How I Ranked 1st at Medical School - Anki Flashcards Tutorial

what is going on guys my name is kenji welcome back to my channel hope it's not the first time you're watching my videos but just in case it is i'm a fourth year medical student and biomedical science graduate studying king's college london in this video i'll be talking to you guys about how you can upload an unlimited amount of information onto your mind using anki i want to start off by saying this is not sponsored by anki this is honestly a tool and a program that i discovered recently that has absolutely changed the game in

regards to how i work how i study and how i learn new things in medical school and this technique doesn't just apply to medical school whether you're in your gcc's your a levels of studying history to a different degree any sort of information you want from whatever discipline can be uploaded onto your mind using anki and using this specific method so without further ado let's go ahead and get started starting off by first telling you guys what a flashcard is and what exactly anki is okay so starting off what exactly is a flashcard so a

flashcard is very kind of simple um idea basically it's a card or a paper where on one side you have a question like what is the capital of let's say france and on the back of the card you have the answer which in this case would be paris so on one side i have a question attached on the other side i have the answer and it's basically a simple way of testing your knowledge to make sure that you know what you're talking about and can memorize stuff in preparation for your exams or whatever you're preparing

for now anki does this exact same thing essentially what anki is is a flashcard software that you can use on your phone on your desktop or whatever device you have in order to do the exact same thing you know having questions on one side and an answer on the other side but it's not just that it's not just a simple flash card it uses uh intelligent algorithms to test yourself constantly over a period of time which i'm going to talk about later on in the video anki is also completely free i think the only thing

you have to pay for is the ios app on your ipad if you want to use it on there but everything on your desktop on ankiweb on your phone that's all completely free that's one reason as to why i would encourage uh students particularly to use anki in order to study for the flashcards okay so now moving on to why i think you guys should use anki and why i think it will help you the first thing as i already said once you've understood a concept in school you know once you've kind of gone through

yourself made notes on it and honestly understand the concept anki is the part that i think is so so useful in uploading exactly what you've learned onto your mind so during my first second idea of medical school i didn't actually use ankis for a few reasons the first reason is that the first three years of medical schools was more to do with understanding content it was more just about understanding how the body works and how the body relates to disease so there's a lot to do with you know understanding concepts rather than memorizing specific details

and to be honest with you i probably could have used anki in first second third year as well but i think anki is definitely more applicable to me now as a fourth year medical student where right now i think i have a good foundation of kind of medicine in my mind i understand the broad concepts but in my fourth and fifth year what's really really important for me is to make sure that i memorize all of the specifics for example in my first second third year medical school would be expected to know kind of you

know what a disease is make a diagnosis and kind of know what sorts of treatment methods you'd use to treat this disease whereas right now in medical school my fourth and fifth year what's really important is not just to know the treatments but to memorize what order you'd actually give the treatments in what order you'd give investigations in and all of these like very very specific information that doesn't really rely on understanding but more relies on memorization uh in the process that's exactly what i think anki is really really good with once you understand concepts

it's really good to help you memorize them and also memorize specific amounts of information so don't get me wrong i still do make notes on all of my lecture content and everything i need to learn in order to kind of understand it and frame it in a way that my mind understands it once that's done i then now use anki in order to try and memorize everything that i've understood in my lectures and upload all that information my mind and make sure that i'm testing myself constantly in the future to make sure that i retain

all of the information i understood in the lecture anki is also very very cool because it uses both active recall and also space repetition in order to constantly test yourself uh in the future so it kind of uses a rating system so maybe a question allows you to rate it easy medium or hard and based on your answer of easy medium or hard you'll then use this like really smart algorithm to resurface cards in the future so if let's say for example you find an answer very very hard i'll make sure to actually resurface these

cards to you more often in the future and let's say for example if i say that a card is very easy i don't need to kind of memorize this again all this stuff you mark easy will come up less frequently in your flash card deck and that's a really key thing and cool thing about anki is that it resurfaces the correct cards at the correct time right before you kind of you know just about to forget it and that's what's so so useful about the anki software the last reason i think you guys should use

anki over any other kind of software like quizlet is that anki is very very easy and quick to use and it reduces the friction to creating flashcards that's another thing i found very very difficult in my past you know when using different companies to create flashcards and even to be honest with you like writing down my own flashcards is i found it very very difficult to actually create these flashcards it took so much of my time to sit down and input all this information that i ended up spending so much of my time literally just

making flashcards instead of actually testing myself on this information and that's the great thing about anki the last great thing about anki is that it's very frictionless in creating these cards but now let's actually move on to my computer and i'll show you guys exactly how i use anki to upload all this information onto my mind for my medical school exams [Music] so as i said the first way that i actually use anki is to upload new information onto my mind so essentially when i come home from a lecture i'll finish a lecture i'll come

home and i'll sit down on my desk and i'll start to make notes like handwritten notes as you guys know i do on my tablet i'll make these notes and essentially all these notes are are my own kind of translation of the lecture so making notes to make sure that i'm writing what the lecture has said in a way that i understand currently right now and also making sure that these notes are something i can constantly refer to in the future should i ever forget the concept and be able to understand them in my own

words in a way that makes sense to me once i actually make those notes what i then do is move on to anki to create flashcards and create questions to test myself on the knowledge i've created my notes so in the future i can continue to review these kind of topics and making sure that i remember them and don't forget them in time for my exam okay so moving on to show you guys exactly how i make my anki flash cards based on my lectures so on the right side of the screen here i have

a lecture that i made a couple of weeks ago and i'm going to show you guys exactly how i created the flash cards a bit so one of the kind of diseases that we had to understand was something called placental previa over here which is the inception of a placenta in the lower segment of the uterus so straight away there's kind of a concept that i need to understand so i want to create a question um first up which is going to be um define placental previa and then on the back side of the flash

card i'll write down exactly what the definition is to test myself in the future so i'll say insertion of placenta in the lower segments of the uterus and as you guys can see over here i actually added a picture just to remind myself of what it actually is so just to kind of um you know get a picture as well and that's a really cool thing about anki is you're able to actually you know um include pictures into your flashcards which is way better than making a simple like paper flashcard you know having a picture

here will really jog my memory it will make sure that i kind of increase the amount of cues and memory cues to remember what this disease actually means so i'll copy it and paste it straight into here and that is essentially my first flashcard and this is actually um a basic flashcard a basic meaning um you know the front is a question and the back is an answer and i'll show you guys later on how i use and the different kind of types of flash cards that we can have on anki in order to memorize

things so once that's actually done and i have a definition there i'll click add and that's essentially my first flash card created so this is exactly what i'll do for the entire lecture i'll go along the entire lecture of my notes making flashcards based on notes and creating questions to test myself in the future and that all gets added to my deck which i'll then use later on to review my flashcards later on to make sure i actually know what all this information is and that's the first way that i use anki so the next

way to actually use anki is to test myself while i'm doing past papers the thing about medical school and especially in your fourth and fifth year is that there's so much content to learn and a lot of that content you're expected to learn on your own or actually in the hospital when you're on the wards in my fourth year we don't actually have that many lectures and all of the lectures that we're given are given at the actual hospital location so if you're in a hospital in london or a hospital outside london all of your

teaching ends up being very very different because all of your lectures are being given at the hospital by the doctors there so what you need to learn is actually quite subjective and it's really important to make sure that you're testing yourself using past papers and then as you're testing yourself using the past papers making sure to use anki to create flash cards so any sort of question that you answer wrong or anything that you're entirely sure of you can put it in anki straight away to ensure that in the future you can retest yourself on

that information making sure that for the actual exam you get that question right and even if you're in high school or in a levels whatever you're in anki can be really really helpful here to fill in the gaps so let's say for example um you already understand the mechanism of a disease or you understand the topic you're revising if you get that question wrong you know you have two choices really you can take what you've learned from the past favorite question and add it to your notes or you can add it to anki to make

sure that everything you don't understand based on the past papers is added to your stack of questions you can retest yourself in the future again to ensure that you don't get that question wrong in the real exam for example i get this question wrong and i clicked you know the wrong answer here and i find the correct answer here what i want to do straight away is to read the kind of explanation of why i got it wrong and then make sure that i add this topic or whatever the answer is to my flashcards straight

away so as you guys can see here this was about a 29 year old female who had a cervical smear test as part of her screening program her results came back hpv positive and was examined psychologically what is the next action you take so don't worry too much about medicine or the signs the correct answer is you'd repeat the test in 12 months so the one way that i can kind of make a flash cards is say after a smear test that comes back um hpv positive uh with normal cytology uh what is the next

action and obviously the answer would be uh repeat the test in 12 months so i'll just copy and paste it and put it in there and that is kind of the one way that i can make a anki flash card again making it a basic card um there's also another way you can do it if i felt like this entire topic something that i don't really know too well what it actually do is to make a card for the entire topic so i'd say um interpreting uh cervical smear results for example and then the good

thing about this website that i use which is past medicine to study for my medical school exams is that they actually have an explanation of the the answer right down below so here is the management of results which is what i want to learn what i can do is actually copy and paste the whole entire thing directly into my anki and what i can now do is actually create something called a closed deletion so i can go onto here and add a closed deletion and what's really important is to change it to a closed deletion

type of card so this is not a basic card with a front and back like you know about i'll show you guys what i mean by closed deletion card but what i want to do is close delete everything that i think is really necessary to you know to test myself on and this card won't test me on you know all of this information it'll actually only test me on the sections i'm actually close deleting so close these two three parts to the card essentially the first is this part here the second to this part here

and the third is this last part here as well actually and let's go back to anki now and actually review the cards i made so i can explain to you guys exactly what these cards were okay so this is a normal basic card as i described to you the frontier being the question which is define placental previa and i'll press spacebar and it'll give me the back of the card straight away so again that's insertion placenta and low segment of the uterus as you guys can see here and then now down below i can mark

it as again good or easy again meaning that it will come again today and tomorrow good meaning it will resurface this card in a couple of days and again easy being that it will resurface it's a bit later on as well so for this one i got correct i found quite easy so i'm going to click easy and that brings on the part of the closed deletion card which is what i taught you guys about earlier on so as you can see i essentially deleted a section over here and what that is is essentially a

card that fills in the gap so the question here or the front of the card is interpreting cervical smear results so how do you interpret a cervical smear results on the back of the card here being a negative uh hpv results test so how will i interpret a negative hpv test if i'm not entirely sure what it is i'll press spacebar it'll give me the actual answer so again it's kind of like a fill in the gap sort of thing so the answer would be return it to normal recall and a few other things as

well but essentially what that allows me to do is allows me to create multiple cards and just delete the areas that i need to test myself on so let's kind of take another example here so again this is the exact same card you know the interpretation of cervical smear results but this time it's deleted what would you do if you have a positive result so the answer that i should be trying to you know regurgitate and come up with my mind is a positive hbo hpv results so again i'd press spacebar and the answer would

come up and just to iterate this is a filling in the gap sort of card so those are essentially the two main ways i use anki in order to upload information onto my mind from my lectures and also from past papers that i do as well this is obviously a very basic you know anki tutorial and how i use anki to memorize stuff my medical school if you want to go into more detail on how to actually use anki you can go to the exact same place that i learned how to use anki which is

skillshare who are also kindly sponsoring this video skillshare is an online platform and community of learning new skills there are thousands of online courses for creative people including cinematography videography studying for exams and also making flashcards so if you're interested in a particular topic whether that might be you know making videos you know skateboarding whatever you want then i'm sure skillshare will have something for you in order to learn all these new skills that you want to learn i've actually personally used skillshare to improve my skills in various areas including how to actually record these

youtube videos how to make them better how to study for medical school exams and also how to use anki flash cards so the way i personally actually learned how to use anki flash cards was a classical skill share by ali abdel called the ultimate guide to anki which i highly recommend you guys watch if you're interested to learn how to use anki in a great amount of detail to help you guys pass your exams in medical school or whatever field you're in the class actually goes into great detail on how to use anki and how

to actually use all of the skills and software that anki produces in order to efficiently learn and upload a large amount of content onto your mind and even though i was against using flashcards in medical school once i watched this class it definitely convinced me to jump on board with anki and i really appreciate the skill chef allowing me to learn such a new skill if you're interested in checking out skillshare for yourself and you want to learn some new skills the first 1000 people who click on the link down below get a free trial

of skillshare and honestly i highly recommend you guys at least sign up for trial you know try out these new classes on anki on whatever you want to learn on skillshare and if you find that you actually benefit from them and you learn loads of new skills then the annual membership is actually less than ten dollars a month so link to that is down the description below but that is pretty much it guys i can't stress how useful anki flash cards have been for me in preparation for my medical school exams and i really hope

you guys take something away from this video and do check out the skillshare course as well on how to use anki efficiently for your exams as well thank you guys so much for watching if you have any questions at all in regards to you know how to use anki or how to you know efficiently incorporate that into your study routine then please leave a comment down below please make sure you subscribe as well please make sure you like the video turn notifications on and i'll see you guys on the next one you