Amboss, USMLE Rx QBank, Doctors In Training Video lectures are tools many students use to study for their classes while preparing for Step 1 USMLE. Recently with the P/F grading of USMLE Step 1, USMLE Step 2 CK is now the emphasis and students anticipate using UWorld for USMLE Step 2 CK, OnlineMedEd, amongst other resources yet to be determined to score highly and obtain a residency spot.
3.) Remaining focused on the material requires significant perserverance. There are tons of distractions with family, friends, relationships, and it is easy to get distracted. Finding the willpower to sit down and focus on material for hours was the most difficult thing as a preclinical student. As a clinical student, things change as we shift to rotations. In my opinion, it's not quite as difficult as the preclinical years but learning how to do a history/physical and acquire skills on-the-job is difficult especially when being evaluated while constantly being compared to others. Clinical years are stressful in a different way too because residencies expect good grades during medical school which oftentimes is not in a medical student's control because of assessment with subjective assessments.
4.) Active learning strategies. Most people only comprehend so much from passove strategies like reading or listening to something. I personally prefer listening to lectures, but then doing multiple choice questions related to the topic gives me an understanding of where my knowledge gaps are. I also benefit from group discussions where we get together to review/test ourselves on topics and discuss what-ifs which may show up on exams. When I need to memorize tables of information (ex. drug name, mechanism, indication), I am best served with flash cards. Others prefer to incorporate ANKI significantly more into their learning and spend their time learning after lectures making ANKI cards and reviewing them later. This provides a structured pattern for study as well as a method for spatial recall which studies have shown is very effective in accumulate vast amounts of information required for a field like medicine.
5.) Yes, I used SketchyMicro during my USMLE Step 1 preparation and felt it helped quite a bit. I also used SketchyPharmacology but do not feel it helped as much. I am aware of more recent Sketchy products but have not used them. A majority of medical students use Sketchy products.
Good luck with your project and thanks for visiting SDN!
