![]() It does take a while to write flashcards, but I find the act of making them myself allows a bit of first-pass learning. Some are questions, and others ask me to identify structures or clinical signs in an image. I convert every lecture, tutorial and dissection session into flashcards. This is because I can match my medical school’s curriculum and my way of learning. You can download pre-made ANKI decks from their website, but I prefer to make my own for study purposes. I find that this motivates me to try and keep a streak going! ADHD brains love a game, and ANKI add-ons can hopefully make flashcards a little bit less painful. I like the Review Heatmap add-on, which visualises your daily activity. This extension lets you catch Pokemon as you learn. Some make it more like a game, such as Pokemanki. There’s lots of add-ons you can download to spice up your flashcard experience a bit. My ANKI flashcards are all backed up in the cloud, so I can’t leave them on the bus or drop them in a puddle. If you have ADHD, you are probably very familiar with the pain of losing your possessions on a daily basis. I find this especially helpful when I have a lot of flashcards, which leads me onto my next point… 2. This saves me the work of guessing which ones I haven’t done in a while. There’s three reasons why I personally like ANKI.ĪNKI works out when you should repeat flashcards to learn them best. You might have guessed already what I’m describing… Therefore I use tools that I can do repeatedly, a few times over to get information in my brain. This minimises the amount of cramming I have to do, which ADHD brains aren’t great at. I start from day one of the semester, and do small but consistent amounts over the following weeks. Because I have ADHD and get burnt out easily, I like to focus on quality over quantity when I study, which isn’t always expected for a medical student. The ‘little but often’ method applies to my tools for studying too. It will also impact how I feel tomorrow too. If I’m really not in the mood to study, forcing myself to ‘be productive’ is likely to achieve very little. These are the rules I live by, whether it’s studying, work for the BMA, or writing my blog. Even though you feel like you’re not doing anything productive when you scroll on your phone or have a sleep after focusing, your brain is still doing some serious work behind the scenes. When we rest and relax, our brains consolidate the information we’ve been taking in, and commit it to memory. I knew I couldn’t fight my attention-deficit medical student brain, so I spent hours on the internet finding ways to work with it, to my advantage.ĭifferent things work for different people with ADHD, but in this post I am going to share how I study as a medical student.įirst of all, the philosophies I apply to everything in my life… Knowing I had ADHD gave me the motivation to try and research ways of ‘hacking’ it, using the scientific reading skills I had learned as a medical student. The medication I now take certainly helps with keeping me focused, but I’ve also changed the way I study. I finally felt like a “real” medical student. From there, my grades shot from a very low third-class to a percentage point off a first. The cycle repeated, with a short stint on academic probation, until I was finally diagnosed with ADHD in June 2020. Eventually I passed my exams with a slightly improved grade, but again too close to failure. My mood was terrible, and I felt really hopeless. I decided I needed to study harder, and pushed myself to a point where I ended the academic year on antidepressants. ![]() When I got my first set of exam results, I’d barely scraped a pass. ![]()
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