9 Study Techniques that got me through Cambridge Medical School science-backed

Today we're going through some science-based, tried and tested study tips that will help you study smarter, not harder. My name's Izzy, I'm a final year medical student at Cambridge University and I just finished all of my Cambridge Medical School exams and managed to pass them all. So these tips are pretty much how I survived Cambridge Medical School. There were some ups, there were some downs, but we made it. These tips and tricks will be applicable whether you are studying medicine or studying another course or even learning a language or something else like that. So I study Mandarin in my free time and these tips are very applicable to that as well. So without further ado, let's get into the video. So firstly, why am I making this video? Learning how to learn is actually so important and it literally supercharges all of the rest of your time that you spend studying. It essentially acts as a productivity multiplier on all of your life and yet we're never really taught how to learn while we're at school. It's just sort of a will kind of figure it out along the way. I personally spent years focusing on study techniques that have actually been shown by psychological studies to be relatively inefficient for the ultimate goal of understanding and memorisation, such as taking notes, re-reading or highlighting. Especially re-reading and highlighting, I absolutely loved doing those. So I'll go through the nine study techniques that got me through Cambridge Medical School. I'll firstly explain them and then I'll go through some practical tips and examples of ways that you can integrate them into your own studying. The first thing I would say is to start with, eat the frog. This is actually the title of a productivity book by Brian Tracy and is actually inspired by a quote from Mark Twain, which goes like this, if it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first. And this is essentially telling us to focus on the difficult things first. You don't need to waste time repeating the stuff that you already know or that you're already comfortable with. Instead, focus on the most challenging topics or the most challenging tasks that you have to do in a day or things that you have to study in a day. The question that I find really helpful to ask myself when revising for an exam is if the exam were tomorrow, what topic would I feel the least happy about coming up in the exam? This often is quite revealing and I'll often try to avoid doing topics that I don't like or that I find unpleasant. But often those are the topics that I actually really need to do and are actually my weak points. This also ties in with the Pareto principle, which is also known as the 80-20 rule, which essentially states that 80% of our results will generally come from approximately 20% of the topics or the inputs that we actually make. By focusing on the most important and core topics first and moving out from there, we can help to prioritise what we're actually studying and what we're focusing on. This applies to both studying medicine and also studying languages. So for medicine, focusing on the core topics and eliminating the ones that you find the most difficult first and then moving outwards from there. And then for language learning, focusing on the core, very commonly used words and focusing on the difficult ones you find there, eliminating them and then gradually broadening that circle and including more and more vocabulary, more and more topics. So this combination of eating the frog and doing the difficult things and also focusing on the important core topics really helps us to make good decisions when it comes to prioritising what we're going to be studying on a given day. The second study technique that has saved me in medical school is the Pomodoro technique, which you may have heard of before, which involves 25 minutes of work time and intensive study followed by five minutes of a break. And this is repeated. I find this really helpful because as per Parkinson's law, where work expands to fill the time allocated to its completion, studying also does the same. And by timeboxing our studying to fixed windows of intense studying followed by a break, this means that we can set ourselves like a mini study goal for that duration of time and work in these short bursts. An article by MIT recommends working in hour-long blocks as the most effective with 50 minutes of study time followed by a 10 minutes break and repeated. However, honestly, I would say that in my personal experience and the experience of many other colleagues at Cambridge, the optimal intervals will vary a lot between people and also actually between topics as well. So for me, if it's a topic that I really enjoy or something that I find quite fun, I often can study for a longer duration before needing a break so I can set it to maybe the 50 minutes followed by a 10 minute break. But if it's something that I find really quite unpleasant to study or I keep avoiding or I find it very mentally taxing, then setting a shorter duration and doing a short burst of intense work often works better for me. Play around with it, try out different time intervals and see if this works for you. The next tip is to aim for understanding first and then memorization. So often throughout medical school and even when learning Mandarin, you could either take two routes. You could either rote memorize everything and just have all these random facts kind of floating around in your head or you can try to go down an understanding route where you understand things from first principles and then you just memorize to fill in any gaps in that understanding where there's maybe just facts that you have to know and you can't actually go from a first principles place of understanding. In a way there are only two real components to good learning or good knowledge which is understanding plus memorization. The understanding is there to give us a mental model for how things generally work in that system or in that topic that we're learning about and then the memorization almost adds just the extra bits and fills in the gaps around the understanding where you can't just derive things from first principles. So the next tip links into that quite well because it helps to promote a clear and concise understanding of any topic that you're trying to learn and it's a technique known as the Feynman technique which is named after Richard Feynman, a physicist who famously used this technique a lot throughout his career and teaching. It essentially means teaching the topic or concept to somebody in a simple and clear way so that someone with very little basis in that subject matter would be able to understand your explanation to them and by being able to teach it to somebody else that demonstrates that you really need to have a solid understanding of the topic itself. There are two ways that you can put this into practice. Firstly if you're on your own and you don't have anyone else with you, you can just try explaining out loud as if there were another person there or like maybe you could explain to any fluffy toys that you have on your bed or something like that just to actually go through the process of trying to explain it and trying to teach it. Secondly if you do have friends who are studying a similar topic to you or even just family members or other friends who aren't doing the topic you could try explaining to them and see how it goes. The next tip is to focus on practice testing which is a form of active recall. It's a common misconception among students that the best way to learn is by reading through notes or textbooks and essentially trying to put information into our brains. However a number of psychological studies including one done in 2013 by Dunlosky et al showed that we actually learn best when we try to take information out of our brains by actively recalling it. When we're tested on a fact or a topic neurochemicals that stimulate memory formation and attention are released in our brain and help us to really solidify those memories. So whether we get it right or wrong it doesn't really matter because as long as you check the answer afterwards and find out what the correct answer actually was your brain is so much more stimulated to actually want to pay attention to what that was and file it away as a memory for future use. It's essentially a way of saying to your brain hey this information is actually useful look we're trying to remember it why don't you remember it for next time and that helps our brains soak up all of this new content much more quickly. Try turning your notes or textbooks into flashcards or taking mock tests. For example for all of my clinical medical exams I found that one of the most effective ways for me to study was to actually do practice questions on a website called Pass Medicine which is essentially an online question bank which would actively test me on my knowledge and also my understanding. I would get instant feedback as to whether I was right or wrong and then also have access to a page with more information so I could fill in any gaps in my knowledge or understanding afterwards. This made it almost feel like a game and I would almost try to reframe it as a game so I could stay engaged with doing it. This isn't sponsored by the way that's just how I revised for my medical school exams. The next tip synergizes really well with the last tip about practice testing and active recall. The next tip is space repetition essentially how you can beat the forgetting curve. In a number of studies about human memory retention researchers came up with a graph visualizing how the brain retains memory over time also known as the forgetting curve which looks a bit like this. So essentially after we initially learn something we will gradually start to forget it over time unless we revise that piece of knowledge or that fact and then we reset the forgetting curve. Then after resetting this forgetting curve it takes a little bit longer before we forget it and the curve is a little bit less steep as the information starts to enter our long-term memory instead. Space repetition is essentially how you can beat the forgetting curve and to put this into practice my favourite way to do this especially for language learning is to use Anki which is a space repetition software which combines both active recall and space repetition. I love this for learning mandarin vocabulary but it also works for studying anything else that you need to memorize things for. Essentially Anki is an app which does flashcards on either your computer or your phone and the software will automatically calculate when you should space your repetition of it. You can also do space repetition and active recall with manual flashcards and I'll link some resources down below explaining how you can do this but I don't personally do this myself. I would really highly recommend Anki as it automates everything for you and all you need to do is make the cards and then everything just happens and you do your reviews every day and then you suddenly remember all of these new facts. Tip number seven is leveraging some memorization techniques to help remember things that are kind of tricky. So my favourite ones for these are mnemonics. So this is really helpful for medical school because often there's long lists of causes for a certain condition or other things like that where we don't want to forget any one item off it so a mnemonic helps to make sure that we can remember that. Another tip is doing mind maps so sometimes I would almost use mind maps as a form of active recall and draw out a mind map and try to remember all the things on it and then check with the list of all the points that I actually should have got and by making it in a mind map format it helps our brains to visually remember where all the bits of the topic are and where all the different facts are. Another memorization technique I found super helpful for learning languages, in particular mandarin, is to create a personal connection to certain words or facts. Find another way that you can link it in to something that you've personally experienced. For example on some of my mandarin learning Anki flashcards I'll include a photo or maybe something that reminds me of a story that's related to that piece of vocab or that sentence and that will just help to get my brain in gear and paying attention to be like oh this is actually important information or oh this is actually interesting and again that stimulates our brain to release those neurochemicals that help to support fact retention. Tip number eight is to make a study schedule including rest and also to track your progress. So this is essentially to zoom out on all of your revision or your studying and there's a few layers to this. Firstly creating a routine for your studying helps your brain feel ready to learn at your usual allocated time. This also helps to make sure that we don't end up studying late into the night or doing all-nighters as actually there are some studies that show that doing an all-nighter can actually really impair your memory retention and even your rational thinking for the next few days up to four days afterwards. If you create a schedule you'll hopefully feel a certain pressure to study and keep on top of things which I think is a healthy thing in moderation because in my personal experience with no pressure at all I can often feel very relaxed and very happy to procrastinate for many weeks. So by creating a schedule and realising oh actually there's not that much time I should probably get going that just helps to make sure that actually some things are happening and some things are being learned. The final layer is that by tracking your progress you'll get a better idea of a how quickly it takes you to master a topic or to understand something and b also gives you an idea of what you really need to focus on next for your studying. So it gives you information essentially about you as a learner and also about what you need to do next. I like to create a sort of daily routine when I'm studying intensively where I try to wake up and go to sleep at a similar time and eat meals around a similar time. So I did this especially when I was preparing intensively for lots of the heavy knowledge-based exams at Cambridge. You can also just do this with Google Calendar so often I would actually make a revision timetable calendar in Google Calendar in like a different colour and pop that into my Google Calendar to schedule all my time. I can show you in detail how I do this if you're interested and I can make a video about my schedule if that's interesting to you guys. The final tip, tip number nine, is to keep reassessing how everything's going. This means essentially doing an audit on a couple of things. So firstly on your academics, how your studying's going, whether you feel like you're actually able to learn using the techniques you're applying. Secondly just checking in in terms of your well-being. This is so important when studying and scheduling in breaks and scheduling in time for self-care and looking after yourself is literally the foundation of any studying that you want to do because if you're not taking care of your health and your well-being, you're not sleeping right, you're not eating right or exercising, then how on earth are you supposed to be effective at anything else that you want to do? So ensure that you're taking care of yourself, make sure that you're doing all right. So if I had checked in with myself and thought of how I could help support my mental and physical well-being better, I may have been able to actually enjoy life a little bit more and enjoy the journey rather than just struggling through and just about surviving and managing to do my exams. After all I've realized that it's more important to enjoy the journey than to focus purely on the destination. To quote Einstein, insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting to achieve different results. So if you find something's not working either in terms of your actual studying or in terms of your well-being, then adjust something, keep trying different things and keep reassessing. I like to reassess how things are going maybe every week or so, but obviously this interval can be adjusted depending on how long you're studying for. For learning Mandarin for example, every single week I'd write a slightly longer journal entry about how my studying was going and what I was going to focus on for the next week and how I was going to change things or adjust things. Because studying and life generally is a dynamic thing and we need to respond to the needs of the moment and to the new information that we're getting about how things are going. So those are my top nine tips for studying smarter not harder. I hope this video was entertaining or useful or helpful in some kind of way. If you enjoyed this video you might like this one over here where I put some of these techniques into practice and show you how I do that. Again just remember that studying is such a personal thing and find what works for you, find what feels good for you. Thank you so much for watching, take care of yourself and I will see you in the next video. Bye!