So my first exam for Mechanisms of Disease (we just call it MOD, it’s easier) is out of the way. Due to how they grade things, it may be a few days before I get a grade on it. This is a bit frustrating, but I can’t do much about it. So, rather than talk about that or whether I’m on the right track when it comes to how I’m spending my study time, I thought I’d talk about some of the tools I’m using.

OneNote

I’ve mentioned this multiple times in the past. It’s nice in that it allows me to free-form write notes draw images, do outlines, add checkmarks, etc. It’s still a heavy go to to help me keep things organized.

This is a current page out of my OneNote. You can see across the top I have a tab for various classes or important topics. On the right I have pages for each lecture plus some other details I want to track. The main section is a portion of the objectives for Exam 1. You can see here I’m using checkboxes instead of colors to mark what I think I know and I don’t. I obviously still have a bit to review here (and note that the scroll bar shows I’ve got a lot more objectives to look at.)

Whiteboards

I mentioned this in my previous post. Once I get to my newer apartment, I’ll get more sheets of whiteboard paper to put on the wall or even some actual whiteboards to mount on the wall. I find this HUGELY useful to help me draw out structures or organize notes. Sometimes just putting “pen to paper” makes a big difference here. One can’t have too many whiteboards in my opinion. I’ve even seen one of the attendings where I work wheel one down so he can teach residents a few things.

I should note, at one company I consulted at as a Database Administrator, their IT/Dev department had very few whiteboards. I never really understood how they got things done.

Quizlet

Some of my fellow students love this app. I’ll admit I use it and sometimes I use old-fashioned notecards. But I find it has limitations. It’s useful for learning “facts” but harder in my mind for learning interactions. Yes, it can be done that way, but it’s more work. So, for example, it’s useful to quiz me on what artery serves the trapezius muscle (main ones are the transverse cervical artery and the dorsal scapular artery in case you’re interested). But less so on fully visualizing where it is and what it does (though I do have a card asking about action). What it has limited use for in my opinion is what are called second-order questions. This might be, “patient is stabbed in the back along the upper back near the neck, what muscle might be show limited to no movement?” The answer (especially if it’s multiple choice and some are obviously wrong) is most likely the trapezius because the nerve that runs to it is in that area. Here it helps to understand where things are and how things operate.

Complete Anatomy

I’ve previously mentioned the Anatomage tables we use for anatomy class. These are awesome, but there’s only two per campus and they’re not portable so I can’t take them with me. Enter Complete Anatomy from Elsevier. I have a copy on my phone and on my desktop. It’s incredible. Very much like the Anatomage tables, I can select a specific structure to examine, add in or remove surrounding structures, look up details on a specific structure and more. I can even tell it to show me how specific muscles move. This is an EXTREMELY useful tool for anatomy. For $40 I would recommend it to anyone who has to study anatomy. I’ve been using it all this morning to help me get a handle on all the muscles in the thoracic cavity and back that I need to know for next week’s exam. It’s definitely helping.

ChatGPT

Or as one of our professors likes to call it, “Professor Chat”. I find the fact that I’m using this a bit ironic because just within the last two years, every PA school application process has had to add a disclaimer that you can NOT use ChatGPT or other LLMs to write your essays. But once here, they’ve encouraged its use. It’s NOT perfect and I’ll be honest, it wasn’t until a fellow student pulled it up in a study session over the weekend that I had given it much thought. My early playing with LLMs had not left me very impressed. It seemed like a gimmick (e.g. “Write me a short love story in the manner of Stephen King”) that while fun, I didn’t find overly useful.

But that study session changed my thoughts. I started playing with ChatGPT Sunday night (the night before my MOD exam). I did several things. In one case I took a slide about skin diseases and copied it into the ChatGPT window and said, “Give me a 10 question multiple choice quiz on this material”. Not only did it, when I got an answer wrong it attempted to explain why I go tit wrong. At one point I put in the entire list of objectives to be covered for the MOD exam and asked it to give me a 30 question quiz with at least 5 second order questions. It did, and then it graded it.

Now it’s FAR from perfect. More then once I’ve found it’ll mark the right answer wrong (which is strange enough) but also it’ll mark the wrong answer as correct occasionally. Honestly, though I found this useful as it forced me to engage with the LLM. For example one question was poorly worded and I told the LLM that and it came back with a better worded question making the same point.

I find ChatGPT very useful for second order questions because it’ll craft decent ones and then after I attempt to answer them, explaining the reasoning to all the available answers, why the one that is correct is correct and why the others are not correct. This forces me to think a lot about systems.

Yes, ChatGPT can be used like an advanced search engine, but that’s only scratching the surface of what it can do.

I suspect I’ll be using ChatGPT a lot over the coming year to help prepare for tests. I also suspect that at times during my clinical rotations, if the preceptor allows it, I will use it to help verify my diagnosis or give me more information to make a better one. I don’t think it’s quite ready to be the sole source of truth though when it comes to making a diagnosis. I will note there are some AI tools that in limited cases can be better than humans, but those tend to be fairly constrained areas of medicine and even then they often have errors.

Study Groups

This is not really a technology or object. But study groups can be critical to helping “polish” my thinking. Sometimes I’ll see how others are approaching problems, sometimes I can share my knowledge with others (which seems to help them, at least in some cases.) Once I get to my newer apartment, I hope to host these once a week or so.

Classroom Study Sessions

This one, honestly, several of us believe if misnamed and we were talking with a professor about yesterday. They’re honestly more instructor (and soon Grad Assistant) led review sessions. For my campus, I’m one of three selected Grad Assistants who will eventually be helping to lead these. The reason some of us think they’re misnamed is because the format is really more a review of material than an actual study of it. We’ve had two so far and the format is the professor(s) create “slide” deck in what’s essentially an interactive PowerPoint like program (I can’t find the name or link right now). They’ll put up a slide with a question and often answers and anyone logged in can select an answer. After some time (generally after about 10 seconds have passed) they’ll show the results, give us the right answer and maybe a very quick comment and then move on. We generally do about 50 questions in one hour. So as you can see, it’s not really studying as much as reviewing. These sessions are completely voluntary, but I think very useful. There were two reasons I signed up to be a GA for these. The first was I want to help my fellow student succeed. The second was because it would force me to make sure I was more familiar with the material. Oh and we get a small stipend, so there is that too.

In Conclusion

There’s probably other tools I used I didn’t think to add and over time I’ll learn to use some tools more than others or add or remove tools to the mix. For example, once done with the Human Gross Anatomy class, I probably won’t use Complete Anatomy as much as I do now. And I’m sure when I’m taking the pharmacology class, I’ll pick up a new tool specific to that.

One thing I’ve very quickly learning is that I have to continually work on my study habits and adapt them as needed. This will be especially true in the second semester when I’m taking 25 credit hours!