What's going on guys!
J from MedSchoolInsiders.com.
Many of you have asked for a tutorial on one of my favorite productivity apps Evernote.
To give you a brief overview, Evernote is a powerful note taking application.
I use it as my main tool for organizing notes in medical school.
Its main competitors at the current moment are Microsoft OneNote and Apples Notes.
This however is not a comparison video.
Evernote strength is in its search function; you don't have to worry about meticulously
organizing your notes in order to find what you are looking for.
You can throw all your notes, ideas and projects that Evernote and it will help you manage
them all with minimal effort.
In this video, I'll be giving you a brief overview of how to use Evernote effectively
as a student.
So how do you actually use Evernote?
It's organized into a series of notebooks and notes.
You can also make stacks which are groups of notebooks, like this one here which is
MS1 for the first year of medical school.
As a student, I created stacks for each of my years in medical school and within those
stacks I created notebooks for each subject or block.
So if you're a college student, I would use course titles or descriptions like chemistry,
physics, English etc.
For med school there are systems like cardiology, gastroenterology, hematology etc.
So, let's look at a quick example to demonstrate.
Within the first year I took MSK which is musculoskeletal.
I created individual notes for each lecture.
I also created condensed notes or summary sheets for each lecture to facilitate a more
active learning process.
In the note for the lecture, I imported the PDF document that the professor shared with
us.
In Evernote you can insert files within your note, so I often place either the PowerPoint
or PDF file that accompanies the lecture into the Evernote note as a reference.
You can then open the file from there and take notes within the document or annotate
and save.
Again, the search function is Evernote strengths.
So the program will actually index the content within the file, therefore when you search,
you'll also be looking within these documents.
So this hierarchy is a more traditional way to organize your notes.
Another powerful way to add another level of organization is with tags.
You can add several tags to each note, so let's look at some examples.
So, right here is anatomy.
In each block, we were going over relevant Anatomy to that system.
So for example, in cardiology, we learned about the anatomy of the heart and vasculature,
in pulmonology we learned about lung anatomy, in GI we learned about the digestive system
anatomy etc.
So rather than placing each anatomy lecture in a separate notebook, I tagged each one
with anatomy.
So, if I need to find any notes on Anatomy, I can search for this tag and they all show
up here.
While I do prefer the convenience, the efficiency and the flexibility of taking notes digitally,
there are definitely advantages to paper notes.
Drawing diagrams or taking notes on the go such as when you're not at a desk are usually
easier with a pen and paper.
I combine both and occasionally write notes or draw diagrams in my moleskine notebook
and import the image using my phone's camera.
So these handwritten notes can actually be searched.
This is a very powerful feature called optical character recognition or OCR.
So, Evernote looks at images in your notes to identify text even handwritten notes.
So, let's do an example, I'll search for viruses.
It knows the diagram, so I'm gonna put tag diagram and boom, here we go.
So it recognized my handwriting, RNA viruses at the top and even highlighted the word viruses
within this handwritten diagram that I made.
So, here's another example; I wrote in an actual notebook and use the scannable app
to quickly import the image into Evernote.
So my handwriting is absolutely horrendous in this note but Evernote was still able to
recognize a few words like hand is right there.
This was particularly useful for me during third and fourth years of med school, also
known as the clinical years, where you are not in the classroom taking notes on your
computer.
Instead, you're in the hospital and I would just jot down brief notes on a small notebook
just to capture an idea or important pearl.
Now Evernote premium comes with this handy feature allowing you to annotate either images
or documents within or the entire note as a PDF.
You can draw arrows, you can add text...
Like this, you can - you can add additional notes etc.
So, you can - you have a great deal of flexibility with this feature and you can do the same
thing on your mobile device, so whether that's your tablet or your phone.
I often used the annotate feature on my iPad when I was going through research articles
on PDF and I had a stylus and I could just highlight as if it was real paper on the document.
You can also share or collaborate on files or entire notebooks with other people.
You can choose whether they can view or also edit the actual note.
I honestly don't think that these sharing features are quite as strong as what you can
do with Google Docs or Google Drive, but if your friends are using Evernote, it's usually
good enough to get the job done.
I've used it a few times when dividing up work with a classmate and it's worked well
for us.
Now lastly, you can use Evernote completely free and that's where I recommend that you
start.
After trying up the free service, you can then decide if it's worth it for you to upgrade.
I personally now use the premium service.
There is a student discount available on their website.
The reason I upgraded from the free service is that with the premium, you get additional
storage, the ability to search within documents, the ability to annotate including on mobile
devices and offline copies on my mobile devices.
However, I again recommend that you start with the free version, see how you like it
before you upgrade to the premium.
I'd like to thank Lecturio for making this video possible.
So if you are either a pre-med or med student, this service will definitely benefit you.
They provide video lectures by educators from top institutions like Harvard, Yale and Johns
Hopkins.
They also provide quiz questions and topic reviews, all of which prepare medical students
for USMLE Step 1, Step 2 or Step 3 and pre-meds for the MCAT.
They also recently launched a pretty cool feature called Book Matcher where you take
a photo of your book page, whether that's first aid and it will provide you relevant
videos that will help to explain those concepts.
So you can learn more here on their website at lecturio.com.
They also have some free videos on their YouTube channel.
So if you are interested, go to lecturio/insider or use the coupon code insider20 for 20% off
your subscription.
Alright guys, that is it for this video.
Thank you all so much for watching.
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New videos every week, so hit subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys
in the next one.