I am still exhausted after my 3 hour med school exam yesterday morning which covered topics ranging from cancer to pregnancy.

I’m exhausted not so much by the exam (it was only 3 hours after all), but mostly because of all the work leading up to the exam. For this exam, we covered 6 weeks worth of lecture material – Shelly calculated this to be ~3200 slides. I learned 80% of this material for the first time over the last three days. Yes, you read that right.

My cramming session culminated with me waking up at 5:30am in the morning on less than 5 hours of sleep, where I proceeded to do more cramming right until the exam started at 9am.

I admit this isn’t the first time, and it is unlikely to be the last.

Now, I’m not here to preach cramming to you. I wish I didn’t do it, because it is so damn stressful. 12 hour+ studying days? It’s crazy and exhausting. And there’s no worse feeling than not wanting to fall asleep because you know waking up will only lead to another 15 hour study session.

That being said, cramming is efficient. The less time I spend studying, the more time I can spend doing other things I like. Like writing blog posts! 😉

In any case, whatever your reasons are for wanting to learn how I cram (curiosity, out of time and need tips, lazy by nature), I’m going to tell you straight up what I do. It isn’t pretty and I wouldn’t wish 3200 slide procrastination on anyone. But hey, if you have to do it, then this might help.

Wait Long Enough to Start

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Shelly here. Hello medhopeful readers…! First of all, I apologize for not posting at all this summer. To make up for it, I promise to post regularly, starting now.

School has started up again, and seeing the first year medical students in our building definitely makes me feel like an old school veteran. Next year will be the start of clerkship for me and I am very excited to be out of the classroom. As this will be my last year in full-time classroom and lecture (hurray), I wanted to summarize a few lessons I’ve learnt through my many years of class, from high school to university to medical school. In this post, I will share with you a mish-mash of all the things that, I think, helped me get the 90+ (A+) in my courses. Hopefully everyone will gain at least something from reading this post and be able to use any of my strategies/tips to improve their grades, if that is what they wish to do.

First off, you might ask: in which courses did I get the A+, or more importantly, which ones did I fail to do so? The simple answer is that I was able to pull off the 90 throughout high school till now, with a few important exceptions such as grade 9 gym and art (I like to blame it on the facts that I’m short and artistically challenged, respectively, haha), three courses in the second term of third year (I think I was too busy with medical school interviews and burnt out from school), and more recently, a couple of tests in first year medical school (the material was too much for me to handle and I have to admit that didn’t allocate my time properly).

Time, time, time

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