(Obviously this thread wasn't targeted to me - I didn't consistently get As/Honors during MS1 or MS2. Why did you get a C in geriatrics?'įocus on the goal - learn the medicine, prepare for USMLE/COMLEX, survive, and move on to rotations. It came up once in 18 interviews - 'You osteopathic students take the weirdest classes. I got a mix of preclinical grades, mostly Bs with a few As and Cs. Your preclinical grades barely matter to most residency programs, especially when you consider you're being compared against a lot of pass/fail students. If you do practice questions, take notes from the explanations (EVEN IF YOU GOT THE QUESTION RIGHT!), and incorporate into your keywords/flashcards. Your flashcards of keywords are narrowest. Learn the medicine-relevant material that will get you through your career, learn the board-relevant material that will get you into a career, and skip the fluff. Try to set it up in a way that allows you to retain information through understanding rather than rogue memorization. When you find what works, be fluid, and be prepared to develop new strategies on the go. I think ultimately that is the most important point of advice I can give you from my own personal experience. I know that when I was just starting I was unable to straight study from lecture packets. I think that by then I'd trained my brain to be able to process the information that way. Towards the end of my sciences I used the notebook maybe about 50% of the time and just highlighted stuff in lecture packet printouts. I found, for example that making out flashcards worked me in the first semester, but didn't work anymore in the second, so I had to adjust and invented the whole notebook thing. One thing I should point out is that I changed the way I studied maybe 3 or 4 times throughout my first two years, and many of my colleague did as well. This helped me to understand and learn the material other than just rely on rogue memorization.įor any lecture that only had a powerpoint, I'd listen to the lecture, fill in anything that was missing and highlight anything the professors seemed to stress, then take to the notebooks again. I was able to organize and word things in my own way, write in details on the subject as presented in other classes, add colorful language, draw little flowcharts and create associations. Ended up with a whole stack of notebooks, but it was nice. Then I'd go through the whole thing once or twice more. If i still couldn't recall it, I'd put it in a different color highlight and go back over the new highlights on my next go around. I would look at the bullet header, or the Q portion and try to recall the associated information. Go through it a couple more times to hammer down the stuff in highlight. I would then go through the notebook once and highlight stuff I had difficulty retaining. I used a bullet point or a Q -> A format.

This is how I did the bulk of my studying, though I was forced to introduce variations as the work load and course material evolved.įor any lecture that came with a powerpoint AND a lecture packet, I ignored the powerpoit and rewrote/reorganized the packet in a notebook. This may sound tedious, but it worked well for me.

Cloze anki choice