Hacker News Reader

Comment by pragone | Hacker News Reader

This is a fascinating subject that I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about, as I've continually tried to improve my studying habits in these first two years of medical school.

There's some great points here. One for discussion that I'd disagree with is copying your notes. Here in medical school, it's literally temporally impossible to copy your notes and actually get to all the material. It's definitely an extremely effective way to learn the material, but unfortunately when you have so much material in so little time, it's just not feasible (FWIW, an average semester has 25 credits of courses for me).

I'd also add in spaced repetition studying - this has been an extremely effective method of studying for me, and I've learned more via spaced repetition studying of previously made flashcards than I have from reading the textbooks. And it does a phenomenal job of isolating the material you need to know from what you already know.

View on HN

After a CS degree (2 decades ago) and many hundreds of hours and courses on medical topics over the last few years, I think studying medicine and fields like engineering or math are very different though, and what works in one may not be the best idea for the other. A lot of memorizing in medicine, like neural pathways, (bio)chemical pathways, location of nuclei in the brain, anatomy (of course), regulatory circuits. You learn everything to "debug" one concrete instance of a biological being, and although variations exist in comparison to all that could be (or even what there is, looking at all animals) it's very little, and it doesn't change (beyond the inherent variation, which only seems great because you are looking at only humans so any deviations appear greater than they are without the perspective of "all possible biological systems" for comparison).

Engineers learn existing systems - and many kinds of them - to be able to create new ones. Medical doctors instead work on only one already existing systems. Engineers can experiment and fail, many times. Medical doctors should "do no harm" first of all. So that limits the creativity and determines how you learn from the outset. Therefore which methods work will also be different.

Having studied both at this point, I'd agree. I think most of my learning in CS tends to be experimentation - write some programs, see why they don't work. Sure, there's some things you need to memorize and understand, but that knowledge is strongly reinforced through experimentation.

> Here in medical school, it's literally temporally impossible to copy your notes and actually get to all the material.

I second this. My med school strat is as follows: I write questions in Workflowy during lecture based on what I think could be tested from the lecture. Then I import them into a SRS app I built and drill them all the week before exams. Works pretty well.

I don't have lectures, so I have the tedious job of trying to pick out the relevant material straight from the textbooks. Let's just say Bro's cards (https://github.com/enlightenedchampagne/Brosencephalon) is a real lifesaver. (Unfortunately my school tends to test some not-board-relevant material and also not test board-specific material, so it's hit and miss, but I've been doing alright so far.)

Email me (in my profile). I have something I'd like for you to look at.

out of curiosity " previously made flashcards "

are you taking the time to make them yourself, or are you using source that made them for you?

I'm using previously made cards by another individual.

A reddit user named brosencephalon when through First Aid* (2015 I think?) and made about 13000 Anki cards for everything in it. It's been extremely popular on the r/medicalschool subreddit, with multiple people saying they did well on boards as a result.

* First Aid: First Aid for the USMLE, published every year. It's basically the bible for medical students preparing for the board exams (namely, the USMLE, or US Medical Licensing Exam, of which there are 3 parts. The first one is taken at the end of the 2nd year of medical school.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com