first year study tips
By Ellie Rigby ( she / her ) First Year Rep 2020-21 You do not need to buy any textbooks to get through your first year . All of the textbooks you will need are available in the library , free to access . I would not worry about having a collection of loads of textbooks either . I personally just used ‘ principles of anatomy & physiology ’ by Gerard J . Tortora / Bryan Derrickson for any extra information I needed . What I found useful , when I had time before the start of each new block , was going through the section in the textbook about that topic and reading through it . I found that it gave me an idea of what to expect and a bit of background knowledge to help me understand the upcoming lectures . Another resource I found useful when doing MSK was the Gray ’ s Anatomy flash cards . They are very useful in testing your memory , plus some of the same photos will come up in your lecture slides . A good way to use them is by getting a family member / friend to test you using the flash cards . Another really good resource is teach me anatomy / physiology which is available on the internet , or can be downloaded as an app . This is great in helping you understand slightly more complex topics . One of the most useful resources you can use is YouTube . There are literally videos of everything you will ever need to know . When we did the neurosensory block , I learned most of the things we needed to know from 2-minute neuroscience by Neuroscientifically Challenged on YouTube . I found that these videos explained everything in a way that I understood , as some of the lectures were a bit hard to follow . Another great YouTube channel is Ninja Nerd Science . One thing you should really take advantage of is all of the study sessions held for your year by older years . The PowerPoints from these revision sessions were my main study resource when I was revising the Good Doctor stuff for the summative exam . Older years have a really good idea of the things you really need to focus on learning and will tell you what these things are at the revision sessions . The ones I found most useful this year were the ones held by ISOC , LACES , BME Medics and MedEd . One thing that you really need to get used to doing right from the start is solely focusing on the learning objectives in lectures . Whilst going through lectures and making notes , you only need to make notes on the stuff relating to each learning objective . Writing every bit of information down from each lecture is a huge waste of time as you will overwhelm yourself and end up trying to learn things that you do not need to know at this level and will not come up in your exams . I strongly suggest working on this right from the start as the sooner it becomes a habit , the easier you will find learning just the content you need to know . You have to remember that some of lecturers go beyond the syllabus in the lectures as they are very passionate about their work and want to talk about it in more detail than you need to know at this level . In terms of actual study techniques , my personal favourite techniques are active recall and spaced repetition – two study techniques that have proven to be extremely effective . There are loads of YouTube videos that explain how to do these techniques . Using spaced repetition and active recall really help you identify what you do and do not know
Read More so you can focus your revision where it is
Read needed
More the most .
14