Even though a lot of the boxes are missed, I still hit a lot of them even though I didn’t record it. But if I didn’t record it, it didn’t happen.

Recently, I’ve been eating like crap, and sleeping like crap. I am going to start hitting the basics, and hitting the bare minimum for my nutrition again. On top of fixing my nutrition, I will have a strict wake up of 5 to help me get into a better sleep rhythm.

I am going to start meditations in the morning. My mentality has been bad all around, I am low energy, lacking confidence. I have felt like I have been getting hit in the mouth everyday(or at least every other day) since school started.

I am tired of feeling a step behind on all the material. My back is against the wall right now I don’t have much of a choice but to step up. It is time to start getting ahead. I am going to get better from this moment going forward. For second year med students the test questions are more complex. They aren’t asking me to identify things quite so much as they are asking me treatment plans or adverse effects of medications. This makes sense to me now because they want me to start thinking like a doctor, as a doctor might prescribe treatment to a patient he should know why he is doing it and what side effects the patient might encounter. It took me a while to genuinely understand this. While some questions are still “first order” or simple recall questions, many questions have become more what should you, as a doctor, do for your patient in terms of physical exam, diagnostics, treatments, and answering the “why’s” for each of the previously mentioned.

I used anki but only for the cards that I made, so they were more focused on the lecture material. A few times, I had a ton of energy making them and I was in a good place. Although I didn’t make them with the focus of approaching a patient, I made them to cover basic memorization.

I will need to work things out and cover every condition from front to back. There is the adage more is better, which in medical school I believe is mostly correct, until a time comes that you feel you have a handle on the material, at that time better is better. I thought I was at a better is better stage in my career where I was thinking about how to be more efficient when studying, but now I believe I am at a more is better stage. There was an academic counselor at my school last year who said you need 7 passes to get to a point where you have mastered the material so to speak. This is what I am thinking, I need to hit the lecture material repeatedly through my notes, and work front to back for every condition we see.

Another thing that I learned is that I need to start going more in depth in the lecture material. I was trying to game the lectures and only hit on the material the professors emphasized, and that helped, but I am thinking now that I’ll have to increase the breath of material that I will be reviewing.

I will also be previewing lectures with Pathoma/BnB/Sketchy. These videos are great. They are clear and concise with tons of value, and I wish I would have gotten to them earlier this semester.

The next card will be a bit broken into a bit more day-to-day level for my academics. And I will leave it on my desk so I see it all the time.