THE BEST STUDY TECHNIQUES that have helped me survive school

this is how I study and before we get into the video let me just be that really good friend for a second that's going to tell you yeah I haven't started either we got this we'll be fine don't worry I Believe in Us well hello everybody I guess the reason why you clicked on this video is because desperate times have called for desperate measures you have to study you might have found yourself in a little bit of trouble because you have no idea how to do it I've been there I've done that and this is why I'm here today trying to help you guys hello everybody and happy Friday it is T minus 5 days up until my next exam which is Oral Facial Surgery and I am about to get down to studying I've done a little bit over the last few days but I'll be very honest I was not in the right mindset to do anything crazy so now I'm back and I'm going to get down I'm going to study and it helps me massively if I get ready for the day whenever I'm studying so that's what I'm going to do and I'll see you guys soon so for those of you who are like who the heck is this girl my name is Anna I'm a dental student in my final year of dental school here in Germany and I'm currently taking my state exams which is the German equivalent to taking the board in the United States which means I am now officially graduating dental school and today I want to share with you guys my tips and tricks my study methods how I am currently surviving this really extended period of time in my life with things that I've learned throughout the time I do have a separate video that I filmed half a year ago about how I studied within school during every semester in every term today's video is solely about studying techniques that I'm currently using I don't know what time it is when you're watching this video but I think it's going down right finals midterms your day-to-day exams everything's coming down and sometimes it feels like it's too much and sometimes we're like I do not know how to prepare for this I have been there plenty of times when I was in high school first form second form I was pretty lucky just having a quick wit and with getting around things without really having to study when I got into University things really change I had to learn how to study and that's not easy that is not easy that it's hard so I did my research and I found out a couple of things that really help me now I do want to mention though that those are techniques that work for me they might not work for you everyone's different everyone's brain works a little bit differently like my attention span is really short I have to keep things interesting to keep ongoing if you have a longer attention span you can work differently in order to study effectively you you have to kind of know yourself you have to know your strength and your weaknesses work with and around them so here is how it goes with my state exams I have had seven exams within 5 weeks I think three of those weeks were living hell but that was because I also had practical exams people told me I'm being dramatic honestly guys this time feels really dramatic so let me be right now it feels like it's the most important thing in my life because it is the most important thing in my life for my first exam I had all the Time in the World to prepare care for and I took like 1 and 1/2 months was Orthodontics 50 subjects 50 different lectures that I had to read through and prepare because you don't really know which one you're going to pick pick a card out of the 50 and whatever subject whatever question you're getting you have to answer in tooth preservation I had less than a week to study which was really really fun plus every single day I had practical exams and an exam so whenever I got home at night I was just so tired it was crazy I couldn't really study effectively during that time that was really just me reading through stuff and hoping to retain anything for my other exams I really had all the freedom and all the luxury to work with all of the study techniques that I have gathered over the years one thing I would really recommend I love not taking as well skip the note taking don't take notes don't copy lecture slides don't copy textbooks don't take your own notes you're never going to look at them again I know it hurts nobody wants to hear that everybody's like oh but I love cute colorful notes you know how many videos I watched in the past on how to take beautiful notes thing is I never looked at them when studying because reading through them I couldn't do it reading through them was one of the worst things ever I took notes for my Ortho exam first half of the question 25 questions I wrote down with a very normal classic note taking approach second half I did with questions and answers second half was so easy to study first half torture it took me so much time to go through that that file and find the answers to what I was looking for they contain all of the information that I need but I couldn't utilize them to study so as much as I love note taking cuz it's fun it's also procrastination don't do it if you want to take notes do it effectively do it with flashcards notion is Great Notion is definitely a tool that I would recommend to every student out there to get because it's free especially if you are a student you can get all of the pro tools for free and it's amazing notion is the the number one thing I love notion I use it for time planning I have a list of all the topics questions lectures I can mark them as completed as in process it's amazing and then I can go to all the sub pages and I just write down my little notes and I just write down my little questions so the way how I take my nodes is I'm combining a blurting method with taking nodes and adding that active recall spice to it by transforming them into questions I don't write down noes as if I would be writing down a notebook a textbook or like a script I'm writing them down as in answers to questions now the bluring method is one of the first studying techniques that I would really recommend you guys to do the bluring technique pretty much is about you reading however much you want to read it could be a paragraph it could be one page it could be two pages it could be an entire chapter you close the book you put the source material aside you sit down and you force yourself to write down or however you want to do it you can also just speak about it you recall all of the information that you had just read writing it down is the easiest way to do that because then you can easily once you're done check back in and find out the gaps of the things that you miss you pretty much do this again and again and again up until you have a good amount of information retained so I did that with my note taking whenever I wrote down the questions and I wrote down the answers I usually went from one paragraph to another cuz my memory is not that great I'll be very honest and there's nothing more frustrating than if you've read an entire chapter you're trying to work through that entire chapter you're sitting down and you don't really remember anything except for like two phrases and then you just get so frustrated and you stop doing it that's one of the key things whenever you're studying work in a way that you're not getting frustrated and feel stupid because if you feel stupid you are not going to keep on doing it you're going to throw everything aside you're going to try to do something more fun you're going to go on your phone you're going to get that dopamine hit from social media you're going to text with your friends you're going to go outside you're not going to keep on studying in order to enjoy studying you have have to do it in a way that it feels successful for you we love success nobody wants to feel like a failure the question answer thing works the best way if you read through the entire text that you want to transform into information that you can obtain and retain you read through it skimming scanning reading that's how you do it you skim through it means you read through the entire text very roughly you scan for the questions that could potentially be made out of that text and then you read and you answer the questions that you've created you're going to look at a paragraph skimmed and scanned for the most important information and you are going to use your brain power to think of a question that you could create out of that information I like to create these questions as if my professor would be asking me them what is the one question that my professor could ask me where I could utilize all of the information given in this text and that's that so at the end of that phase one I would be left with all my flashcards except for I'm doing it in notion there are no flash cards but I have these you know slide open pages and lists with my questions and my answers I also like flash cards whenever I want to create flashcards I really love using study smarter and good notes a general tip if you're currently about to get into college or university goodnotes is a great app it does cost money but it's a really good investment to have to store all your files all your notebooks you can create study cards you can and create calendars in there it's amazing it's one of the best apps to have definitely I tried notability personally love good notes more a bunch of my friends are using notability I don't know at the end of the day I also do think it's about Aesthetics I've been a good notes girl since day one it's the one for me good notes and I we go hand in hand as soon as phase one is over and I have all the material for active recall we actually go into active recall space repetition whenever you have the time number one thing to do do do not study everything all at once do not study everything every single day something that goes alongside with space repetition but is not exactly the same is putting the subjects your lectures whatever you want into groups and categorize them with color coding it that's how I did it with ortho at the end cuz I only had a week to actually recall everything which is not a lot for 50 subjects I made myself list I did a color coded with red yellow and green green being the subjects that I felt most secure about the ones where I felt like if I only skim through it one or two more times I'm going to be good yellow being the ones where I felt pretty okay if went down I would be able to talk my way out of it but I still need more details and red being the ones where I'm like I did not know anything I really have to study from scratch I would always say that the ones that are in the Red Zone you should look at every single day the ones in the yellow orange Zone it's fine if you don't look at it every single day and the green ones just whenever you have time once a week every 3 days maybe but that also depends on how your memory works I think there is not one size fits all kind of schedule you kind of have to figure that out for yourself and then I like doing active recall one of the most basic things is to just look at the question try to give an answer there are different ways of how I do this when I'm in public I'm not I'm not a library girl I'm not going to the library to study I'm not doing that I love studying at home but sometimes I used to study at school I was already there and it was more convenient to just sit down there and study I would put on noise cancelling headphones and I would answer the questions in written form with good notes or on paper another kind of twist on this which is something that I like doing at home is using my handy dandy whiteboard which I love very much if you've been on this channel for a little bit you know that I love my whiteboard it's one of the best investments that I ever made you can get them for such a small amount of money on Amazon whatever it's resource friendly you do not have to waste paper and to me it feels better than to use my iPad I don't know why I think I could probably potentially use my iPad for the same source and reason but I prefer using my whiteboard and that's something that I did when I studied for Ortho was when I tried to answer the questions I wrote down a mindmap on my whiteboard like I put down the title I wrote down the big I don't know like points the key points that I wanted to tackle within my answer kind of connected them and wrote down tiny little bullet points for every key point I did not write down all the information on the Whiteboard but I used it afterwards to go into detail and to explain my answers I did it in that very specific way because I knew that for this exam I would have 15 minutes to prepare my answer I would draw a card I would see the question that I got and then I would have 15 minutes to prepare now there were two rounds on this exam I can tell you how it went down the first one around I was so nervous I was so anxious I just wrote everything down I was so in my head I wrote down everything that came to mind in no particular order then gave out my answers it wasn't good like it wasn't terrible but there was no structure I had no idea what I was really talking about and I was just really nervous second round I was like okay I kind of I have have to shift this I I cannot do this again I draw my second question and this time around I just I took a deep breath and I did exactly what I had done at home before with my whiteboard wrote a mind map I gave out my answers so much structure I knew exactly what I wanted to say I knew exactly in what kind of order I would want to give my answers I wrote down the key points the things that I did not want to forget to mention that one was good I got like three questions from her first time around my professor asked me more questions than I gave out answers that's all always a bad sign I didn't even mention we're having spoken exams we're not having written exams I think if you have a written exam one of the best things to do is actually write down the answers exactly how you would write them down within the exam but I do also think whenever you have written exams a lot of the time you have a lot of practice exams to go through them another thing that I love doing and a studying technique that I really want to recommend you guys to try is the fman technique the fman technique is another active recall studying technique and it is amazing as chef's kiss it pretty much means that you are going to explain a subject and the best way to do this imagine you're trying to explain it to somebody who's never heard of this thing before if you can explain a topic to somebody who has no clue about it you have to understand it first the best thing to do that is you know the details you're just not going to throw them out because that person doesn't know anything but in case they have questions you should know more answers you should know the details when whenever you're taking your notes you can already implement this by writing down the answers to the questions that you've created to yourself in simplified words use your own words as if you would explain it to somebody else and with a fman technique you can do it at home you can do it alone or you can actually explain it to other people but something that has always helped me out tremendously was whenever I felt somewhat secure in my studying was to explain it to other people and to have other people explain things to me especially last minute before an exam having my friends explain things to me and their own words always helped me out so much especially if they had metaphors analogies one of the best things so this is one of the oldest study methods that's been on the internet for like I don't know how many years ever since the internet was probably created the Pomodoro Technique I've mentioned it so many times on my channel pretty much means that you work for a certain interval you take a break for a certain interval the interval of your break always being shorter than the one of how you work the very classic standard approach to this is 25 minutes 5 minutes off however you kind of have to figure out for yourself how much time you can work on and how much time you need off personally I don't like 25 minutes because I don't get anything done within this time I prefer working for at least 1 hour and then taking at least 15 minutes off a lot of the time I do work in time blocks of 1 and 1 half hours but if I work for such an extended amount of time you do need like at least 1 hour of a braak and that's how I do it and I do like two to three maybe four of these time blocks and then that's it for me you have to know when your energy Peaks throughout the day appear and utilize them I'm not really a morning person I prefer working out in the morning but I hate studying in the morning I can't do it I can't focus I can't focus up until noon I know that about myself so I plan my days accordingly I work out in the morning don't stop working out shocker and then I study from noon onwards up until the evening I am a night owl but I do know that after like 900 p.m. this standby mode I can't I can't study so I know it doesn't make sense to study after 9:00 p.m. it doesn't work that way know your energy Peaks and use them to your advantage if you prefer studying in the morning first thing after waking up do that if you prefer studying at 1:00 a.m. do that don't listen to what everyone else is doing you do what suits you best another thing that really helps me is getting ready and looking cute whenever I want to study it just makes me feel more like in the Zim you know what I mean like I feel like yeah I'm I'm in my work mode I'm not in my lounging around at home mode not a studying technique but definitely something that I want to mention before ending this video if you want to study well if you want to perform well if you want to be in your academic weapon era you have to get an enough sleep rest recovery good nutrition good diet don't neglect your social life do not forget to go out with your friends every once in a while just because it's exam season does not mean that you have to lock yourself inside of your house use your time effectively have a good time scheduling plan utilize the time know how you work personally I can only work for four to maximum of 6 hours every single day all of the other time I cannot focus anyways I'm drain my brain dead not actually dead but empty there's no sense of me not using the free time that I have besides that so do have a social life go on dates go meet up with your friends recharge your social batteries don't run empty like you can't keep on going if you're constantly drying yourself out go to the gym work out go to your sports clubs whatever you doing keep on doing that and every once in a while take a day off don't work every single day that doesn't work no pun intended take days off give yourself a little breather it's really important I hope you guys found this video slightly helpful you really wanted to know my studying techniques I still have more than half of my exams coming at me so in case anything changes in case I find any new techniques I will definitely let you guys know up until the beginning of July I will be an exam season baby but I feel good because it's about to be summertime and I feel so much more motivated I beds you have heard a bunch of these things but sometimes it's not always about necessarily learning new things as in finding out about new studying techniques but also about how people bring them across to you what I really want to do is I do not want to transform you into academic weapons I'm not the best of my grade I'm not the smartest but I want you to remember that life is always beautiful and always worth living and you can get things done and you can be productive but you can also have fun that's really important to me God knows for the longest time time all of these things were such a struggle for me I could not find the joy and the beauty in these things and I'm not just talking about studying life in general college life it just didn't feel as fulfilling as I always thought it would be when I was in high school I really found my way around it and I know you do too you will do that too so without any further Ado thank you guys so much for watching today's video if you like today's video make sure to leave a like comment and subscribe join the fam I would be more than happy and and I will see you guys in my next video up until then stay safe stay healthy and I love you bye

Channel: Anna Neubert

Views: 118,541

Keywords: how I study, study routine, study technique, study tips, how I study in dental school, dental school, med School, medical school, dental school vlog, med school vlog, study with me, study motivation, study with me pomodoro, pomodoro technique, spaced repetition, finals time, finals, study with me finals

Id: 93JmaUnVH9g

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2024