Hi, I’m Tom.
During this series, I am going to take you on a structured journey through my thoughts on the most efficient and effective ways to learn medicine. I will be discussing how to learn and understand the vast amount of content you need to know to be able to sit medical exams and perform well as a doctor.
During medical school, you will go from being mostly clueless to being a doctor who is capable of treating patients independently. The faster you can retain the factual knowledge and understanding of the content, the more quickly you can develop the ideas, attitudes and skills of a great doctor.
Imagine you could connect to the wifi and download all the factual knowledge you needed to be a doctor overnight. How much easier and more enjoyable would exam preparation, clinical placements, research and patient contact become?
If you can learn and retain enough facts, the rest of medical school becomes so much easier. You can better place your experiences into context and more effectively practise the communication and practical skills you need to develop.
It is worth briefly explaining my journey to arriving at the thoughts and principles I am going to share with you. I spent more than a decade sitting regular medical exams. I sat all the medical school exams, trying many different strategies with varying success, and eventually graduated with honours. Halfway through medical school, I intercalated and completed a bachelor's degree in psychology, with the primary intention of learning more about the process of learning, eventually graduating with a first-class honours degree. After I graduated from medical school, I completed a master's degree in medical education, wanting to take a very deep dive into the underlying theories and principles of teaching and learning medicine. I kept sitting exams, completing the MRCP (membership to the Royal College of Physicians) exams and obtaining the MRCP diploma, completing the DCH (diploma in child health), the DRCOG (diploma from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists) and the MRCGP, or membership to the Royal College of General Practitioners. I even became a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
A big part of the reason for sitting all these exams and diplomas was because I enjoy experimenting on myself and testing my theories and strategies for learning medicine. Some of those strategies have yielded poor results, even leading to me failing exams on a number of occasions. Where I failed, I tried again and implemented a different plan, resulting in dramatically better results. I can confidently say that my successes were not the result of an underlying exceptional ability that I possess; they were the result of trial and error to find the best study strategies, along with careful planning and execution.
What I will do in this series is to share my ideas about creating and testing your own study strategies, overcoming procrastination and inertia to execute your plan, what techniques are evidence-based, and the optimal approach I have found for tying everything together in a simple and effective plan of action.
This series is designed to help you develop your knowledge quickly and efficiently to allow you to excel in exams. It is ideal for a brand new medical student to get a head start and avoid many of the common mistakes new students make. It is also a fantastic guide for current students, who are trying to get to the next level in their exams, have just failed an exam or want to go from high grades to the top of the class.
So without any further waffle, let’s get straight into it. The next section is all about creating a revision strategy that works.