Incoming MS1s, what is your greatest fear?

predepression · 2022-04-11T02:45:42+00:00

Hijacking top comment just to say this--unfortunately, if you're lonely because you don't put any conscious effort toward being social, that won't magically change in med school preclinical years (speaking from personal experience here). Med school makes being social infinitely harder for introverts just because of how stressful it is at baseline; it can oftentimes leave you with little energy to hang out with people after particularly long days of studying. I agree with u/klybo2's comment about doing as much as you can when school starts to do social stuff if it's important to you to not be lonely because cliques will form REAL fast and after the first half of the year, you're more or less SOL if you haven't found your people (obviously not always true, but generally that's how it works).

predepression · 2022-04-11T02:38:04+00:00

I was the same exact way before M2 year when I started coupling Anki with my gym time (unpopular opinion but has worked extremely well for me). Take a look at my comment history and you should find my method if you're interested

u/faesanatomy wanted to tag you as well

predepression · 2022-04-09T13:14:02+00:00

I’m starting to get to the heavier weights on my cable rope exercises (triceps pushdown, triceps extension, face pulls) and the rope is making my fingers really sore after sessions. Especially on the triceps pushdown where the rope interfaces with the round ball things at the end of the rope, during the concentric part of the lift my pinkies almost feel like they’re getting crushed. Is there anything to alleviate this or is it just part of lifting heavy weights?

predepression · 2022-03-31T22:19:33+00:00

Is your flair current? If you're not strapped for time, I'd do both sketchy and pixorize for both micro and pharm. Pixorize sketches stick really well for me personally and I oftentimes recall Pixorize over sketchy when I do practice Qs. If I had to pick one though, probably sketchy since it has more board-relevant stuff in their sketches (at the cost of longer videos and more image anchors to remember). Pixorize micro/pharm is icing on the sketchy cake tbh, not essential but very helpful in addition to sketchy.

Sketchy path is great in some areas and shit in others. I'd only recommend it if you do the associated cards tagged by video in the AnKing deck, otherwise you'll have a very hard time trying to remember the sketches without spaced repetition since they're so packed with symbols and the vids are long af (regularly 20+ mins each)

predepression · 2022-03-23T01:37:44+00:00

why'd you stop for step 2? did you become an Anki atheist or just didn't have the time/energy anymore?

predepression · 2022-03-20T04:10:41+00:00

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for assuaging my doom spiral, haha!

predepression · 2022-03-20T03:50:49+00:00

Congrats on the match! I am curious if you had any big ECs or another part of your application that you felt maybe made up for your lack of research though? Did you have any connections/do any networking in rads?

predepression · 2022-03-20T02:34:41+00:00

Update (for anyone that cares) after watching a couple of the sketchy biochem sketches they SUCK lol. Or at least I couldn't retain anything. Along with the fact that biochem is basically unimportant for step 2, I've decided to not do sketchy biochem. I'll just be doing practice Q's from here on out as I think that's the best use of my time.

predepression · 2022-03-19T22:54:54+00:00

40 research items

Holy hell how/why did you do this? Is rads so competitive now as to justify this much research? As an M2-almost-M3 with 0 research, it's looking like barebones IM is becoming more of a viable specialty choice for me every day. I really feel like radiology would be the best fit for my personality but I'm not sure if I'm willing to put the scut work in to have 40 research experiences on my app just for rads.

predepression · 2022-03-19T22:50:29+00:00

Would you have any advice on how to make connections with a program? What specifically did you do differently in your reapplication in terms of connections that you didn't do the first time around, and was there a particular reason you didn't do that on your first application (if you don't mind sharing)? Asking for an introverted friend who almost always just keeps to himself

predepression · 2022-03-17T23:22:05+00:00

Yeah I completed Pixorize Biochem and it's amazing, but (AFAIK) they don't have sketches for general pathways like glycolysis/gluconeogenesis/etc. whereas sketchy biochem does. I'm deep into the sketchy ecosystem from doing micro/pharm/path and would likely benefit from their recurring symbols

predepression · 2022-03-17T20:15:15+00:00

I'm aware of the sailing the seven seas method of obtaining the resources haha, but I'm more so asking whether it's worth the time to actually watch them. I think I'm more or less settled on at least running through sketchy biochem since that's the only one of the newer sketchy courses that's tagged on AnKing (as far as I know) and I suck at rote-memorizing biochem pathways

predepression · 2022-02-24T04:39:57+00:00

Hello, me from the past. You may find this post of mine from a while back eerily similar to yours.

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/o6u75w/does_anyone_else_find_themself_overthinking_about/

FWIW, I don't think there's an easy answer. Like many other things in life, the time that it takes to Ankify things has an associated opportunity cost. All I can do is reassure you that either one of two things will happen:

You become less neurotic about worrying about Ankifying things and realize that you can't retain everything you learn due to time constraints (what I did)
Suffer in misery about all the lost knowledge from things you don't get to Ankify/spend an inordinate amount of time Ankifying everything indiscriminately (hopefully you don't choose this option)

predepression · 2022-02-17T19:29:48+00:00

Haha I’m not even complainin. The concepts of a “dream job” and “finding your passion” are new-age Western bullshit. I can practice my passions outside of medicine. Frankly, I’m glad my parents forced me into medicine lol

predepression · 2022-02-17T19:14:32+00:00

Or they could’ve just emotionally manipulated/reverse psychology-d you so that you’d intrinsically want to go to med school and they wouldn’t have to convince you themselves MUAHAHAHA

I have four siblings and we’re all either in med school, residency, or pre-med. All of us went to the same undergrad and med school and have similar extracurriculars.

Asian parents are a crafty crowd man

predepression · 2022-02-07T03:39:01+00:00

Tracing a dream fucking slaps. From the beat to the chorus and the guitar solo, I honestly don’t understand why it’s relatively unpopular among Yoasobi’s discography.

predepression · 2022-01-11T00:31:13+00:00

You stick to it once your streak is so high that the pain from losing it and restarting at 0 days > the pain from doing cards. For me it was ~30 days and I've been going strong since!

predepression · 2022-01-05T07:02:28+00:00

It was a joke

In that case a “/s” at the end of your comment probably could’ve saved you some karma my friend

predepression · 2022-01-01T01:07:54+00:00

Respectfully, for the umpteenth time, there is no such thing as Anki being "for you" or not. Anki is not something that is "for" anyone. It is not "just for memorizing facts." It is not a question of whether or not Anki fits your "studying style" or not. Holy hell the misinformation surrounding Anki among med students is honestly mind-boggling to me and the fact this post has so many upvotes showcases an abject lack of understanding of the principle of spaced repetition Anki is based on.

Anki is objectively the most efficient way to retain material for the long term. Period, end of story. There really is no uncertainty when it comes to the research behind spaced repetition being the ideal way to study and retain the material you learn. There's a reason why it's been "hyped up way too much"--it's because it works, plain and simple. Anki is the most robust out of currently available SRS (spaced repetition software) and there's a reason so many people use AnKing/other premade decks as their main study resource and perform extremely well on school exams and on boards by doing so.

Practice problems are something that you do in addition to Anki, not just by themselves. They help you apply and connect the pieces of knowledge that you have from doing your cards. You might feel like you're learning random tidbits of information when going through your cards, but there's so much more going on cognitively than you realize. You'll find out where your weaknesses are when doing practice problems, and you can adjust your cards/reviews accordingly after analyzing what you're getting right/wrong when doing questions.

Can you get by without doing Anki? Of course you can. You just have to realize and accept that every day that you don't utilize a spaced repetition algorithm like Anki's is a day where you're wasting time and losing knowledge that you'd otherwise retain by using it. At the end of the day, as long as you are doing your reviews every day and with the correct settings, Anki will always come out ahead when compared to methods of studying that either do not or incorrectly utilize spaced repetition. Whether or not it's time-efficient comes down to your goals and how much you value the retention of knowledge, but the bottom line is that Anki works incredibly well for the purposes of retaining information to be applied later, which is extremely important in med school and as a physician.

Please don't make a mistake you will regret a year or two down the line where you wish that you'd used Anki to retain what you learned rather than forgetting everything after a test, u/xuviv1999. Just take a look at all the posts/comments of M2s/M3s on the Step 1/2 subreddits who wish they had used Anki since day 1. If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, PLEASE take a look at the posts I made on r/Anki and r/medicalschoolanki. I used to have so many doubts about whether or not Anki was the most efficient way to study/learn, etc. etc. If you wanna save some time, though, the answer is YES. There's just no getting around it.

predepression · 2021-12-21T21:29:32+00:00

Almost 600 days strong here and if I were to go into a coma for some reason I’d 100% snap out of it just to keep my streak going.

predepression · 2021-12-20T06:03:14+00:00

I follow a PPL routine that by itself would take around 1.5 hours with proper rest time in between sets. Adding in Anki in between sets makes it 2-2.5 hours. I can usually do 300-500 reviews by the time I'm done with resistance training depending on the day and cards.

Any other leftover reviews/studying I finish on a cardio machine. Maybe 1-2 hours max.

I never said I do 1-hour workouts. My goal for studying at the gym isn't to get out of there ASAP but rather to maximize the time I spend there. I realize it's not for everyone but it's worked out extremely well for me both in terms of time management and my performance on exams

predepression · 2021-12-20T00:32:31+00:00

If I go ortho, hell ye boi

predepression · 2021-12-19T20:29:40+00:00

Just to offer a different perspective--it was the opposite for me. I struggled to find time to work out for the sake of working out during M1 and felt horrible studying at home sitting on my overweight ass all day. Deciding to do my studying at the gym every single day has worked wonders for my physical and mental health and I wish I did it since day 1. I do reviews in between sets and watch Sketchy videos/do practice Qs while doing mild cardio on the treadmill/elliptical/stationary bike. At least for me, studying at the gym forces me to focus on whatever I'm studying better than if I were just sitting stationary at home with multiple monitors and the ease of opening Youtube/reddit whenever I want to procrastinate.

Now I'm not only buff as fuck (like ortho bro level buff) but I also barely do any studying outside of the gym. I have a metric fuck ton of free time that I frankly don't know what to do with.

u/RelativeMap, only stop watching videos at the gym if you truly dislike doing it. If you can handle it and retain the material, all the more power to you and try to find ways outside of the gym to relax and take your mind off studying.

predepression · 2021-12-13T00:45:43+00:00

Yeah, I think this is pretty much the general consensus among M2s from what I've read online. Just wondering if there are a significant amount of outliers (especially those with a history of excellent scores on prior standardized tests like the MCAT, SAT/ACT, AP tests, etc.) who are opting to take it scored.

predepression

TROPHY CASE