How To Use Anki In Medical School | Step By Step Guide

one of the biggest challenges medical students face is the sheer quantity of material thrown at them pair this with the fact that learning all this material is 100 your responsibility and it can make this experience pretty intimidating luckily there are tools designed that make learning and remembering what you're learning really easier than it's ever been and this is where anki comes in and know this video isn't sponsored by anki and anki wasn't even originally designed for medical students but because this resource coincides so perfectly with the specific needs of medical students you'd be hard-pressed to find a student not familiar with it now anki can be a little difficult to set up and really know how to use and because of this a lot of students are drawn away from it but in this video we're going to walk through why it's so valuable how to set it up and how to use it to really succeed in medical school i'm going to show you specifically how i use it in all the settings and the decks that i use that have helped me be successful as a medical student and many of you may just want to copy these settings down and not get too much into the weeds of this pretty complex tool and that's perfectly fine and others of you may want to use this as a foundation and customize it further for your specific needs also perfectly fine but either way this video will give you a foundation for how you can approach your work and i am so confident that it will set you up for success as a medical student let's get into it [Music] what's up youtube if you're new here my name is j.r smith i'm a medical student at the mayo clinic and it's been a minute since i've seen y'all um my wife madison and i we recently got back from cancun we had a few weeks off from school so we just enjoyed that laying up on the beach and enjoying kind of not doing much work but now we are rested rejuvenated i'm back home back in school and back ready to provide you guys with some videos and i've been really really excited about this one um most of you guys know that i am a huge anki proponent and i have been promising most of you guys that i would make a video for you guys so thank you for your patience i think that it's going to be worth it now i've been using anki since i started medical school and i actually recently spoke with a few of our first-year medical students here at the mayo clinic about anki and how amazing it is and honestly that that's what motivated me to have a sense of urgency to really bring this video out to you guys so anki is the japanese word for memorize and it's used in a variety of settings even roger craig who used to be the record holder for most jeopardy award winnings used anki to memorize a lot of just random facts that you need on jeopardy and it's becoming more and more frequently used in medical school a study in 2015 by washington university school of medicine surveyed their students and found that 31 percent were using anki and found that the use of anki flash cards was a significant independent predictor of step one scores and for me personally i think it's the primary reason i went from being an average student in undergrad to really excelling in medical school and the reason is is because it forced me to use two very important methods of learning active recall and space repetition these are the two most effective ways of learning and then remembering what we're learning and since that's essentially our job in medical school anki should be our best friend active recall is essentially just testing yourself it's the idea that actively working our memory and pushing ourselves to retrieve information will be much more effective than things like reading and highlighting text let's think about two separate students who are reading a textbook on arthritis and as they're reading the textbook they come across a part that says osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis both students decide that this is something that they want to remember one chooses to highlight it and the other writes down on a note card what is the most common type of arthritis and puts the answer on the back now when the second student gets to the end of the chapter he pulls that note card out and tests his memory now who do you think will remember that fact better the literature says that the second student using active recall is going to remember this information much better than the first student who is using more passive modes of learning a recent research study reviewed the literature on 10 different learning techniques and they showed that practice testing and distributed practice had high utility and showed greater effectiveness than things like rereading highlighting and summarizing practice testing is what it sounds like it's testing yourself it's the same thing that that second student did when he wrote down that question on the note card and then used it to test if he remembered what he read distributed practice took this a step further and was defined as using a schedule of practice questions that spread out the study activities over time and this brings us to space repetition the second concept medical students should use so that we're not only learning material but we're actually remembering what we're learning now this is even more straightforward than active recall it's just scheduling out time that you will review the material you're learning and by doing this we're avoiding what has been termed the forgetting curve which states that over time we forget things which may not come as a surprise to you but it claims that every time we refresh ourselves on what we learn the time it takes to actually forget it lengthens and eventually this can actually become permanent knowledge for us this was discovered by a german psychologist named herman eddinghaus who essentially tried to remember fake made-up words and tested himself on these words over varying periods of time and plotted his results on a graph that we now term the forgetting curve and on this graph you can see that information is lost over time when there's no attempt to retain it but every time that we consciously review that material it takes longer for us to actually forget it and this makes sense right think about being introduced to somebody for the first time you may struggle to remember that person's name just one day after meeting them now think about a close friend who you haven't seen in years it probably didn't take much to recall that person's name even if you haven't used it in ages and it's because when you were building that relationship you were constantly using that name whether it was a couple times a day or a few times a week or even months now years can go by and you still remember that person's name so when you're in medical school and you're learning what seems to be an unreasonable amount of material and your professors are just rattling off fact after fact off the top of their head we have to understand just how many times they've seen and reviewed that information and a lot of times other people's knowledge and understanding of certain topics leads students to experience that imposter syndrome but really it's just that this person has seen this material more times than you have it's not necessarily that they're inherently smarter than you are and that's why doing well in medical school and mastering the material that you're given isn't really dependent on what you may think of as natural intellect but much more dependent on your work ethic and strategies for learning we should be thinking how can i consistently review and test myself on the material i'm learning and there are a ton of ways that you can go about this but i can't think of anything more effective and efficient at accomplishing those two things spaced repetition and active recall than anki anki is essentially a collection of note cards that you can either create yourself or download that first test your knowledge no different than writing down on a note card what is the most common form of arthritis but it also employs space repetition because you'll continue to see this card time and time again over varying time intervals based on how well you remember this information and what's amazing is that this tool uses an algorithm specifically designed to overcome the forgetting curve so as you're learning things in medical school anki allows you to really solidify that knowledge essentially on autopilot and what really makes this a powerful tool for medical students is that there are pre-made decks specifically for medical school a deck is just a term used to describe a collection of cards and other medical students other incredible medical students have created libraries of cards that coincide almost perfectly with everything you'll be learning in your specific classes these decks are designed to help prepare students for their step exams and since many schools use their courses to accomplish the same goal the material is more or less spot on so not only do you not have to worry about scheduling your review of the material but you don't even have to worry about creating the cars in the first place and of course you can always add cars based on specific things that you're learning or specific things that you want to remember but i would say that out of all the cars that i do maybe one percent are cars that i've personally made now again because anki can be challenging to get set up and really know how to use i'm going to walk you through this process and show you the settings that i use and how i use it so let's head over to the computer first you're going to want to download anki onto your computer i've included a link in the description below for where you can do this but once you've downloaded it onto your computer and you open it you'll see a home screen that looks something like this now it'll look a little bit different you won't have these decks here and you may just have a deck that just says defaults when you first download it but it will look something similar to what this looks like so before we dive into the decks and creating your own cards let's first just get our settings set up so i can show you how i have my settings set up and you can see if these will work for you so i go to my preferences for anki and then this is what will pull up it has four sub categories basic set scheduling network and backups um really the only one that i think that i actually played around with was scheduling and this is the only one that i think that you should play around with i have the first thing check the show next review time above answer buttons this will you'll see what this means once you actually use anki but when you have things like you know good it can say you won't see it again for three and a half months or you know things like that um it's nice to see that because if you want to see something sooner you may change how frequently you see it and you won't know that unless it tells you you know when's the next time you're going to see it the second box is something that some people do have checked it's showing remaining card count during review so when you're doing these and you have 500 cards to do some people like to see okay i'm down to 400 i'm down to 300. for me i don't like to see that because i start to look down at the card remaining count and it actually slows me up because then i'm just like trying to get through it and instead i have it i don't even know how many i have left and i just kind of crank through until it just says i'm done um so if you're like that i would uncheck this i think it comes defaultly checked this box the show learning cards with the larger steps before review i don't have checks and i don't have an android so i don't have this checks either this next day starts at so this is a everyday kind of tool so i usually do my anki in the morning so i want my next day to be refreshed before i get up before i do my anki so i never would really start my anki before 4am sometimes i've started it around 4am but um never before 4am so as long as my next day starts at 4 hours past midnight so that's going to be 4am for me i'm good for some people they want to do their honky in the evening so you can change this to something like 8 p.m if you don't plan on starting your anki until after them and then learn ahead limit 20 minutes i'm pretty sure this this may be the default network these are things just like syncing so if you so you can download your on your computer your phone your tablet um this is just going over synchronization across those devices and then backups if anything happens you can keep backups so those are the basic preferences settings um that i use you can also turn on night mode if you like kind of a darker background um i personally have night mode for almost everything except for my anki but if you want night mode there it's right there so now that our settings are all set we can get into our cars and we can either create personal decks or we can download pre-made decks like what this anking is i personally use pre-made decks almost exclusively and we'll get into those in a minute but you may like to just create your own personal decks like what i have here and i'm going to show you guys how to do that let's say that i wanted to create a deck for orthopedic surgery i would come down to the bottom here and click create deck i can title it ortho and there you have it you see the deck just popped up alongside my the other decks that i have in my library now to add cards i simply go to the add button on the top of this window and this window will come up which allows you to create a car to add to this deck this type button here shows the different types of cars that you can have i really only recommend using maybe two to three different types and i'll show you the two that i primarily use and then the deck is just going to be the deck that we're adding it to which is going to be ortho first i'm going to show you how to create the basic flash card which is the default here and it's the common question on one side answer on the other side type of flash card so from our earlier example i can write what is the most common form of arthritis and i know that the answer to that is osteoarthritis now there's something else that you can do here which is really cool and you can use this tags feature and so let's say that i wanted to tag this arthritis so now whenever i wanted to study any cards that i made related to the topic of arthritis i can find all the cards that i have on this topic you can do other things like bolding or underlining text and things like that i personally just leave it like this and so when you're finished with your card you simply click this blue ad and it goes away but don't worry it didn't actually go away i'll show you where is in a second but before then i want to show you the other type of card that i use and it's the one that i almost use exclusively and it's called close deletion so to get there i can just go up to type i can click basic and i can just type in close and it's going to be closed deletion now instead of having the classic front back flash card i now have a fill in the blank style card which i found works in many more different settings than the traditional front back style card so i'm going to use the same question that we had before but now i wanted to say blank is the most common form of arthritis and i want that blank to be osteoarthritis so i'm going to just type in the true statement and now i'm going to substitute osteoarthritis with a blank statement and i'll show you how i do this so i highlight this you can just double click it and you're going to use this bracket tool over here you see that it says close deletion you can also use keyboard shortcuts command shift c if that interests you but you can just click that and what it does is it puts this in brackets and you'll see what this looks like once we get to the card again you can see that the tag arthritis actually stays there which is nice because if you're making a lot of cards on the same topic you don't have to keep putting in the tag so i'm going to add this card and i'm going to go out of here and you can now see that i have two new cards those two cards that we created in my ortho deck so what i do is now i can click my ortho deck i can click study now and this is that closed deletion style card that i just made it says blank is the most common form of arthritis and you can see now that this blank is in those same kind of brackets but i actually can't see the answer so on the bottom here you can click show answer alternatively you can click the space bar which is much more efficient and this is what i do but first i have to answer this question in my head so osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis again testing myself i click the space bar to check it and there we have it but at the bottom you can see if i missed it i can click again and i'll see it again in five minutes if i got it but it maybe have taken me five to ten minutes to really remember what it was i can click hard and i would see it again in 12 hours or just at the end of my anki session if i got it i can click good and i'm gonna see it again tomorrow and if it was really easy i can click easy and i would see it again in four days so these are those time intervals that we're able to see and again you can use keyboard shortcuts so again would be a one hard would be two good would be the space bar or three and hard would be four i usually just alternate between one and the space bar so either i got it or i didn't but you may want to utilize these different options when you're using your space repetition so since i got that one i'm going to click the space bar that i got it good and now we have the second form of the card that we created that basic style card what is the most common form of arthritis osteoarthritis and it's going to show me that just like a front back card would so now i'm going to click good again it says i finished my deck for now i can go back to my decks and i don't have any do cards now this is how you can add your own cards and your own decks but again the cards that i create make up a very very small fraction of the cards that i actually use to review there are a ton of pre-made decks out there which were created by incredible medical students that have essentially everything you need specifically this on king deck here is what most medical students use and this is what i use and it's in my opinion the most valuable tool that medical students can have i'll include links to this deck in the description as well as a link to a reddit thread where you can find a ton of other decks that are specific for medical students like this anatomy deck that i have now before hopping into this deck you actually want to install a few add-ons into anki which are just tools that make anki run smoother and make really large decks like the anking a little easier to navigate so to do this you just go up to tools and you click on add-ons and when you do that this will pop up so you can see i already have these add-ons here the most important of which that really corresponds well with the on king is his hierarchical tags too and so to do this all you have to do is google anki add-ons you'll get a list and those list of add-ons whatever add-ons you want have a corresponding number associated with them you just click get add-ons you type in that number you click ok and like you see right here it says changes will take effect when anki is restarted so you'll click ok you'll continue to put in all the numbers that you want for your add-ons and then you restart anki and they're already automatically updated into your anki so i'll again have links to where you can get these add-ons set up into your anki but it really just makes everything a lot more smooth so now that i have my add-ons i want to adjust a few settings in here and i can show you the settings that i use with my on king deck so the first thing on here references what time intervals you're going to use when you get a card wrong and you get a card right on your first day so for me when i get a card wrong i want to see it again in five minutes so this is what this means right here if i get a card wrong i'm gonna see it again in five minutes when i get a card right on the first time that i see a card i'm gonna see it in 1440 minutes which is one day i don't know why it's only in minutes but 1440 minutes is 24 hours the next thing is order and so i want to show new cards in random order this is how i like to do it if things are in a specific order then i'm not really thinking about the card and i'm just remembering the order so this kind of helps me avoid that now new cards per day we're gonna try to max this out and it doesn't mean that this is how many cards you're doing but it's important that you put this to 999 so that you don't have a limit on how many cards you can do in a day my graduating interval is just set to three my easy interval is set to four so again on that card that said what is the most common form of arthritis and i knew it was osteoarthritis i could have clicked easy and i wouldn't have seen it for another four days so that's what this is referring to when i go over to reviews again we're going to have this maxed out to 999. you can see these settings here i honestly didn't play too much around with these settings other than this maximum interval so this maximum interval i think is pretty important because i set this to 180 days which is six months and that means that no matter how well i know a car no matter how many times i get it right in a row it won't go more than six months without showing me that card again because i think if i've waited two years to see a card it'd be over my head regardless of how many times i've seen it and when you have things like step coming up and these other exams i just want to be able to see things i don't want more than six months before so for me i set that to 180 days over in lapses what i thought was important is a leech threshold so let's say that i missed something eight times in a row that's going to try to tag that card but the leech action that i wanted is just to tag it because i can miss something eight times in a row and i don't want this to think that the card is broken because sometimes i might be broken so if i missed something eight times in a row it's just going to tag that card for me under general i don't really mess around with these settings and there's nothing here to mess around with unless you're really into code and now we're back to the homepage when you've done this i'm sure your onking now says a ton of cards right here under new now what you want to do is you're going to want to go to browse and when you go to browse this is what your browse will come up you're going to want to go over to dex you're going to click on anking you're going to click into the field over here you want to highlight all of the cards for you they're probably going to be all unlocked so instead of yellow they'll probably be a gray you're going to do command all that's the fastest way to highlight everything and then you're going to click command j and what that's gonna do is it's gonna turn all the cards yellow essentially what you just did is you suspended all of the cards and so now they're all turned off if you did that and you clicked here now it would probably look like this and you don't have any cards to do now what you want to do is now once you have this you can actually go back into your browse and now you can unsuspend cards you can turn cards back on as you're going through them in lecture so the way that anki works is it's by tags and they use tags based on third-party resources like first aid boards and beyond pathoma sketchy all of these third-party resources and the way that they do it is by that tag system and so that's what these are here we don't want to really play around with the decks as much when we're unsuspending now now we want to focus on the tags and so this ak step v7 is the tag that you want to use because these are the courses that first and second years are going to be using because we're preparing for step one so if i click the toggle you'll see i have all these third-party resources here now what i can do is if i am going through something in first aid for example and i'm in biochemistry and what we're learning about is chromatin structure what i can do so i've already done these cards that's why mine are already unsuspended but for you yours are going to be all yellow as i go through my lecture on chromatin structure i can highlight all of these i can highlight using command a and then i can click command j again and that's going to unsuspend those cards so it's going to turn your cards from yellow into gray and when they're gray now when you go over here you're going to have all of those cards here it's not going to be that egregious amount that you had at first but it's going to be however many cars correspond to chromatin structure when you're learning that the cars are going to be the same material that you're learning in your lecture alternatively you can go to browse and let's say that i am watching a boards and beyond video and i'm still in biochemistry i'm it's about the dna structure so i watched the boars and beyond video on dna structure and after i watched that video all of these cars are specifically targeted towards that video on dna structure which again are going to correspond really really well to when your professor gives you the lecture on dna structure so every lecture you have you can use anki you can use the tags to unsuspend cards related to that lecture so then you can go to lecture you can use a third-party resource if you want to but you can use the tags that are related to the specific material learned in lecture and unsuspend cards and start to do those as you're progressing through lectures and as you're progressing through your courses now there's sure to be cars that you may not need to know or maybe low yield and you don't want to know and as you can see here i've unsuspended my dna structure when i was in biochem but out of all of these cards i still kept three suspended so i unsuspended them all when i actually got to the cards when i was doing my reviews i wasn't liking them whether it was because they were low low yield something that i really didn't learn or something i didn't really care about so then i just resuspended them and you can do this as you kind of progress through there's a lot of material in here you don't have to know all of it and when you're doing this day in and day out and doing this for every single one of your courses you're going to appreciate when you're really focusing on high yield information um you don't necessarily have to do every single card in the yonking deck obviously the more you do the more you're gonna know but it is nice being able to toggle that suspend feature which is really really easy so just for a reference let's say that i wanted to highlight these cards i'm gonna highlight them i'm gonna click command j so now they went from yellow to gray they're unsuspended now when i get out of here i have those three cards i can click my anki to do i'm gonna click study now which thyroid medications are associated with drug induced lupus i don't remember because i haven't done these cards but when i click space it's gonna tell me that those two are the ones i don't really i haven't learned this yet and i may learn this in another course but since i haven't yet all i do is i click shift 2 or the at symbol and you see card suspended and the next card if a patient on isoniazid develops arthralgias and a rash you should suspect the patient has developed probably lupus drug induced lupus so i'm fine keeping that card i've seen something related to it before so i'm just gonna keep it in my deck now so now i'm gonna click space again and the last one which antibody is sensitive for a drug induced lupus not completely sure haven't learned it yet i'm gonna click space so i can see it anti-histone antibodies was not completely sure on that did not know don't feel like i need to know at least now so i'm going to click shift to and it's going to be suspended so that's what a few cars look like in the on king deck i know a lot of people are also going to be wondering how many cards i do how long it takes me you can see today i did 480 cards in a little less than two hours that's about typical for me um and you can see that my daily average is about 400 cards you can also see that i have a streak of 222 days and anki is one of those things where it's important that you do this consistently every single day that's how you utilize the space repetitions that you can avoid that forgetting curve and you utilize the algorithm by coming in day in and day out to do the anki that's the hardest part about this but as you can see again two hours every day of doing anki isn't the worst part and again as medical students studying learning this is our job if we can commit to coming in day in and day out we're going to be doing really well in our courses and most importantly we're going to be solidifying knowledge in our brain that's going to make us good doctors so that's how i use anki and why i think it's the most valuable tool for medical students i hope that you guys enjoyed this video i hope that it was worth the wait and most importantly i hope that it helps you get to the grind of medical school if you did find this video helpful make sure you smash that like button and consider subscribing if you haven't already so you don't miss any future uploads i hope this video can make the transition into finding out how you learn best a little easier and most importantly help you grow as a student and a lifelong learner because really that's what we're here to do and as always keep evolving and i'll see you guys in the next one all right before i go i don't know if y'all noticed but look at this dope mug that my sister-in-law got me we got all of these amazing black male figures we got martin luther king obama we got malcolm x frederick douglass muhammad ali drinking coffee out of this gonna make me get through anything

Channel: Evolving Medic

Views: 45,410

Keywords: Medical school, med school, married in medicine, Mayo clinic, med student, medical student, minority in medicine, black doctor, surgeon, premed, usmle, mcat, premed student, black men in medicine, minorities in medicine, med school advice, premed advice, keep evolving, evolving medic, advice, tips, strategies, Anki, anki tutorial medical school, anki tutorial for beginners, anki tutorial, medical school vlog, medical school study tips, med school day in the life

Id: xLIKnumRXD0

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021