Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)

If I hadn't stubbled upon this essay and Anki, I think by way of a Wired article, I'm not sure I would have gotten into or passed medical school. They were eye opening and turned me from an average smart student into a leader of my class. I had planned to keep doing my cards after moving on to fellowship but alas, life gets in the way.

That's impressive! Would you mind sharing how you used Anki for your studies?

You deserve some credit, though. Setting this up properly takes quite a bit of discipline and persistence. I only did it for certain memorization-heavy classes and I still found it to be kind of a chore. Mostly in college I just tried to understand things deeply and hoped that this kind of understanding/memory would be reasonably durable. That got me good enough grades for what I was trying to do, but it probably would not have been sufficient for a very competitive professional school like medicine.

That's how I did undergrad. Wasn't even much of a note taker, usually just paid attention during lectures and did the reading. That's not enough for the insane volume of information you have to learn in med school. There are certain subjects like physiology that are very conceptual but even there you need to know quite a bit of detail, and then of course the memorization heavy topics like anatomy, microbiology and others.

There's a reason Anki is used so heavily by med students these days.