Hey! Do you have any tips for a current third year medical student with exams a month away? I'm really struggling with how to revise
Hello! Good luck in your exams :) I’ll try to break down some of the things that have helped me in the past when it came to revision.Planning your revisionThe first step is uaually to make a study timetable. When you know how much time you have, you can work out how much time you have per subject. I usually start off by allocating an equal amount of revision time for each subject, but then fiddle around with it based on how hard I found subjects. So a subject I find easy might get less days, whilst the ones I find hard might get more.When you are planning out your timetables, don’t do it in blocks. An entire week of a subject you love seems perfectly reasonable, but what about subjects you hate? I like to break mine up into chunks; I sandwich the unpleasant bits between days of subjects I like, so I don’t have to suffer for long periods of time. Also, you don’t have to be rigid. Having a bad depression day and can’t handle your least favourite subject on monday? Swap that day with friendlier subject. as long as you stay strict with yourself and do it when you feel a bit better, then it doesn’t matter if you are flexible with when you cover it. The important thing is this: plan out your revision, and don’t get caught up revising the stuff you like and know well, because you’re avoiding the bits you don’t like. We all tend to instinctively avoid the bits we hate, but timetable them in, and don’t let yourself leave them til the end. What to revise from
Only you know what kind of materials your university uses. But I personally liked to be minimalistic. What matters most is:
your learning objectives (which should explain every topic you need to learn)
your lectures (because they should cover almost all you need to know).
I preferred to work primarily from these, supplemented with short books (like the ‘lecture notes’ or ‘short course’ or ‘crash course’ type books) because you don’t usually have time to go poring through 500 page tomes which go into heaps of unneccessary detail. By all means, you can dip into papers or big textbooks etc as you go along, to supplement your studies or revision. But I’ve always found it important to stay focused on the topics you need. Medicine and science are vast, and if you’re easily distracted it can overwhelm you or cause you to waste time veering off course reading stuff that is interesting but pretty irrelevant. If you have time, you can absolutely go into more detail; sometimes that’s what separates a good mark from a great one. But if you’re panicking, running out of time and struggling to get by and pass, then you need to be ruthlessly focused on your objectives.A month is a reasonable amount of time; with prioritising the most important material and good planning, it should be possible to get what you want done. Good luck :)
