There is one thing that you own that everyone wants; your family wants it, your girlfriend wants it, facebook (if you are so inclined) wants it, your friends want it, your email wants it, sleep wants it, extracurricular activities want it, studying wants it. If time was the first thing you thought of reading this you are right. There just does not seem to be enough time to do everything you want. As a medical student how do you find the time to do what is the most important for your time as a medical student.
As a medical student you will find that 24 hours a day does not seem sufficient. The semester starts, you sleep and wake up and already there is the first exam. After that exam, you blink and there is the next exam. Time just flies. There seems not to be enough time.
You studied really hard for your first block. Your results come back. Whew you survived. Now its time to relax. You take a week off from studying. You relax, sleep, talk to family, talk to your girlfriend, wife and spend time just doing whatever you want. The next week you say I will start tomorrow. That tomorrow turns into another week. Now you have two weeks to grind. You grab your books sit in your favorite spot and grind. You study hard but now you are spending time catching up. You need more time but oops now its 11pm and you need to call your girlfriend/family. Finally, blocks (exams) are tomorrow and you know you have to cram all night. This happens over and over again. Its a vicious cycle.
How do you deal with this? Haaaa. You on your own.
Just kidding. The best thing to do is to study a little everyday. Yes. This is nothing new; its common knowledge. As such I'm sure you have tried to implement it at one time or another. Considering how much information you are able to assimilate on the day prior to your exams this should be a cinch. Suprisingly, it is not, you pull out your books/notes and read. For some reason you cover only a little bit of material you need to. If its even 45% (arbitrary number of the top of my head) of what you are able to cover on the day prior to the exam you are doing good. Unfortunately, more than likely it is not. Then you wake up and its already the eve of your examination and you still have to cram most of the material since you have not been able to keep up irregardless of the fact that you tried to study everyday. Why?
There are many reasons for this. They vary depending on individual. One common reason relevant to myself and a few others I spoken to appears to be pressure, ie the pressure you feel from the proximity of the exam. The further away the exam is the less pressure you feel. With the pressure lifted you feel you have more time to do other things. All of a sudden you have many things vying for your attention, things that you would not conceive on the day prior to exams. You dont push yourself to finish your alloted readings because you feel you have time to catch up. Catching up... ... (Now thats one dangerous phrase, but thats for another blog post. ) The exam comes around and you are cramming again. After this trial you return to your old habits.
Knowing what to do does not seem to be enough at times. So how do you handle studying with hard even when the exam is far off. You can approach it in two ways: 1) create your own pressure or 2) work without pressure. I can not speak for creating pressure because its not the route I took. Maybe reminding yourself constantly of the importance of the exams etc might help. Maybe... What I advocate is akin to nike's slogan, " just do it." Do not think, Do not rationalize... Just make a plan that you believe will help you spread your material over everyday (excluding weekends of you so please) and then blindly follow it like a robot. Just make blindly complete your daily goals. In a week or two you can look back and see how your plan is working and tweak things.
This worked for me. And I hope it works for you.
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