How to Study Smarter, Not Harder: The Cambridge System

during my seven year studying medicine at Cambridge University I was presented with the biggest academic challenges I'd ever faced in my life it was sink or swim and what I learned during this time about the true value of studying was absolutely crucial to my academic development I realized learning is not all about studying harder but rather studying smarter in this video I'm going to walk you through seven specific and simple study habits I've adopted which saved both my grades and my sanity and can hopefully do the same for you today we'll go beyond just the basics of active recall and space repetition which you might be familiar with if you've watched some of my other videos and I'll bring you along on a little journey with me through each of my years at Cambridge from first year up to my seventh year I've made a mini notion guide with all of these tips which you can access totally for free via the link below if you're interested if you're new here my name is Izzy I'm a Cambridge graduate and a doctor without further Ado let's get into the video the first habit is the co-working Habit studying is not known for being a particularly fun activity but that doesn't mean we can't try during my first year of University one of my friends who was also studying medicine studied with me every single day during our first year exam term we'd meet up in the morning and start studying together then go get lunch in college together and Hall and generally support each other through the whole process we'd cover topics at the same time and help each other check our work this made it feel so much more fun and enjoyable and sustainable and then when we ultimately passed all of our exams together we felt a real sense of camaraderie and could celebrate together it can be really easy to sort of retreat into your own space when studying and shut out the outside world and thinking that by being zoned in we do things more effectively but in reality this is actually a great time to work with friends to not only bounce ideas off each other but also to strengthen those friendships additionally having an accountability buddy for something is actually proven to increase goal success and help you to move towards whatever your goal is so for example in the case of studying studying with a friend and keeping each other accountable can help you to feel that sense of accountability and get things done within a an hour day week month you can make an agreement together and be like today we're going to get through all of the topics in renal for example number two is the core content habit my second year of medical school was when we had the most pre-clinical knowledge to learn it's literally a volume of knowledge that I'd never experienced before among Cambridge Medical students as well it was a notorious year for Burnout which was something that I personally experienced and also several of my friends and I have a video talking more about that I'll link that somewhere over here it was physically impossible to learn everything and know everything and one of the features of the pre-clinical medical curriculum at Cambridge is that the syllabus is not clearly defined and there's almost an unlimited volume of stuff to learn if you wanted to which was a feeling I was really not used to as previously at school I was always able to learn everything on the syllabi because it was very much limited so here I learned to apply the perito principle also known as the 80 20 rule this concept was discovered by Italian economist Wilfredo perrito who in 1896 observed that roughly 80 of Italy's land was owned by roughly 20 20 of its population and he continued to notice this 80 20 phenomenon for example 20 of the plants in his garden bore 80 of all the fruit the central idea behind this concept is that 80 of all functional outcomes result from 20 of causes so when you study focus on the core topics first in other words focus on that rough 20 that's going to give you around 80 percent of the results laser focus in to all of those 20 on each topic before moving on to anything else or going into more depth for example in Pharmacology which is the study of medications and mechanism of drug action I would start by learning the core drug classes and also the main few examples of these as the core 20 of the knowledge before only later considering adding all the rest of the drugs in that class some of which aren't actually used in clinical practice anymore and also any specific side effects for any Niche drugs that aren't really used anymore by establishing this core understanding of these core content areas I could reap 80 of the benefit of studying without having to go through all of the niche details that were unlikely to really come up in the exam in any big way number three is the Curiosity habit which is essentially about leading with curiosity curiosity can be defined as an intrinsic motivation to learn in my third year at Cambridge I intercalated with a Bachelor of Arts in biological anthropology which essentially is the study of human evolution Health cultural development social networks since seven million years ago this was assessed by essays and also a dissertation with some research and was more free form than my pre-clinical medical studies and I found myself learning a lot and also being able to tailor my learning to what I was interested about I learned to follow my curiosity with Academia and so for example in one of my modules which is around social networks one of the topics was memes and I found myself asking more questions about how memes spread and how viral memes can become a part of our culture and spread throughout a whole society so quickly and as a side effect of this I realized that the things I was genuinely curious about really stuck in my memory so much more you might have found this yourself when you find yourself remembering really random and potentially not very applicable or functional facts that are just really interesting and you're genuinely curious about and actually there's a lot of science behind this because when exploring a topic to learn about we learn much more effectively and retain more information when we're genuinely curious about it in this study which I'll pop on screen the researchers found that Curiosity does indeed have a potent effect on learning itself in both immediate and one day delayed memory tests participants showed improved memory for information that they were curious about and for incidental material learned during states of higher curiosity as part of this study they did fmri scans which stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging and they found the activity in the midbrain and nucleus accumbens was enhanced during states of high curiosity so essentially if you're in this state of really being in the sense of wonder of like oh I really wonder what happens next or oh why does this happen then you can naturally learn things more effectively and remember stuff much more efficiently so you might be thinking okay Izzy but what if I'm not curious about a subject I'm learning in school and that's really a fair point because I think we've all been here and not everything we learn will naturally be interesting to us I'll talk a bit more about how we can deal with content that we don't find super interesting or that we find difficult in habits five and six so stick around for that if you're interested number four is the less is more habit which is essentially about working less which I'm sure you'll be very pleased to hear in my fourth year I started my clinical studies and I started clinical patient-facing placements in hospitals I'd go into placement from nine to five and then try to go home and study afterwards and maybe go to the gym and push myself and I found that quite quickly I was getting a really really tired out and my energy levels were dropping along with my productivity I found something really unexpected which was the less I pushed myself to work when I was feeling drained the better I actually learned and performed this links in with the point before about curiosity where when I was allowing myself to really rest and recharge and feel curious and excited to learn I was able to memorize and learn and absorb material much more effectively through this experience I discovered first hand how important taking care of yourself and actually allowing time to rest is I know literally everyone harps on and on about how important it is to take breaks and allies or to rest it's so true so take it from me after seven years of studying at Cambridge I'm telling you work Less in his book titled rest why you get more done when you work less the rest expert Alex student Kim Pang talks about the benefits of rest and its ability to help you think more creatively and effectively he recommends simple measures like taking breaks to walk or nap which can really replenish your energy fill up your cup and boost your ability to concentrate one crucial component of rest that he also mentions is stopping at the right time and this can be actually really counterintuitive and actually super interesting so this actually triggered my curiosity into something I won't forget Pang recommends that you actually stop working at just the right point which is when you see your next move but you decide to leave it until tomorrow the writer Ernest Hemingway was a famous advocate of this practice actually and he would say to always stop when you know what is is going to happen next overall this is a great way to avoid burnout and also provide a sense of clarity and ease of restarting reducing that activation energy when you're starting work the next day because you already know your next step of course the crucial Foundation of a rest is getting proper sleep I've made a more in-depth video all about this subject which you can check out over here with a bunch of evidence-based tips if you're interested and when we talk about rest we mean real genuine relaxing activities that allow your body and mind to actually take a break from over stimulation so what I don't mean to say that technology can never be involved so such as watching a movie or show can sometimes be a nice way to unwind try to be mindful about what you choose to do during this rest period And I would potentially controversially suggest that scrolling on Instagram doesn't really count as true rest and unwinding and instead maybe take some time to read a book stay away from screens maybe go for a walk something like that number five is the Sprint Habit in my fifth year of medical school we had the infamous pathology exam at Cambridge which was one of if not the most challenging exam I've ever taken in my life but this exam would have to to interpret histological slides understand the pathophysiology of disease along with clinical presentation investigation and management some of the content was unbelievably dry so I experimented with a lot of different ways to try to combat this and one thing that I found really really helped was blocking a set time to focus Pomodoro Style by using a Pomodoro Technique we can make learning feel a bit more motivating and encourage ourselves to study dry or difficult material if you're unfamiliar the Pomodoro Technique is a method of studying developed by a student in Italy named Francesco cirilla in the 1980s it was named Pomodoro because the clock that he used was shaped like a tomato which is pomodoro in Italian the keycepts are number one get your to-do list and a timer to set your timer for 25 minutes which is the set time for a Pomodoro and then focus on a single task until the timer Rings number three when your session ends mark off of Pomodoro take a five minute break in Cirilla's book he recommends 25-minute Pomodoro intervals and five minute break intervals but you can actually Tinker with these times and various different Studies have found different times work for different people often our minds and bodies work in almost ultradian rhythms which are usually around 90 minutes so generally setting a focus period of somewhere between 25 up to maybe 90 minutes would be effective and generally I find that for drier material shorter pomodoros are better because it's more mentally draining to make yourself look at something that you really don't want to whereas if it's something you can get into a flow with then try increasing the Pomodoro duration because then you can actually really get into some deep work on the topic six is the triplet habit which is scheduling three blocks of studying with a topic for each in a day in my sixth year at Cambridge covered lockdowns had hit and delayed a lot of teaching and exams and I ended up taking a gap and some time out for part of the year and I was at home with a lot of unstructured time I found that by planning each day with three topic themes I could give myself some sense of structure for example in the morning I'd study Mandarin then in the afternoon slots in the early afternoon I'd learn medicine and then in the late afternoon maybe I'll learn about another medicine topic groundbreaking it's a great way to divide up the day and have a variety of topics to study but still allow time to focus fully on each one and by its nature this is very helpful with unstructured days so in my case this was during covert lockdowns but it could be something really helpful if you have weekends or if you're a student who has full days to study to see if it helps bring Clarity focus and motivation to your day number seven is the Frog Habit in my final year at Cambridge Medical School I had exams which were the culmination of all of the years of study beforehand which was like meant to be the Pinnacle of my clinical knowledge and examination skills for these I had to demonstrate that I was fully ready to graduate as a doctor I learned that I could make my day flow more smoothly by starting with the hardest tasks or topics first I don't know about you but I find that in the morning my willpower to get through difficult things is much higher so as soon as I wake up if I get the hardest things out of the way I'd feel a sense of momentum and then the rest of my day would play more easily because I'd be like oh ha I've already finished the hardest thing the rest of my day seems relatively pretty chill this is summarized so nicely by this quote from Mark Twain which I absolutely love if it's your job to eat a frog it's best to do it first thing in the morning and if it's your job to eat two frogs it's best to eat the biggest one first of course even in the morning it can be hard to do things that you're intimidated by the most and this won't work for everyone and getting there is not an overnight process so if you're looking for like a bit more guidance or inspiration on this subject I'd really recommend the book eat that Frog by Brian Tracy and if you're interested you can read a summarized version with a few extra juicy links and Analysis on short form and you can get free trial plus 20 off via my affiliate link down below if you're interested if you enjoyed this video I think you might like this one over here where I talk about seven life lessons from seven years at Cambridge University where I talk about the broader life lessons Beyond just studying that I learned at Cambridge University which is some of the most valuable things that I learned during my time there let me know in the comments below or by email if any of these tips helped and if you have any more that you'd like to add thank you so much for watching and as always take care of yourself and I'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Dr. Izzy Sealey

Views: 304,760

Keywords: cambridge university, university of cambridge, cambridge medical student, doctor, izzy sealey, issy sealey, izzy sealy, learn mandarin, learn chinese, language learning

Id: aA6WXzHTH4M

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2023