02/12/13 10 Tips to Study Efficiently | Fac Medicine - Faculty of Medicine - School of Medicine

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1. Remove The Irritants and Distractions:

Before starting study take 5 minutes to remove various irritants and distractions, which could irritate

you or distract you soon after the start of the study. Examples include, going to toilet and emptying

your bladder even if you have half the urge to go instead of doing the same 15 minutes after starting

the study, keep all the stationery items ready before starting the study like sharpening your pencils,

having your pens, highlighters etc at hand.

2. Teach The Topic:

Teach your topic of choice to someone who doesn’t understand it. This is a good exercise to organize

your knowledge and gives you the same result in five minutes, which you will get in an hour of

combined studying.

3. Bring All Your Senses into Action:

It is difficult to memorize abstract ideas for they being far removed from our senses. You can shift

them closer with various aids such as vivid pictures, feelings, images, videos and audio recordings that

relate information together.

4. Assess Your Ability to Move Between Concepts:

If you can’t move between concepts then you haven’t linked enough. You can assess this ability of

yours by opening up a word document and start explaining the subject you are working with. If you

can’t jump between sections, referencing one idea to help explain another, you won’t be able to think

through the connections during a test.

5. Don’t Skip Patches of Knowledge:

When you are studying a topic you should be able to relate every piece of new information with

something else that you have already learned. Efficient learners do this automatically, but if you skip

patches of knowledge, you won’t be able to recall them during a test.

6. No Need to Force It Down:

Your study plan should be to advance your knowledge steadily throughout the entire duration of the

semester, instead gulping the knowledge and stuffing your brain with entirely strange ideas towards

the end of a semester.

7. Look for Patterns of Information:

While studying try to find patterns of given information. This way it becomes easier to organize the

knowledge by identifying broader patterns that are similar across different topics.

8. Build a Baseline Knowledge Bank:

02/12/13 10 Tips to Study Efficiently | Fac Medicine - Faculty of Medicine - School of Medicine

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Having baseline knowledge allows you to build strong knowledge on it very easily because having a

general understanding of many topics gives you the ability to understand and retain many new

concepts.

9. Adopt Simple Models:

Models are simplified concepts of difficult ideas, which you can reference when trying to understand.

10. You Have to Retain It in Your Head:

If you don’t understand the contents then having beautiful notes and a perfectly highlighted textbook

is of no use. The only goal of study is to understand and retain the knowledge so that it can be recalled

and reproduced during assignments, tests and life. Don’t be shy of getting messy while scribbling

down ideas on paper and interlinking them in your head. Notes and books should be used as a

medium for learning and not as an end result.