3 SUPER QUICK STUDY TIPS

Things I learned during my first year of medical school

I cannot believe I’ve finished my first year of medical school already! Wow! 

Warning: long Parks and Rec gif-filled post ahead (90% of these are cheesy but I am pizza levels of cheesy when I’m reflecting):

1. Do your thing

The first semester of med school was a weird time of looking and seeing what other people were doing to study and wondering if I needed to do that too. 

I wondered, should I get a bunch of colored highlighters? Make a million flashcards? Am I behind because I haven’t studied that lecture yet? Should I stream instead of go to class because that’s what other people are doing?

My advice? Try new things out but once you figure out what works for you, don’t be afraid to stick to it. Some people found out that they study best in groups. I found out I study best by myself. I don’t like highlighting but I do like writing down things I need to know in a spiral so I can review/remember them better. I also like doing as many practice questions as I can get my hands on. I like going to class and taking notes on my computer. 

I didn’t know any of that until I got here. And that’s okay. But don’t stress about what other people are doing - you’ll find what works for you. 

2. Don’t try to study 24/7 

Seriously. Don’t. It’s not worth it. You’ll burn out and realize you could have been more relaxed and focused if you took a break. I try to take a couple minutes of break every hour and a bigger break every few hours whenever I’m studying. I also try to take at least one day off per weekend and do something fun (even if it’s small). I also know I study best during the day so I usually take the evenings off as well unless it’s like crunch time. 

3. Investing in dress clothes is a good idea

Inevitably, you’ll forget that you have yet another clinical skills class that requires white coat attire (aka business casual) and only remember last minute, without time to do laundry. It’s way less stressful if you have a few possible outfits. Even easier? If you wear dresses, get some nice professional dresses. Nothing better than only picking a single thing out of your closet to wear! Also, along with that, make sure you have dress shoes that fit and are comfortable. I learned that I need to break in new flats sometimes before I wear them or I will get really bad blisters. 

4. Laughter is the best medicine

As cliche as it sounds, I could not have gotten through this year without laughing. Laughing with new friends, laughing at ridiculous situations, laughing at silly gifs posted in our med school’s FB group specifically created for that purpose (it’s the best, highly recommend. Our class has 3 facebook groups - one for class announcements/club things, one for study materials, and one for laughing. The silly one was started by an MS2 (now MS3 I suppose!)). Laughing is seriously therapeutic for stress. Also some of my classmates just happen to be hysterically funny. Also A+ to tumblr for keeping me giggling. Also, Broad City (put it on your list of shows to watch!) 

5. The days are long but the weeks/months are short

I still cannot believe it is May and I’m already done. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to reflect on my experiences on my tumblr so I can remember them (because sometimes it feels like my memories are getting squeezed out to make room for new knowledge). Journaling here allowed me to process this year in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I would highly recommend it to anyone about to start school (of any kind!). 

6. Make new friends but keep the old

Yes, I am quoting a Girl Scouts song. Because it’s true. I am so very thankful for the technology that has allowed me to (try to) keep up with my college friends. Life is busy for all of us but it’s always nice to chat with old friends (and hang out, location permitting!) Also my med school class is filled with the most amazing people and it’s been so fun getting to know them :) I love my girls so much, they truly are my ride or dies. Med school is quite a bonding experience.

7. You’ll do things you never imagined you could

For me, that was anatomy and clinical skills. I was a bit nervous about dissecting and the whole experience but I was pleasantly surprised. It was not as weird as I thought it would be. In clinical skills, I was terrifyingly nervous about standardized patients and being filmed and getting feedback and learning how to do all the exams. We all got through it and now I feel much more comfortable. There are still hard days (like a couple of weeks ago) but I am not as nervous. I also learned how to do the male GU exam and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. 

 I also can’t believe that I went from knowing nothing to taking a history and doing a physical on a real patient all by myself AND presenting them to my preceptor. I still have a ton to learn and say stupid stuff sometimes but it feels like I’m on the right track. 

8. While sometimes first year feels like this:

You’ll have moments where you feel like

And one last bonus lesson:

Can that be the medblr motto? Also shoutout to medblr for being such an amazing and supportive community. Could not have gotten through this year without y’all!!!! 

Congratulations to all the other first years who are finishing up school or already done :) And welcome medblr class of 2020!!! So excited for y’all. 

This has been a thing for a little while, but it certainly bears repeating! If you can get the certification (that’s definitely the trick here), it can work for some private loans too.

Basic Types of Student Loans

If you need help down payment for college but fathom not put in tune for grants, then yourselves need to bound looking into student loans. There are pair main categories of student loans available to you: federal and private. Under each category there are several different long-term loan types. Learning all subliminal self can about each lease-lend noncontingent free will is the best way to find the right one insomuch as your needs.

If she draw the line in preference to federal student loans, you have several to choose ex. The antecedent is the Stafford Loan. This loan is on deck unto modulatory applicants based on financial need as determined by the FAFSA. Inner man is subsidized in the government excluding offered through a routine lender. Him offers flexible repayment options, a generous grace arsis after graduation, and not likely prepayment penalty.

The Perkins Unsecured loan is another constitutional loan privilege. It is self-acting to students with exceptional monetary need. One benefit of this loan is its low interest rate. Like the Stafford Loan, they has a knightly grace burden.

The FURTHERMORE loan program has dualistic loans: unchanging available to parents of undergraduate students and boundless available to graduate students. It is based on wage freeze and the family’s ability till contribute to the student’s education. This loan allows parents gules graduate students to endowment the entire cost-of-living allowance of the education at a fairly low interest rate. Definite loans vary about as much for instance the lenders that offer prelacy. Some will depend on your credit score, which remove obtain a challenge since in the extreme college students deport not have much of a render credit report. One commonly used loan is the Signature Philologist Loan. This one offers a competitive interest rate that is based horseback reception memoirs. Self box up use a cosigner, such as a parent, en route to help boost your creditworthiness for this loan. Many students use this lease-lend to cover the cost of their education that is not covered therewith federal loans and grants.

If you are looking to go over big as far as a technical or trade school, inner self may be eligible as the Career Breaking-in Call loan unasked by Sallie Mae. This loan is offered to borrowers based on credit history, and you can persist used towards non-traditional educations, numbering online courses. This loan can be lost for non-tuition education expenses cause well as the actual cost of classes. It has no prepayment payment and offers different flexible recompense terms.

Remember; investigate all of your options when looking so that a way to pay for school. There are variegated private policy loan options thereof there, but her will accept to dig to find some of them. Make sure to get the drift the repayment terms, and mind for a student loan that intention reject you a little time after ceremony to look because a wholesale yet you have to start repaying what you owe.

Does Zapping Your Brain Increase Performance?

Here is a picture of the nine-dot problem. The task seems simple enough: connect all nine dots with four straight lines, but, do so without lifting the pen from the paper or retracing any line. If you don’t already know the solution, give it a try – although your chances of figuring it out within a few minutes hover around 0 percent. In fact, even if I were to give you a hint like “think outside of the box,” you are unlikely to crack this deceptively (and annoyingly!) simple puzzle.

The Nine Dot problem: connect the dots by making four lines, without lifting your pencil from the paper

And yet, if we were to pass a weak electric current through your brain (specifically your anterior temporal lobe, which sits somewhere between the top of your ear and temple), your chances of solving it may increase substantially. That, at least, was the finding from a study where 40 percent of people who couldn’t initially solve this problem managed to crack it after 10 minutes of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) – a technique for delivering a painlessly weak electric current to the brain through electrodes on the scalp.

How to explain this?

It is an instance of the alleged power of tDCS and similar neurostimulation techniques. These are increasingly touted as methods that can “overclock” the brain in order to boost cognition, improve our moods, make us stronger, and even alter our moral dispositions. The claims are not completely unfounded: there is evidence that some people become slightly better at holding and manipulating information in their minds after a bout of tDCS. It also appears to reduce some people’s likelihood of formulating false memories, and seems to have a lasting improvement on some people’s ability to work with numbers. It can even appear to boost creativity, enhancing the ability of some to make abstract connections between words to come up with creative analogies. But it goes further, with some evidence that it can help people control their urges as well improve their mood. And beyond these psychological effects, tDCS of the part of the brain responsible for movement seems to improve muscular endurance and reduce fatigue.

It’s an impressive arsenal of findings, and it raises the obvious question: should we all start zapping away at our brains? That certainly seems to be the conclusion reached by the growing DIY community experimenting with home-made tDCS headsets.

But, while the list of supportive studies is far longer than those linked to here, the overall state of the evidence nevertheless continues to occupy that frustrating scientific limbo of being ultimately ambiguous – especially when we take into account all those comparatively boring, non-headline grabbing studies that found no significant effect from tDCS. In fact, a meta-analysis of tDCS studies – one of those laborious studies that study the findings of other studies – found the technique had no effect at all on a wide range of cognitive abilities. Yet that review in turn has been criticized as being too conservative and potentially biased in its own analysis.

More to the point, few of these studies have yet to be replicated, and most of them rely on a handful of unrepresentative people (US undergrads) who are asked to undertake the kind of lab-controlled tasks that usually share a questionable (at best) relationship with real world activities. And as for the long-term effects of tDCS use, or even how it affects brain function exactly? It’s not clear.

Yet none of this haziness has deterred start-ups from developing a slew of commercial tDCS headsets targeting home-users. Primary among those is Foc.us, which started off with a headset that allegedly enhances gaming ability before expanding to ones that improve learning speed as well as athletic endurance. There’s also Thync, a mood-enhancing headset that’s been described as a “digital drug” that can help users “energize or relax without drinks or pills.” While not quite based on tDCS, it uses pulses of electricity to target cranial nerves just under the skin to supposedly induce various moods.

Another such start-up, Halo Neuroscience, recently introduced its own headset, which stimulates motor neurons in a way that supposedly accelerates the strength gains and skill acquisition of athletes.

The firm reports on its own unpublished “preliminary results” with elite Olympic ski jumpers showing a 31 percent improvement in their propulsion force, with significantly less wobble when airborne. Even if a far more modest result than 31 percent turned out to be true, these sorts of findings could mean that tDCS is set to become a significant performance enhancer in the sporting world. Will its use in competitive settings be considered cheating?

In academic contexts, some universities are already trying to curb the off-label use of prescription drugs to enhance academic performance, with Duke University explicitly considering such use as “cheating.” Similarly, the Electronic Sports League, which holds massive gaming tournaments with million dollar prize pools, has started randomly testing players for so-called “smart drugs” that may give e-athletes an edge over their non-doping opponents.

Would using Foc.us’s GoFlow to “learn faster” be considered a similar instance of academic dishonesty by Duke University? Or what about using Foc.us’s gaming headset in the context of shooting down virtual enemies? If these devices give any sort of a boost, it’s not clear why their use should be considered any different from drugs like Adderall or Ritalin, at least in regards to cheating.

In non-virtual sport, the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) prohibits substances and methods when they satisfy any two of these three criteria: 1. they confer a performance enhancement; 2. they pose an actual or potential risk for athletes; and 3. they violate the “spirit of sport.”

If the preliminary findings from Halo Neuroscience on ski jumping are even remotely valid, the first criterion would certainly be met. On the other hand, it’s not yet clear if tDCS poses a noteworthy potential risk for athletes – though any such risk would almost certainly be smaller than the one involved in soaring over 100 meters through the air, as in the case of ski jumping. But does it violate the difficult to define “spirit of sport”? It’s a question that WADA may wish to avoid: to answer yes may commit it to trying to ban the unbannable. As far as we can tell, tDCS leaves no uniquely detectable impact in the brain: a ban would not be enforceable.

On the other hand, tDCS may simply be construed as not “artificial” enough to threaten our (often arbitrary) notions of fairness, whether in sports or academic settings. Unlike injecting or ingesting a synthetic drug, many may have the intuition that a weak electric current is comparatively “natural” or “clean.” For instance, even though the effects are similar, WADA currently tolerates athletes who increase their red blood cells (and therefore, presumably, their performance) by sleeping in a tent that simulates high altitude, but not those who do so by blood doping or EPO. Something about sleeping in a tent to enhance performance does not strike us as suspect in the way that drugs or blood transfusions do. Perhaps tDCS will be occupy the same corner as altitude tents: for the rule makers, both can be convenient inconsistencies in the rules, as both elude detection anyway.

An yet, while we can question the evidence for the actual efficacy of most performance enhancers currently used, tDCS in particular stands out in calling for more data. Unlike Adderall or anabolic steroids, at the moment anyone can get their hands on a tDCS headset by legally ordering one online. And even if these headsets become more closely regulated, people can still cheaply make their own using common items found at electronics stores, stimulating any part of their brain, or their children’s. Given the current hype around it, it would be good to know more about how exactly it impacts the brain — and the long term consequences.

Top Image: These are increasingly touted as methods that can “overclock” the brain in order to boost cognition, improve our moods, make us stronger, and even alter our moral dispositions. Credit: Fabrice Coffini/GettyImages

Source: Scientific American (By Hazem Zohny)

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I'm fine.

What she says: I'm fine.

What she means: Why do we never speak about the fact that we don't know what happened to Benvolio after Act III. His last fucking line is "This is the truth, or let Benvolio die." and fucking Shakespeare decided that it would be a great idea to let him out of the play and never speak of him again. He DIED in the Q1 and we never are told how, Lord Montague simply says "and young Benvolio is deceased too." Even though in Q2 at the final scene it says "Enter Lord Montague and others" it is never openly said if he entered along with his uncle or not. His two best friends died, one in his arms and the other was his cousin; he was left alone and Shakespeare didn't even bother tell us his fate. Why couldn't he give him the happy ending he deserved? Why didn't anyone listen to him? Why? There would have been way less death that way.

Teacher inspires nervous young test-takers with messages on all of their desks

Chandni Langford teaches fifth grade in the Woodbury City public school system in New Jersey. When she heard that her students were nervous about an upcoming test, she devised a clever and heartfelt way to encourage them. 

The pictures have since gone viral with over 18,000 shares, and hundreds of people have chimed in with messages of support. But it’s the students’ response that will leave you in tears. 

PREPARATIONS FOR AN EFFECTIVE STUDY SESH

1. Wash your face so you feel refreshed and ready.

2. Get a bottle of cold water and a small healthy snack to stay hydrated and nourished which really does help when you’re studying because it keeps the brain active. A study snack example could be, fruit and nuts or maybe a guilty pleasure (but don’t go overboard!)

3. Clean your study area if it isn’t already. Remember, a messy area = messy brain. But thats not the case always I know. However, a clean and organized study area stimulates your mind and makes you want to sit down and study.

4. Gather ALL your study essentials like your pens, pencils, ruler, paper (basically your general stationery), and most importantly, your actual subject material of course (textbooks, notebooks, handouts and past papers).

5. Lay all your study essentials neatly on the desk to how ever you think everything will be easily approachable.

6. Block out ALL distractions which will prevent you from studying effectively. Turn off your phone and put it away as far as possible. Put away EVERYTHING that you know for a fact that will keep you from studying your best. If you listen to music while you study, then classical music is said to be very helpful, however use the phone just for that purpose, and for what you will encounter in the next tip. You can also use your iPod if you have one or any thing that plays music. Just remember, don’t procrastinate. 

7. Set yourself a timer to make sure you don’t spend too much time doing one thing or waste time. Keep your phone ONLY for this purpose, unless your watch can set the timer, anything else. Most popular method is the pomodoro method. If you are unfamiliar with this, let me explain. So basically in this method, you study for about 25-30 minutes and take 5 minute breaks and then a long 15 minute break. You change this to how ever you want but don’t go extreme for example study for a about 40 mins and then take a 20 minute break. No. Again, if using the phone for the timer, PLEASE PLEASE refrain from checking social media. 

8. Start the studying now that you are fully prepared. Remember, practice active studying rather than passive studying. Active studying would include annotating lecture notes, doing practice questions, organizing and identifying main points, making summaries, etc. Passive studying would be just reading through your notes.

Hope you found my tips useful (and i hope they made sense) even though you probably saw these everywhere else. I’m just here spreading them out again to remind you what’s better for you and your grades and general studying. My name is Aditi, and I hope everyone is having a fantastic day! 

My first year at university came to a close and here are some important things I learned along the way that really helped me succeed throughout the year (but most importantly survive to the end)

1. Start working hard from the beginning

A common thing students do for the first few weeks of classes is try to convince themselves that they don’t have anything to do because it seems like they haven’t learned enough material. The moment you learn something on day 1, you have something to review or catch up on. If not, try to get ahead a little. I promise that staying on top of your work from day 1 is how you can help prevent midterms from sneaking up on you.

2. Make schedules and learn to manage your time

This goes with #1 because scheduling, planning, lists, etc. are how you can stay on top of things. Simple to-do lists or, for those of you that like more specific planning, hourly planners work great. Being specific about when you’re going to do something and what it is you’re going to do (i.e. study lectures 11-13) really helps to organize your brain and your studying. Also, part of managing your time is not committing to too many things at once. You may still be trying to figure things out and the last thing you want is to be dealing with more than you can handle. 

3. Don’t fall behind because you’re studying

It’s so hard to dedicate your time to classes that aren’t the ones with exams coming up, but falling behind on those other classes won’t help you in the long term. University is a total balancing act and you need to be able to balance keeping yourself up to date with courses as well as reviewing for any upcoming exams, projects, papers, etc. A lot of people (including me sometimes) fall behind on every class because of midterms and then spend all their time up until finals playing catch up rather than thoroughly preparing for finals.

4. Don’t cram

We all know this isn’t the way to go, but we do it anyway. You can’t study for a class effectively in 2-3 days. Give yourself a week or two to go over the material more than once. I always try to schedule small chunks of studying - a few pages a day that can take up to an hour or two of my time - at least 2 weeks in advance so that I start preparing, but I also am not taking too much time away from keeping up with current classes (see #3). And no all-nighters! Sleep plays a role in consolidating material, so skipping sleep is not the way to go.

5. Picking classes

Don’t pick a class because you heard it was easy and don’t avoid a class because you heard it was hard. The same goes for professors. Opinions on courses are subjective (obviously) and everyone experiences courses differently; a class that was a breeze for someone else might not be for you. Don’t take course reviews too seriously. Rely more on how you feel about the overall course material because you’re more likely to try hard and succeed in a course you’re genuinely interested in, even if it’s more difficult than other courses.

6.  Be kind to yourself

You are a human and being a student is not your only purpose in life. Eat properly, stay hydrated, keep active, and sleep well are the popular pieces of advice. Make sure you’re listening to your body and paying attention to your mental health. There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking time for you when you need it, whether it’s an hour, a day, or a few days. You don’t have to push yourself to extremes or burn yourself out to feel like you’ve done the best that you could. The breaks you give yourself will be the reason you make it through to the end. 

Reminder: It’s possible that your first year doesn’t go well and if it doesn’t, know that it isn’t the end and you can come back from it. First year can be really difficult for some people and it can be a breeze for others. Don’t get discouraged because it’s only the first year and you have many great ones to come later!