From My Frontal Lobe

Q:Any advice on study techniques and saying no to procrastination?
thanks :)

Anonymous

If you knew me, then you probably wouldn’t want to ask me for advice on saying no to procrastination. I could probably write a couple textbooks on how to procrastinate; of course, they would all be written while I am putting off something I should’ve been doing instead.

What about study techniques? Well, I hate studying. Seriously. I DO NOT like to spend time studying books. I didn’t come to medical school for that. I didn’t choose to apply to medical school because I wanted my days filled with books. Some people do. And that’s great. Some people choose to go to medical school because they are really interested in the material — they find it fascinating. I am not one of them.

To be clear, I’m not saying that I don’t find the material interesting. I am just not one of those people who gets a high off studying. I wanted to come to medical school so that I could treat patients. So getting into the study mode was and still continues to be quite a challenge for me.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a short answer to your question. Everyone studies differently. What worked for me was making my own notes with as many quirky or strange pictures/illustrations I could manage. The down side of this was that it takes longer than just reading through a text book. But I think the retention is a lot better. I created a video to illustrate what this process (for me) looked like when I was studying pharmacology. You can see this video by clicking here.

And now, back to the question about procrastination. Honestly, I still struggle with it. The frustrating thing is that for many people who deal with it, will power is not enough to stop it. There were a few things that helped me with my procrastination. Frankly, I should use still be using these techniques more than I actually am. I also wrote about this previously in two separate posts titled The Game Plan and Study Schedules.

I hope those 3 links above will be of some help. Good luck with whatever you are studying!

P.S. - I hope you are not an anonymous, ambitious 5 year old Kindergarten student asking these questions. If you are, I would advise you to ignore everything I wrote above, stop studying and go play outside.