- Hey friends, welcome back to the vlog.
This is an exotic study with me video
where I was skiing in the French Alps with my friends
before all of this social isolation lockdown stuff
and because I'm a massive nerd,
I decided to spend one of the evening studying
rather than socialising.
Anyway, the day starts at 7 a.m.
when I wake up in our fancy ass chalet
and lie in bed doing absolutely nothing.
At 7:30 I decide to stop being a waste man
and head downstairs to grab breakfast with the gang.
We get a great breakfast courtesy
of our wonderful Chef Anna.
And then at 8:30 we head downstairs,
I struggled to put my boots on,
and we take the bus over to Méribel Centre,
in the Three Valley Ski Resort.
From 9:15 to 12:15 me and my friends Ayushi and Jason
have a private lesson with ski instructor Rupert.
After the ski lesson at 12:30,
we head over to Mottaret, a smaller village area thing
where we chill on the deck chairs
and grab a cheeky chocolat chaud.
All right mate,
we got ourselves some cheeky chocolat chauds.
(faint talking in the background)
Ow.
I just spilled it on my top.
That's bad.
We meet up with the rest of the gang
and have lunch at Mountain Burger.
And then at 2:30 p.m. I ski back to Méribel Centre,
get rid of my skis, get out of my boots,
and breathe a sigh of ecstasy as my feet stop hurting
for the first time in four hours.
I think about going back to the chalet
to start doing some work but I had a nasty fall yesterday
and my shoulder really hurts.
So, I head into a nearby spa for a cheeky sports massage.
I chill in the spa until 4:30 p.m.
I wanted to film this but there
were lots of other half naked people there,
and I thought it would've been a bit weird.
Afterwards, I happened to run into the rest of the gang.
We catched the bus home and we end up
back at the chalet at 5 p.m.
At 10 past five I bust out the laptop.
Pour myself some apple juice to relax,
and join the #squad having cake on the dining table.
Everyone's chilling and chatting
but for the sake of studying
and for the sake of this #content
I decide to be really anti-social
and I start doing some work.
First, I download the new version of Anki.
I load up my Spotify Study With me playlist
that you'll find linked in the video description
onto the smart speaker in the chalet
and I end up procrastinating for 40 minutes
by chatting with the crew about the coronavirus
and making some tea for everyone.
At 5:50 I finally sit down to do something productive,
and decide that it's about time I start preparing
for the USMLE,
a medical exam that's taken by US medical students.
I'm toying with the idea of maybe applying
to the US for residency,
so I thought I'd see what this exam's all about.
After then procrastinating for another whole hour
by chatting to my mate Rohan,
I finally dig out the USMLE First Aid textbook pdf
at 6:15 p.m.
I start by going through the most important page
of any textbook, and that's the table of contents.
And as I'm doing that I set up
my retrospective revision timetable in notion.
I create a table with the main topics in one column,
and the idea is that when I've studied a topic
for the first time, I'll add today's date
in the second column.
And then when I've studied it for a second time,
the date will go in the third column,
and I'll colour code it and to be honest,
I've got a whole video explaining this process in depth
that'll be linked in the video description
if you fancy checking it out.
After making a list of the subjects in the textbook,
I start by flicking through the first few chapters
to check out whether any of this stuff is new,
or if it'll be mostly a case of reactivating knowledge.
Luckily it seems like mostly it's stuff
that I once new that I'll just have to relearn
which doesn't seem too bad.
And as I'm going through
I'm creating toggles and notion for the main topics.
So that when I actually come to study these subjects
I'll immediately have a big picture understanding
of what's going on.
And as I'm going through I'm finding appropriate emojis
to represent each subject
which makes me feel happy inside.
After doing this for around 15 minutes,
it's 7:05 p.m. and I decide to actually
make a start on gastrointestinal medicine.
I quite enjoyed scrolling through the textbook
and seeing what topics would come up
but it's a pretty mindless activity
that doesn't actually use any brain power.
So I tried to avoid doing too much of it in one go.
I start by doing some hunting around on the internet
for a pre-made Anki deck.
This is one of the great things about medicine.
That there are hundreds of revision resources
already available on the internet.
So in a way, there's very little point in us
making our own notes.
I turn to the USMLE step one subreddit
as the ultimate source of more knowledge,
and they point me to a few Anki decks
that I set to download through our pretty slow wifi
in the French Alps.
Incidentally, I actually learned how to play the piano
and the guitar by following the recommendations
of the learn piano and learn guitar subreddits,
so now whenever I need to learn anything new
I just turn to the appropriate subreddit for that topic
and I'm never dissapointed.
By 7:15 once I've started downloading the Hoopla Anki deck,
I continue growing through the textbook pdf thing.
I start by making a list of all the hormones
within gastrointestinal medicine.
And then I make a quick list of all the pathology topics
within the subject.
This is again scoping the subject in action,
i.e. before starting to actually drill down into the details
of any one subject, I need to have some sort
of an overview of what's actually in that subject,
so that I don't lose the forest from the trees.
I've got much more information about this
in my skill share class about how to study for exams
which you can check out if you'd like.
Anyway, as I'm going through the book and writing down
the different diseases that can afflict someone
within gastrointestinal medicine,
I categorise them into different areas of the body.
The book sort of has them in this order,
but it doesn't explicitly categorise them
and I find that whenever I'm learning anything,
if I can form some sort of categorization process
then it makes the learning process much more efficient.
For example, now in my head and in notion,
I appreciate that there are only 11 conditions
that can happen to the oesophagus,
and only really four that can happen to the stomach.
And that's easier to form a mental model in my head
than by recognising that there are 87 conditions
in all of GI medicine which is really quite hard
to keep up with.
By 7:35 the Anki decks downloaded
and so I imported into my Anki account.
It's pretty huge but I'm only gonna focus
on GI medicine today.
Having scoped the subject for it,
I think about tryna sync it over to my iPhone,
but the 600 megabytes worth of data
is gonna take a few hours to sync
over our very slow wifi.
So I decide to wait until
I get back home with decent internet speed before trying
to upload it to Anki web.
From 7:35 to 8 p.m. we faff around trying
to order some pizza delivery because this is
the one day that week that we don't have
our personal chef in the chalet.
We try and figure out who can speak the best French,
and exactly how to order pizza for home delivery in French,
but then when we ring up the company,
we find that A: they can all speak English anyway,
and B: they don't even deliver to our place.
From 8 pm, while the others are still
tryna figure out the logistics of food delivery,
I make a start on the Hoopla Anki deck
for gastrointestinal medicine
I realise pretty quickly that this won't work
because the way that the Anki deck is organised
it means that I'm seeing information in isolation,
which is an absolutely terrible way to learn
because it's relying on memorization
rather than understanding.
Having identified this within the first few minutes
I decide to change up my strategy
and actually read from the textbook.
So for the next half an hour I read through
the different diseases in the book,
and if there's anything I don't immediately understand
or that's new to me or that I want more information about,
I do a cheeky google and find the Wikipedia article
for that disease.
If anyone's going to comment
about how Wikipedia is terrible,
you're clearly behind the times.
Literally every medical student and doctor I know
uses Wikipedia extensively several times a day.
It's amazing that we've got this incredible resource
available for free.
I've also talked in the past and in my skill share class
about how note taking is a balance between
compression and context.
The notes in the First Aid book are great,
but they're very very compressed.
Which means there's no context to the information.
But the great thing about the internet
is that if we need it,
the context is just a google search away.
Therefore there's not much point in me actively spending
the time to take notes about these conditions
because I know that all I notes I need
will always be on Wikipedia whenever I need them.
By 8:30 p.m. I begin to lose concentration
and start to feel a wave of tiredness
from the ski lesson that morning
that was absolutely knackering.
Turns out, our group of six doctors and two dentists
didn't quite manage to figure out the logistics
of ordering food in France,
so our boy Jason ends up cooking up some stuff
in the kitchen with the limited ingredients
that we have in the chalet.
He makes a French toast toastie with cheese, onions,
and mushrooms and it's the best tasting toastie
I've ever had in my life.
Jason is amazing.
While we're eating
we do a casual articulate practise session,
with everyone taking turns to describe
to the rest of the group what's on the cards,
we realise that we don't know many people
in the person section,
and so we google those as we go along
so that we can all learn from the game.
At 10 past nine I spend some time working through
an online course on Brilliant
who are very kindly sponsoring this video.
I'm continuing the introduction to Neural Network Series
that's teaching me about computer vision
which is something I've been interested in
for quite some time.
Especially because everyone talks about how
machine learning and neural networks
are being used in medicine to interpret investigations like
x-rays, CT scans, and ECGs.
Brilliant's course gives a great accessible introduction
to the topic and I found myself wishing
that more medical school resources had the clarity and
the engagement that the Brilliant courses do.
In fact, if I'm ever in a productivity slump like today
I find that doing one of Brilliant's daily challenges
helps reboot my brain and gives me
that second wind of energy that I sometimes need.
If you'd like to check out their incredible maths,
science and computer science courses,
there is no time like the present.
Head over to brilliant.org/ali
and the first 200 people to use that link
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At 9:40 I spend 10 minutes joining the others
in cleaning up the kitchen, putting stuff in the dishwasher,
and washing some dishes to make sure
the chalet is in a decent state.
And then at 9:53 I head up to the bedroom
intending to do one final burst of work
before heading up to bed.
I open up Anki on my MacBook
and start working through flash cards on the topics
that I've studied today as a form of active recall.
But then by 10 past 10 I find my eyes beginning to shut
so I decide that that's probably enough work for one day.
So I close the laptop,
set all the various devices to charge, brush my teeth,
change into my scrub bottoms that I use as pyjamas,
and crawl into bed.
Because I'm on Holiday I give myself permission
to spend some time wasting time on my phone before bed,
which is normally something that's completely forbidden
as part of my productivity philosophy.
And then after mindlessly scrolling Instagram for a bit,
I call it a night.
I really hope you learned something from this video,
and do please remember to sign up to Brilliant
by using the link in the video description
to help support the channel.
If you liked this video, here is a playlist
of some of my most popular study themed videos.
Stay safe and goodnight.
(slow electronic music)