PA-H: Physician Assistant... Hopefully

HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR STUDYING SCHEDULE: 

Hey guys!! Since some of you asked me how I organized my studying schedule for this summer, I thought it would be best to make a post about it. It’s the first time I make a post such as this, and I’m sorry for the poor quality of my photos, but my mobile phone has the only camera I have at hand, so let’s get down to business! 

KNOW YOUR DEADLINES: It’s important to know when do you have your exams, when is that essay due and so on. This way you’ll keep track of time and you’ll know how much time you need to commit to each task. I would advise color coding each one, as I did with the subjects which exams I have to retake in september. This way, you’ll have your goals and needs always in mind. 

KNOW WHAT YOU NEED TO STUDY: It’s important to be sure of all the things you need to study. As you can see in this image, I wrote down every unit I need to know for my anatomy exam, and I did the same for the other subjects as well. I also added a little checkbox beside each unit in order to keep track of all the times I revise each one so I can know at a glance how I’m doing and where I need to improve. 

USE ADDITIONAL TOOLS: Getrevising is a webpage that can help you create a schedule if you don’t know where to start. It gives you the opportunity to, completely free, add your classes, appointments, subjects and deadlines to create a schedule. You can also give a priority to each subject so they can assign more study hours to those subjects you find more difficult or where you need to invest more time. I used it as a reference, because it is not perfect, and I don’t know if it’s possible to change the study blocks from 1 hour sessions to longer or shorter ones, but it helps you to make an idea of how many hours you should invest in each subject. Anyway, this tool is completely unnecessary, but I used it because my study schedule is for the whole summer (that’ll be two months of holidays) and so I felt a bit overwhelmed by how many things I needed to tackle. 

EDIT AND WRITE YOUR OWN SCHEDULE ATTENDING TO YOUR NEEDS: The most important thing when you write your study schedule is to know your strengths and limits. I printed a weekly schedule from my laptop iCal to see at a simple glance how many things I had going on in a week and how many hours I could dedicate to study. You can find simple weekly calendars anyway or you can even make your own. The first thing I wrote down were all those unavoidable things such as birthday parties and weddings and medical appointments as well as those things I want to do daily such as running, bathing, walking the dog or reading a bit at night. Once this is done, I can see how many free hours for studying I have, and if I feel like they are not enough, I cut down some things that aren’t completely necessary, because sometimes what is necessary is to make some sacrifices. But remember to always leave some free time for yourself, because it’s good for you to relax and get some strength back. Then, looking at your get revising schedule or simply knowing your needs, write down every day which units you are going to study. Try to be realistic, and don’t cram things in every study session. If you can only study tree units in one morning, then do that. Otherwise you’ll feel stressed and you won’t keep up with your schedule, which can make you feel bad and think that it’s not being useful at all. I’d also recommend highlighting your subjects with the same colors you used for your deadlines calendar, because it’ll help you make an idea in your head of your week. 

TRANSFORM YOUR WEEKLY SCHEDULE INTO A DAILY ONE: I find it better to, once a weekly schedule is prepared, write it down as a daily one, to the hour. Some people may think this is a bit obsessive, but it makes me less stressed knowing what I should be doing in every study session. Moreover, it makes me feel satisfied crossing out things I have already done, and crossing them out of my list! If you’ll feel stressed watching the things you have to do every hour using just the weekly schedule may be fine for you. I used a simple lined notebook and wrote the hours myself. 

PLUS:KEEP TRACK OF YOUR PROGRESS: If you don’t want to make a daily schedule, or if you’re not accustomed to follow a schedule this thick, you may find useful keeping track of your progress. You can write down what you do every hour your dedicating to studying, or maybe you can write down things as “I planned to study for 3 hours with two 10 minutes breaks and I managed to study just 2 units when I planned to study 3”. This may help you know your weaknesses and analyze what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. When you realise things as this, you’ll find it easier to make a reliable and realistic schedule that is up to your needs and strong points. This way you’ll know if you work better in the mornings or the afternoons, if you get distracted easily… But remember that the most important thing is to take things easily and bit by bit. Everyone works differently, and what may work for others may not work for you. Analyze and know yourself, and then no one or anything will stop you. 

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In med school, taking notes is hard because there’s SO much material. I remember going through one of my lectures and wondering how the hell I was going to simplify it to something I could actually remember. I usually make what are called “study sheets” after each lecture, and this is how I do them!

If there’s learning objectives, follow those. Use them to guide your notes. If there’s not, then use your intuition (based on what was heavily emphasized or covered the most) to figure out where to focus your notetaking. Just make sure you’ve organized everything in your head before putting it down to paper, because notes only work if they’re clear! 

Use categories to break up your learning. In one lecture there’s often multiple components, so I use headings to separate the main points. That way they don’t all blur together in my head.

Whenever possible, make charts, diagrams, or drawings. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve remembered something on a test because I took the time to draw it out! If you’re a kinesthetic or visual learner, this is super helpful. It really simplifies the material and organizes it thoroughly. It’s much easier to study from a clear chart than a block of text.

When you do use text, keep it concise. Use different colors to write out key phrases and terms, and try not to write out paragraphs and paragraphs. Sometimes, it unavoidable, and you need a lot of text to understand a key concept. Short and sweet wherever possible, though, makes life easier for you! 

Transform, transform, transform. Always try to put things in your own words wherever you can. Manipulate the material so that it coincides with what you’ve learned. When you think about a topic from multiple perspectives, you understand it a million times better.

I’m sorry this took so long to answer, but I wanted to do it properly and it’s a hard question. But here we go!!

HOW TO USE YOUR IPAD TO HELP YOU STUDY: 

I have my 8tracks app so I can listen to good studying playlist while I’m writing papers for uni, etc. It makes those thing more bearable!! And I also use Podcasts a lot, because english is not my first language and it helps me improve my pronunciation while I learn something interesting!! 

Secondly, I have my documents apps, I use dropbox to share and save all the documents I need for uni. But my favorite one is pdf notes, it allows you to save in your iPad all your pdf documents, you can organize them in different folders and this is how it looks: 

In the circle you can see all the categories, and in the background, you can see my histology class slides. I carry them here because that way I don’t need to print them so I save lots of money in that aspect, and when I’m studying I can complete my notes looking at them, without getting lost in piles of notes and papers. I also use this app to carry medical textbooks in pdf format, which is SO helpful, because I don’t have to go with a heavy bag full of books to uni, and it’s way cheaper. 

Then I have this HUGE bunch of medical apps, but the one I use most are the ones in the circle. 3D 4 Medical apps are simply gorgeous, they’re functional, accurate, helpful and a great resource. Essential Anatomy has been the key for me in this term’s anatomy! Also, you have the most HELPFUL app to study the skull, really I can’t praise it enough. I couldn’t put my hands on a skull at the beginning of this term, so I studied with this one and believe me, the results were magnificent! Here you have it: Skull Viewer. 

As you can see, there are other apps helpful for medicine students, such as Sobotta’s anatomy atlas, but it’s pretty expensive and the free one doesn’t have many features so, um, yeah, just go to the library and get the book; There’s also spinning brain, pretty good to study the brain! Well, you get the idea, just typing medicine in your iPad you’ll get lots of suggestions, but these are the ones I use most. Just try them and see which ones you find useful!! 

I use a lot this writing tools: Pages for iPad. It wasn’t free when I got my iPad, but I think the new iPad models have it incorporated? I find this app pretty useful because I write a lot, and since I have pages in my laptop too, I have all my documents synchronized and I can finish things in uni without having to carry my laptop everywhere! I don’t use it to take note, because I’m a very “pencil and paper” person, but I have classmates who use it for that, and they say it saves them lots of times! So you have another idea there! Also, Textilus allows you to write and edit documents in a lot of formats, so it’s really helpful. Keynote is another apple app, which is pretty similar to power point, but, you know, made by apple. I have it synchronized with my laptop too, so I use it to create and edit the presentations I have to give in uni (which are a lot, son). I have FREE apps, such as MindMeister or Inspiration to create mind maps, and MindTools to learn about team work, management and those things (this one is quite interesting, check it!!) 

If you didn’t know about these apps, you’re going to hear about them now because they are my absolute favorites!!!!! TED is famous program which brings creative and inspirational people to give talks, and believe me, you can learn so much from listening to these talks, I can’t even begin to describe it! It’s not something you’d find “useful” for uni, but knowledge doesn’t end there!! And Coursera is such a great organization! I learnt about it thanks to a friend, and it’s amazing: you get to enroll in professional courses about a wide variety of interesting topics for FREE. Yes, my friend, for free. If you pay a minimum sum you can get an official certificate, but if you are just interested in learning, this is your place! I took a course in Medical Neuroscience and I learnt so much!! (And it’s going to be really useful when I start neuroanatomy next year) 

Finally, I have the famous Microsoft apps to work in this format from my iPad, which is really helpful when you work with people that work with this format: OneNote, Word, PowerPoint, Excel. 

I also use my iPad when I need to do research at uni, but of all the apps I mentioned, I would say that pdf notes is the most useful one for me. 

Hope this helped!!! 

So I think this might be the question I get asked the MOST often. People are always asking me how do I study for this or that class. So I thought I would just make a master post I could link you all to. :)

All classes

Watch my video on how to study. This applies to almost everything you have to study. 

See below for additions to doing everything listed in that video. 

Math

Do problems. Do all the problems. Do them again. 

Do all the problems in your book.

Get another book and repeat step 2 

Trust me 99.9% of all math classes is pattern recognition. If you can learn how to solve the problem you can ace any set of variables they throw at you. 

Physics

See math—because physics is JUST applied math. You have to learn how to read the questions and pull out the information you need—the only way to do that is to do dozens of questions!

Micro Bio/ID

Flow charts—break things up by group to understand them. You have to group things to remember what’s gram positive or gram negative 

Don’t blow off the actual micro part of micro. If you understand the virulence factors you’re more likely to understand the sx/tx

I had to use a lot of silly sayings to remember all the little pieces of micro. So I would remind myself about the diseases of haemophilus influenzae by saying haEMOPhilus (epiglotitus, meningitis, otitis media, pnuemonia). It was silly but it worked for me. 

O Chem

Do all the problems. Do them again. 

Get another book and repeat step 1 

Flashcard the reactions you don’t understand—put the reactants on one side and the products on the back. Practice these backward and forward. 

Draw out every step of reactions you don’t understand

Circle your electrons or mark whatever it is you lose track of

Count—count where everything went at the end to make sure you didn’t screw up. 

Categorize. Do all members of this group react this way?? It’s easier to learn the rules and the exceptions than force memorize every individual compound’s reaction.

Gen Chem

See math

Understand real world examples. I related all of the stuff about heat to a cup of coffee. It worked for me 

Talk through it! I had to read chemistry out loud or try to repeat it out loud in my own words to have any idea what was going on. 

YouTube videos are absolutely perfect for gen chem!! (There’s even a whole CrashCourse series on Gen Chem that’s appropriate especially for high school level chem). 

General Biology—Genetics/Immunology/Cell Biologyetc

You really need to watch my video 

Cross relate—you have to integrate all your biology together to keep all that information in your head. 

Flashcard only the stuff that can’t be understood. (Like cell markers, etc) 

Charts! Biology is all about categorization and understanding the similarities between different groups of things. If you can simply remember the characteristics of a group it’s easy to know everything you need to about all the members of that group. 

Pathology

Pathoma

Look at the pictures until you feel sick. 

Make flashcards of the pictures so you can at least do immediate identification of what you’re looking at even if you don’t know exactly what the pathology is. 

Integrate! How does the physiology relate to exactly what is going on with the pathology? How does the pathology predict treatment? 

Learn some latin and greek root words. Even if you have no idea what the word means you might be able to figure it out from there. :) I’ve gotten more than one question right by just figuring out what the word meant. 

Pharmacology

Understand the mechanism of the drug—it will really predict how it is used or what its toxicities are for

Flashcard the bare minimum or anything bizarre you can’t remember any other way. 

Figure out the similarities in the names. If it sounds the same, it probably belongs in the same class. 

Don’t learn in isolation. It’s hard to study pharmacology on its own—instead study it integrated with physiology and pathology whenever possible for the best understanding. 

Study as case studies!! What diuretics would you give to a patient with CHF? With ESLD? 

Biochemistry

Charts—get poster boards or tape together a ton of sheets of paper and try to write out every pathway you can to see how it all is integrated. 

Always track the flow of energy!! Where is your NAD/ATP/etc?

Group pathways by the “point”. Are you destroying carbohydrates or building fats? How does this compare to other pathways that do the same thing?

Try to rewrite the pathways from memory then see what you missed. 

Anatomy

Spend a bunch of time with the specimens if you have access to them. 

DRAW even if you suck at drawing

Learn the clinical correlations—why do you care

Thing about everything in relationship to one another! 

Do questions!! Grey’s has a student question book I recommend.

I’ll probably add more to this list as I go and as more of you ask for specific subject advice, but here you go!! 

When in doubt, always ask yourself “how would this be asked on a test?”. If you could write a test question about it, you should definitely know it! 

And always remember that you should study for understanding and not just for a grade—always be learning and not memorizing. It’s more important you understand the material than you get the A!!