ow I Ranked 1st at Cambridge University - 20 Study Tips

All right, so it's been a few years since I've graduated from university, but I still always get a bunch of questions from students asking for study tips on how to do well on their exams. So in this video, we're gonna go through my 20 top tips for studying that I used to do pretty well in my exams while I was at school, and also studying medicine at Cambridge University while building this YouTube channel and having a business and trying to have some semblance of a social life and enjoying the journey along the way, let's go. And we're gonna split this video up into five parts. That is target, revision, technique, friends, and balance. And tip number one is to scope the subject. What this means is that for every subject that we have to prepare for, that we have an exam for, we wanna create some sort of tree diagram that gives us a visual representation of everything that we need to learn in the subject. Often one of the things that students struggle with is not appreciating where a given factoid or fact or concept fits within the wider picture. And so the way we wanna think of it is like we wanna build up the tree from the trunk and like the kind of branches first before we worry about the little details like the leaves. But if you're in a lecture and you're covering like a leaf over there somewhere down some random branch, it can be very hard to like appreciate how it fits into the wider picture. And so as long as we scope the subject at the start of our curriculum, at the start of our course, at the start of our revision period, that will really help in terms of just appreciating where stuff fits in. The benefit of this is that you can also then color code the areas that you're weak in. So I like using a kind of red, amber, green, traffic lighty based system for all the topics. And so at a glance for every subject, anatomy, physiology, chemistry, physics, whatever, I can see immediately, okay, these are the red zones and therefore those are the areas that I wanna focus my revision on. And that brings us to tip number two, which is to really focus on your weaknesses. When we're studying for exams, there's the very easy temptation to focus on the things that we are good at. So people invariably revise chapter one and chapter two of everything far more than chapters 19 and 20 at the back of the book. And really the point of the color coding system is that it really helps us target our specific weaknesses. Like if you know you're really good at maths and you know you suck at French, like I did in school, there's no point spending ages focusing on maths or spending exactly the same amount of time focusing on maths and French. It's all about recognizing, okay, I don't need to do much work in this particular subject. I'm going to put a disproportionate amount of effort into the stuff I'm bad at, so that I can get to a point where I'm really good at all of the things. In real life, this is actually probably bad advice. In general, in real life, we do better and we get ahead and all that stuff by focusing on the things we are good at, rather than by trying to improve all of our weaknesses to a reasonable standard. But generally in school and university exams, it's not the case that like, if you get an amazing mark in one subject, that makes up for bad marks in the other subject. We do have to kind of play this game of getting all of our stuff to a reasonably high level, if we're optimizing for exam results at school or at university. And tip number three is to use a retrospective revision timetable. Now I've got a video all about this, which will be linked up there in the video description, which I think several hundreds of thousands of students have found really helpful. The idea behind a retrospective revision timetable is that it's different to a prospective revision timetable. Normally when we make a revision timetable, we like to list out that, oh, on this day, I'm going to study this, this and that. On, you know, then next week, I'm going to study a bit of renal physiology and a little bit of upper limb anatomy and a little bit of like the Krebs cycle in biochemistry. And we create this like theoretical plan, which A, is an exercise in procrastination because just creating that prospective revision timetable is a bit of a waste of time. And B, I don't know, if you're anything like me, you never end up actually sticking to that theoretical timetable because real life gets in the way, there's social stuff that happens. And we find that maybe I'm good at that thing, but not at that thing. And so this theoretical plan ends up just going out the window. Instead, what I like to do is use a retrospective revision timetable. And I've been using this for my exams from like second year of med school onwards. And the idea there is that instead of planning what we're going to do in advance, we actually just plan it on the day. And we, again, we focus on our weaknesses. We figure out, okay, where are my red zones today? You know, I was red on physiology, so let me study some of that. I was red on neuroanatomy, so let's study a little bit of that. And then once we've studied it, we put the date down next to the subject, and then we can color code it based on how well we did on that subject on the day. And so at the start, we have a long list of topics and they're all red because we don't know any of it. But then over time, they slowly go amber and they slowly go green. And if you want more details on that, you can check out the actual video on the retrospective revision timetable. All right, part number two is revision. And tip number four is that note taking is broadly a waste of time. Now, this is a bit of a controversial take, but there's a bunch of studies that show that students, like one of students' favorite strategy for studying is to summarize or take notes from the stuff that they're consuming in lectures or the stuff they're watching videos about or the stuff they're reading in textbooks. But there's a decent amount of evidence that says that simply taking notes and summarizing with the book open, proverbially, is not a very effective way to learn because it's quite a passive thing and it's very easy for us to do. Now, generally, we have this misconception when we're trying to learn stuff that learning should be easy. And when learning is easy, we feel productive. Yeah, I've just done three pages worth of notes. But actually, the way that memory is formed and the way that we build those connections between concepts and topics is by putting effort into it. And in a way, the more effortful it appears, the harder it seems to us, the more likely our brain is to form connections between those relevant things and the more likely we are to actually know the topic. That's why most students' method for taking notes is a little bit of a waste of time because all you're doing is just summarizing the material. Whereas there's a bunch of other techniques that have been shown in the scientific literature where they've done hundreds of studies looking at evidence-based study tips that are way better than taking notes. Now, if you're studying a subject where you actually do need to take notes, let's say you're studying English literature at university where there is no easily accessible revision guide and you do need to have some sort of novel interpretation of Madame Bovary or something, I don't know, something to that effect, then in that sense, taking notes makes sense because you genuinely do need to condense the information down and get a hot take on it that you can then memorize for the exams. Whereas if you're studying something like medicine or a science subject, you already have tons of revision guides, there's already students in the years above who've already written a bunch of notes, you've got loads of free stuff available on the internet. And so in that context, I think taking notes is broadly a waste of time and instead we should be focusing on the more effective and efficient study techniques. And speaking of those study techniques, the next tip is to focus on understanding first. Now, again, one of the mistakes that students make, which I made a lot when I was a student, is to try and just memorize stuff as we go along. But the way that we should try and study is broadly, we need to understand stuff first and we need to memorize it second. Understanding it basically means being able to explain it to a 12 year old or a five year old or however year old you have a friend or nephew or niece or son or daughter. Basically, we wanna understand things enough to explain them to a five year old. And there's a quote from Einstein, which is that if you can't, allegedly from Einstein, which is that if you can't explain it to a 12 year old, you probably just don't understand it well enough. This is also famously called the Feynman technique. Renamed after Richard Feynman, who apparently was just like a fantastic communicator and really good at physics and stuff. But one of his key skills was in being able to break down concept topics and explain them to kids. And that's what understanding really means. It's not really about whether, can a five year old understand it? But it's more about, can you explain it to someone that doesn't really have a baseline level of knowledge on the topic? And can you answer the why, why, why questions that they're gonna inevitably ask? The idea is that for each topic, you try and explain it to a five year old in your head or a friend or whatever. And when you get to the point where you, like you don't know the answer to one of the questions that they're asking, at that point you think, okay, cool. This is where my understanding ends. Let me dive into the textbook or the internet or Wikipedia or YouTube or whatever. And let me fill in this gap. And now I'll be able to explain it to the five year old again. And so over time, we're very much focusing on how do we understand this information in the most efficient way possible. But then once we've understood it, we do actually have to memorize it. And thankfully, we have three amazing techniques for memorization. Technique number one is called active recall. And this is the by far the number one technique in all of effective studying, which I've done tons of videos on in the past over the last like five years. The idea behind active recall is basically we need to test ourselves. We have this erroneous assumption that to get information into our brain, we need to put it into our brain by kind of reading it or consuming it. But actually the way memory formation works is that to get information into our brain, we actually need to try and retrieve that information from our brain. So we read something once, we try and understand what the deal with that thing is. And then we test ourselves on the thing that we've just read or that we've just understood. And then we ideally wanna repeat that testing of ourselves further down the line. And again, this is gonna seem hard, but there is gallons and gallons of scientific evidence that says that testing yourself on stuff makes it far more likely for that stuff to stick. There's a fantastic book as well called Make It Stick, which is all about the science of effective learning. And what the authors of that book say is that generally, if you are unhappy with your grades or performance in any kind of test or any kind of exam, it just means that you're not testing yourself enough. Testing is by far the number one way to improve your score. So if you have bad marks, test yourself more often, more frequently and more so that it feels hard when you test yourself. And I guarantee basically that that will lead to an improvement of your score. So active recall was tip number one for effective memorization. The second one is something called spaced repetition. Now again, spaced repetition is something I've talked about ad nauseum. You might be familiar with it. Basically the idea is that whenever we remember anything, whenever we learn anything, our memory for that thing exponentially decays. And this is called the forgetting curve, which was discovered by a chap called Ebbinghaus in like the 1800s. And this is why you have that phenomenon where you read something and then a week later, you try and look at it again and you've just completely forgotten everything about it because that's natural. It's not that we are a dumbass and we can't memorize things. It's just literally the way that memory works. And the whole, like some people have a photographic memory is a complete myth. Like there is no evidence that anyone in the world actually has a proper photographic memory. So we all suffer from this kind of memory decay. And the idea behind spaced repetition is that spaced repetition interrupts the forgetting curve. So we might study a topic on day one and use active recall to test ourselves at the end of the session. Then our memory is gonna decay a bit and maybe the next day we would repeat the testing of ourselves. And if we got stuff wrong, we would look at our notes. Then we might repeat it four days later and then maybe a week later and then maybe three weeks later. And the idea is that over time, as we repeat the testing and as we space that out over time, that is what's gonna lead to the forgetting curve being interrupted permanently. And we're gonna try and help get that information into our long-term memory. This is why as well, like consistency when it comes to studying over a long period of time is generally a lot better than like random bouts of intensity all in one go. Because even if you do like 15 minutes per day, that is way better than doing like two hours at the end of the week because you're benefiting from that spaced repetition effect and you're benefiting from the fact that memory formation really gets consolidated when we are sleeping. And so in a way, the more sleeps you have in between study sessions, the more likely you are to more effortlessly retain all that stuff. So we've got testing, we've got spacing. And the third big tip for effective memorizing is something called interleaving. Again, they talk about this a lot in the book, Make It Stick. But the idea is that basically we wanna be interleaving various different things in a single study session. And they've done studies where, for example, let's say you've got two groups of students and you give one set of students math problems, but like you've got them in blocks. So like, you know, all of the, you know, topic A would be a block, topic B would be a block and topic C would be a block. And then you take another group of students and you sort of interleave like ABC, ABC, CBA, you know, that kind of thing. So they're not doing all of one set of problems in one go. And they find that the performance of students in the second group, the interleaving group is way better than in the first group. No one quite knows why this is, but again, maybe it ties into that thing of like when studying and when learning feels effortful, like we haven't yet got like a pattern just to repeat ad nauseum for a single set of problems. When it feels effortful, that translates to better memory. And so theoretically, that helps improve our retention of stuff. And so generally we wanna be interleaving things. So it's like, I'm gonna do three hours of just renal physiology is generally a bad shot. Maybe like one hour of renal physiology followed by some heart physiology, followed by some anatomy, and then going back to the renal physiology. That is probably a more effective way of going about it. All right, now we come to part three, which is technique. And tip number one here is to do lots of mock exams. Now, the biggest thing here is to recognize that when it comes to studying for stuff, the exam is actually not a test of knowledge. It's a test of exam performance. And yes, in an ideal world, in a dream world, the stuff we'd learn at school and the stuff we'd learn in our degree would all entirely be relevant. And we'd be doing it for the sake of knowledge rather than for the sake of passing an exam. In the real world and the way the current education system is designed, which is not ideal, but in the current world, we're not doing it for the sake of knowledge. We're doing it partly for the sake of knowledge, but mostly to pass the exam to get some sort of qualification at the end of it. This is even true of medical school. You would think that the exams in medical school help you be a doctor, but generally the stuff you get tested on is not the stuff that translates to you being a better doctor, at least in written exams compared to clinical stuff. And so what that basically means is that when we're studying for stuff, we should recognize that we are optimizing our score in a game and that game is the exam. We're not worried about just general knowledge across the board. Well, we can be, but again, we're in a goal-directed behavior to do better in exams. Therefore mock exams, like past tests, any way we can get hold of past papers, that is often the most high yield thing we can do. Because again, we're tapping into the whole active recall thing and tapping into the idea that testing ourselves is just the way forward when it comes to memorizing anything, but we're also kind of implicitly learning what sort of questions the examiners are asking and what exam technique looks like. And if I think back to the exams at university in med school that I did the best in, it was the ones in which I'd done the most mock exam papers. So in a way I could get inside the heads of the examiners and kind of predict what questions were going to be asked. Whenever I say this, people in the comments are always like, oh my God, this is like bad. Like you should be studying for the sake of knowledge. It's like, yes, I agree. In an ideal world I would be, but I also have to pass an exam. So, you know, don't hate the player, hate the game, as they say. Technique number two is to use intentional flair. Now this generally applies to essay exams or exams in which you have to answer questions in long form. And basically the more flair you can add to that, the more interesting it is to the examiner. I spent a year supervising medical physiology at Cambridge University. And so I read dozens and dozens of essays and inevitably the ones that I felt were the best were the ones where there was some level of flair, whether it was just even just like nice handwriting or, you know, pretty diagrams or someone adding like a really interesting introduction that had an interesting take on the subject of like, how was the sodium pump discovered? If someone adds like a flairy, interesting kind of introduction, it really makes me as the examiner feel like, oh, hello, this is kind of interesting. This is unusual. Especially, you know, if you're doing one of these public exams where the examiners are reading like hundreds of scripts in a given day, the more flair you can add and the more you can stand out in their mind in a good way, hopefully, the more likely they are to give you a decent mark. And I'm gonna let you in on a secret. A lot of examiners don't actually read your whole essay, read all of your work. A lot of them get quite lazy. A lot of them get a bit like demotivated, especially as the day progresses. And so the easier you can make it, the more you can make it look as if you are the sort of person who deserves a high mark, the more likely you are to get that high mark. Again, this is not ideal. You would think, especially in like things like medical school and law school and stuff, that the examiners are reading every single word of your essay. But if you've ever tried reading like 100 essays in a go, it's just genuinely really, really, really hard to actually read every single word. So basically, if we can front load the flair, and if we can structure our essays and make them look pretty, that really does go a long way in creating this halo effect in the eyes of the examiners. And that generally translates to a better mark for ourselves. So it's just about the packaging. It's about the marketing. It's about the presentation of stuff. It's not only about the content. And tip number three for technique is, in general, you should try and bank as many points as you possibly can with coursework. This applies to some university subjects, to a lot of school subjects at GCSE and A-level or O-level and A-level, whatever they're called these days. But when there is the option to do coursework throughout the year, which contributes to your final grade, that is generally a good thing to do because it's kind of scary when 100% of your grade rests on that final exam. So the more you can put flair and vibes and good stuff into your coursework, especially if that's an option, the easier the final exam becomes. All right, that brings us to part number four, which is friends. And tip number one here is to really study with friends. This is something that most people don't do because they're like, oh, my friends are distracting. But really what you wanna do is you wanna find a good group of friends where you vibe with one another and you're all motivated to study for the exams together. You don't even have to be doing the same subject. When I was in my second year of med school, for example, I had friends who were doing like history, law, medicine, philosophy, maths, and we would all go to the same library and study together and we'd be using the Pomodoro technique together. So we'd study for 25 minutes, then we'd take a five minute break and we created this WhatsApp group that we called the Pomodoro Society, which is still going to this day because we're all still kind of friends. And yes, you might take a little bit of a hit to your productivity, but if I think back to my university experience, A, I think I was much more motivated when studying with friends, but B, it also just made the whole thing much more fun. And if I'd been just stuck in my room on my own, I would have had a lot less fond memories of university, especially exam term, than I did because I was in the library hanging out with friends and we'd go out to lunch after a few hours of revision. Tip number two for studying with friends is to test each other. This is a thing I used to do a lot with my medical school friends when I was in clinical school, so the final three years of med school at Cambridge University. And the idea there is one of us would learn a topic and then we would test the other people on it. Or for example, if I was studying a topic, I would ask someone to test me on it. Like when you're studying with friends, especially if you have a friend, like in our case, it was a friend called Paul, Paul just kind of knew everything. And so the temptation is there, but like, hey, Paul, I don't know anything about the thyroid. Can you just tell me about the thyroid? That's kind of bad because it's just passively trying to absorb information from another student. Whereas the way we do it is like, right, Paul, I don't know anything about the thyroid. Can you test me on it? And then you can fill in the gaps. And so Paul would be like, okay, cool. What are the common causes of a lump in the neck or a common causes of like a painful goiter or whatever? And then it'd be like, oh crap, I don't know. Oh, I think I can remember this. I think I can remember that. And so we're actively testing ourselves and testing our friends. And then our friends are hopefully filling in the gaps or if there's a gap that no one knows, then someone can Google it and we can all like learn together. And tip number three for this is to read your friends' essays. So when I was at university, again, like me and my friends would get together. We formed a shared Google drive. And instead of all of us preparing the same essays that we would then kind of try and memorize for the exam, we kind of split up the workload so that I was doing three, Catherine was doing three, Jake was doing three, Molly was doing three, Paul was doing three, Calum was doing three and so on. And so by the end of it, each individual would do three essays worth of work, but then we'd have access to like 30 essays from the other 10 medics in our college. And this was a great system, right? Because it means that we are distributing the workload. A lot of university revision, a lot of school revision is kind of inefficient because a lot of people are kind of doing the same thing. And if you pull resources and if you share your notes and stuff, you can benefit a lot from the economy of scale in terms of writing essays and planning stuff out. Now, obviously, if in the exam you are trying to regurgitate a friend's essay word for word, that is probably bad. It's probably gonna be picked up on and that's not what I'm endorsing. What I'm endorsing is use your friend's notes, share resources amongst yourselves. And then when you're doing stuff, you can add your own flair and your own vibes to it to make it your own. And finally, we have part number five, which is balance. My tip number one here is to have some sort of workspace. I really liked going to libraries. In my first year of med school, I tried working in my room and I really failed at working in my room because I'd always get distracted because my computer was there and because the music would be on and because the bed was right next door. And so if I just wanted to sleep, it would just be too easy to fall asleep. Whereas from second year onwards, I started going to the library and then I made it this routine to go to the library every morning after breakfast to do some work. And when you're in that zone, when you're in that zone of silence, maybe you've got your like study with me music playing in the background. Link in the video description if you wanna check it out on Spotify. There's just something about that that really helps in terms of focus. This is a thing that I'm finding these days as I'm working on writing a book about productivity, which is that like when I have a specific space, like some kind of routine that in the morning, I'm gonna wake up, I'm gonna go to the gym and then I'm gonna sit down for three hours and try and write my book. That is when I make the most progress. Whereas when my routine goes out of whack and I try and write here and there and everywhere else, then it's just actually genuinely hard to focus. And so I'm big on building some kind of routine and some kind of workspace that feels productive, that helps us build those healthy habits for kind of maintaining that consistency and enjoyment over a long period of time. Tip number two in balance is to definitely have time for unwinding. There is this like over glamorization that happens, especially at university, especially in things like medical schools where people are like, hey, I work so hard, I don't have time to sleep. I worked so hard, I pulled an all-nighter. That's generally bad. Obviously balance is the way forward. I think students these days now no longer compete to see who can work the hardest because that kind of used to be a thing back in my day when I was in my youth. But really, you know, it's all about balance. It's all about having hobbies, having stuff that you can do to unwind. I find it useful to actually schedule that time into my calendar because when you're enjoying work and when you're kind of turning into a game, which is what I was big about, when you're enjoying it, it can be very easy to just be like, oh, I'm having so much fun that I just can't be bothered to, I don't know, go to the gym or like do the sports stuff. But generally, I think scheduling time for unwinding in the calendar is really helpful. I would have like Game of Thrones nights with my friends. We'd all hang out every week and watch Game of Thrones. We'd do a bunch of like sports stuff together, you know, playing badminton, playing squash, that kind of thing, even in the midst of exam season. And it was actually in exam season that I first took up squash for the first time in my second year. And we played on average like an hour a day as like an exam break. And that stress buster, stress reliever, semi-relaxing, semi-competitive thing just really helped in terms of making me feel more motivated to actually study while I was studying. And also to feel more tired at the end of the day so I could have a good night's sleep because sleep is when all these memories and stuff gets consolidated. And tip number three for balance is to really focus on enjoying the journey and not being so fixated on the destination. This is the advice that I give to a bunch of students who come to me for advice these days. Like when you're a student, it can be very easy to defer your happiness until after the exams or until after your degree or until you get a job. And one of the most saddening things I hear from medical students is, oh, you know, I don't really enjoy med school. This med school thing is really hard, but once I become a doctor, it will all have been worth it. I'm always like, ooh, that's like a dangerous way of living life because A, med school is genuinely more fun than being a doctor. And when you're a doctor, you're obligated to be in and you have a job and the stress is different to the stress of being a medical student. But also like, you know, being a student is supposed to be the best time of your life. It's like your prime, you've got loads of friends around you and never again in your life will you be in an environment where you have so much spare time and you have so many friends all around you. And so really focus on enjoying that process. And the way I think of it is we wanna try and enjoy each day on its own merit rather than being fixated on like, you know, this next rung of the ladder and I will be happy when I dot, dot, dot. So really it's all about the journey rather than the destination. Yes, we wanna optimize for studying for exams and we wanna optimize for doing well and doing well in our degrees and all that kind of stuff. But really, you know, if we're not enjoying the journey along the way, you know, we wanna try and do our best to enjoy the journey along the way because otherwise we're just like screwing ourselves over by kind of throwing away these like potentially best years of our life for the sake of an end goal. And it's only when you get to the end goal that you realize, oh, actually, I kind of wish I'd enjoyed myself more along the way. Now, if you've gotten to this point in the video, then firstly, thank you very much for watching, but you're also probably the sort of person who appreciates leveling up their own thinking and problem solving skills, which is why you might like to check out the sponsor of this video, which is Brilliant. If you haven't heard, Brilliant is an online courses platform that has interactive online courses in maths, science, and computer science. Their courses are fantastic and genuinely entertaining and insightful to work through. And the way they teach stuff is all based on a very first principled approach to learning. It's like they would teach you a concept and then they would do it, like they would find some sort of interactive way to integrate that concept into a question. And then you would try and solve the problem and then you'd learn the next concept along the way. And this is exactly the format that we used to have at Oxford and Cambridge in terms of supervisions and tutorials with like, you know, two of us and one kind of tutor or expert on the subject matter. They would teach you a little bit of something and then you try some work. It was like very kind of interactive first principles way of learning a subject. My favorite courses in Brilliant are the ones on computer science. When I was applying to med school, I was actually torn between med school and computer science and ended up going for medicine in the end, which was a great decision, but I always kind of thought, I kind of really wish I also knew more about this computer science-y stuff. And so in Brilliant, they've got fantastic courses, you know, the introduction to computer science, introduction to algorithms, introduction to learning how to code in Python. If that sounds up your street and you want to level up your problem solving skills and learn the math science and computer science behind what makes the world tick, head over to brilliant.org forward slash Ali and the first 200 people to click that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much for watching this video. If you got value out of this, you might like to check out this video over here, which is specifically about the essay memorization framework that I used to win the prize for best exam performance in one of my years of med school. So that'll be linked over there. Otherwise, thank you so much for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll hopefully see you in the next video. Bye-bye.