What techniques do you use to memorize information (schemas, terminology, pictures, exact data etc.) [...] how do you memorize information?
There are a lot of different techniques for learning information (learn, not memorize!) and I think that early medical school is almost more about finding out how you best learn than the actual content. There is absolutely only one good way to find out how you best learn - practice and experiment. As Chinaski said many people (including myself!) thought I could get away with the same techniques I used in high-school: reading something a few times, using it once or twice and then leaving it until the exams when I would read over it again. I found out pretty quickly that this didn't exactly work.
My learning techniques changed a lot over the 6 years of medical school and realistically are still changing now depending on what the content I'm learning is and how much of a grasp I have on it - learning about cardiac anatomy is a simple re-read of the information in my anatomy text but trying to learn about interpreting echocardiograms requires me to sit down with a few different textbooks (anatomy, ultrasound & cardio text), a video source (of USS echocardiograms) & a list of cases to individually go through pathological processes & how they appear on the USS screen. There are however some consistently good strategies that I've found:
- Adding an extra layer of depth that requires you to understand the first layer (i.e. interpretting echos requires cardiac anatomy knowledge) will ensure that you have that first layer nailed-down and also highlight areas you didn't realise were lacking. This mostly comes in during clinical years where you suddenly have to use your clinical examinations to actually come up with diagnoses or management plans.
- If I can teach a topic then I understand it/if I can explain it to someone with either a base level of knowledge and they can use those explanations to learn it then I know my understanding is relatively complete. There is no way I would know heart murmurs as well as I do if I hadn't spent multiple weeks teaching them to different students and explaining them multiple different ways. I also wouldn't know my musculoskeletal anatomy anywhere near as well as I do if I hadn't been employed as a tutor or (on the point above) if I hadn't worked as a prosector (dissecting the models for class).
- Getting someone with a far greater level of knowledge than you to listen to your explanations/listen to you talk through a topic will absolutely confirm whether you know it or not. Firstly, it takes a shit-load of confidence (usually engendered by a lot of study) to be comfortable explaining diabetes/thyroiditis/diabetic keto-acidosis to an endocrinologist that you've asked to critique you, & they'll be able to actually help you out when you get stuck/give you explanations that are better than your own/add depth to your understandings by linking other key points. If you find someone that's happy to do this with you then try your best to keep them around.
- Use multiple different learning strategies rather than just relying on one - i.e. don't just read through a textbook, don't just write out things on a whiteboard, don't just talk about them to yourself, don't just visualise the actual process... do it all. In general I find my best way of learning is reading about something while highlighting the heck out of it (e.g. cardio anatomy/physiologyy), writing the key topics on a whiteboard (cardiac cycle, electrical pathways & ion channels, valves, ventricles & atria, great & cardiac vessels) then explaining each of them in turn +/- drawing and explaining diagrams where relevant, then sitting down and visualising the processes involved ... followed by doing all of this in order to teach one of your colleagues. Adding an extra layer of depth (as in my first point) such as incoporating this into an explanation of a pathophysiological process or linking it to one of your clinical examination findings (heart murmurs etc.) will help as well.
Are you in medical school to pass exams, or to become a competent doctor? Passing an exam by memorising lists won't make you the latter. Many med schools don't require rote learning - I did very little of that as a med student, myself.
I certainly agree with this premise, though I think my opinion is a bit separate from yours. I feel that memorization is an important step in developing a contextual understanding for a lot of things in medical school but that it's only one of the first steps. There are a lot of topics in medicine that require a broad understanding of the topic before you can delve deeper into them and many of these require some element of memorization to hold information in your head until you make those links. Similarly, for examinations I feel that there is a difference (as you describe) between studying to understand the topic and studying for exams - often exam study came in the week or two before them & largely involved practice/memorization of key exam topics.
I felt that the work I did during term in medical school was what would make me a competent doctor (still to be seen, haven't passed intern year yet!) but that this work didn't necessarily translate directly to examinations. The base of it always did - being able to examine & come up with a plan for a patient will always be the crux of any clinical medical school OSCE - i.e. your day-to-day practice will translate directly. In saying that there is a difference between being able to come up with the answers and being able to come up with them
in time - I
absolutely memorised & practiced to death all of my clinical examinations, the tables out of Talley & O'Connor for 'correlation of signs & symptoms to disease' & many more things that I already knew so that if someone asked me that question in an OSCE I could say it without thinking and give myself more time to think about other things. If I could walk into an 8 minute cardio exam on infective endocarditis and finish it in 5 minutes knowing I haven't missed anything then I could go back outside and begin preparing for a station I wasn't so good at - e.g. the haematology examination I knew was 2 stations ahead.
It's not that I didn't know those answers or didn't contextually understand them, but OSCE's in medical school are a dance/act more than they are a test most of the time. Keeping in mind though that I made them a dance/act/streamlined process
after I knew and could explain the content in my sleep.
Similarly, when the questions are short response and ask things like "what are the clinical signs of ...?" or "what is your management plan for ...?" or "what are your priorities in investigating this patient?" I found these easily came from my actual work through medical school rather than direct memorization. Unfortunately there certainly were parts in my degree (JCU) which often tested some relatively obscure knowledge. These tended to come about specifically in our multiple choice questions and in our "extended match" question banks - especially in the earlier years for our humanities/ecology of health subjects where we would be tested on obscure social sciences frameworks.
I think a topic that a lot of people can understand the need for memorization is in organic chemistry. Yes, there is a need for a contextual understanding of the actual processes & theory but at the same time if you can't rapidly reproduce the organic chemistry pathways then you have no framework on which to base that contextual understanding. Quite frankly, I don't think there are many people who can learn about the ways the glycolysis, TCA, pentose-phosphate & glyconeogenesis (+ others) pathways interlock & then draw out & explain the pathways without ever having put effort into memorizing them - it's far easier (for most) to draw out the pathways, rote-learn them & then add contextual information onto that framework. In that sense I find memorization an invaluable tool; it is only the initial part of the learning process but certainly is an essential skill. The same applies for neuroanatomy/anatomy in general: it's very hard to generate an in-depth understanding at the start without having the actual anatomical positions of things memorised because every description is relative to other structures rather than in a fixed position - e.g. the .... pathways run lateral to the ... and inferior to the ....
I think this thread has come at an interesting time since it's so early in the semester, realistically my advice is that you shouldn't be focusing on preparing for exams at present but rather focusing on trying to understand the content. Being able to pass the exams will come with understanding the content, not with memorization alone ... but often getting HD's won't come without memorizing some content.