Schtudying
Studying. I've been studying for finals, starting last week Wednesday. For those of you keeping track, that would be two and a half weeks before my first exam. As a professional procrastinator this is a major step forward in my studying career. My hope is that through this proactive approach I will somehow be a better studier than in the past.
As a professional procrastinator I have been very successful in the past. That past would mostly entail my undergrad education. In a world of multiple choice questions and occasional short answers, it works well to cram. Now I would call most of the cramming I did in undergrad the non-memorization type of cramming. I learned concepts, facts when needed, but all of it was done in an effort to keep the amount of studying time to a minimum. At least subconsciously, if not overtly. By learning things reasonably well in a short period of time and then getting it all out efficiently on an exam I managed to get the marks I needed, while maintaining my procastinating nature.
I suppose my justification for this type of work was that in the end, I was still working on the "these marks are just numbers to get me somewhere else" theory, one that had been in force since late high school. However, I should really be moving out of that mindset at this point, since a) the marks don't matter any more and b) I'm supposed to know and remember and use this stuff forever. At least that's what we're told. Once in a while you wonder when doctors need to know that Lck is the signaling molecule for the CD4 and CD8 receptor and phosphorylates a... oh, never mind.
The big question is how do I learn to learn for good? Much of my undergrad knowledge is still there, in pieces, but as I joked with some people this very evening, the ability to recognize and choose a correct multiple choice answer from a set of alternatives doesn't exactly cut it when a patient presents with a set of symptoms. I guess my first attempt to make this stuff stick is to study it more in advance (thus my slow digression from Captain Procrastinator to some advance work). Perhaps I need a new style. But I'm kind of stuck in the one I've got, and it does seem to get the job done. I do think with a more focused attempt to learn the stuff that seems relevant for the future I can make it work. So onwards with the concise, hopefully applicable, likely illegible study notes. Hopefully some of it sticks.
posted by Art @ 12:09 a.m.
4 Comments:
The studying has indeed begun... guess we couldn't relax forever. :D
If you're just going for straight memorization you could always try sleep-learning.
Adam F
I can't say that science or medical school is anything like engineering, but I would say that my undergrad taught me how to learn and understand concepts fast. I may not remember anything I was taught in first year (or last term for that matter), but if I were to learn it all over again now, it would probably take about a quarter of the time.
It's true, and a very valid point. A lot of the stuff I've learned so far is review, at least in part, of what I did in undergrad. And in those cases, I have found that the relearning process often goes faster and easier than the first time. So... hopefully with enough repetition and relearning the sticking thing will work.
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