Tuesday, November 25, 2014

My Medical School Study Notes

medical school study notes
When I moved to Alberta in June, I was faced with the task of packing my life into my little hatchback. Needless to say, my bookshelf of medical textbooks and binders would not be making the trip. What did come along was a navel orange box containing my medical school study notes. Though I partly wanted to keep them for sentimental reasons (thousands of hours of careful work are packed into that box), I do find that I look up things in my notes from time to time, and will probably (hopefully) be looking them over to prepare for the Step 1 USMLE.

While excavating my notes on blood transfusions today, I came across a few useful pages which I'll share as a glimpse into my study-note-making medical school life.

Here's a Harry Potter themed picture mnemonic I don't even recall coming up with:

medical school study notes

Here is a diagram I've referred back to many times to remind myself of the actions of PTH and calcitriol on calcium and phosphate regulation. It was presented in lecture as a table, but converting it into pictures helped me to remember it.
PTH calcitriol function

These diagrams show the different kinds of neural tube defects:
neural tube defects types

This note page describes how a pleural effusion develops:
pleural effusion pathophysiology

Here's the first of many note pages on the visual system:
medical school study notes

Here's a diagram of skin anatomy -- and an accompanying busy page of notes.
skin anatomymedical school study notes

It may be a while before I can let my box of study notes go. Only this year was I far enough removed from my undergrad study notes to finally put them to rest in the recycling bin. Until that day comes for my medical school notes, they'll remain safe and sound in their orange box.



If you're interested, here are other posts I've written about how I study:
On getting organized to study:

On studying:

4 comments:

  1. Wow, your notes are so compact! Did you write them all down in notebooks or compile sheets in files etc?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They're compact so that my pile of notes to study is as thin as possible (I'm easily intimidated by having big piles of notes to learn!). I write notes on sheets rather than in notebooks so that I can easily separate out specific pages that I need to study :)

      Delete
  2. Thanks for posting!! Very helpful!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Your notes are perfect and condence! I love it!!!

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...