How to Study with Flashcards as a Medical Student
Being a medical student means that you will for sure have a huge load of information to memorize, this is why it’s crucial to learn how to study effectively! 🚀📚💪
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Medical school is a highly demanding journey that comes with huge amounts of material to memorize — from the Kreb’s Cycle in Biochemistry to all the blood vessels in the body to the side effects and indications of hundreds of drugs in Pharmacology. This is so much information, and we as students only have so much time in a day to study! 😵💫
This is why finding effective study methods is absolutely crucial — not just for getting good grades, but also allow yourself to have free time for your hobbies, family, and alone-time. Med students also deserve to have a life outside of studies! In fact, having time to rest and recharge helps you become more productive the next time you study. 💪
I am Dr. Kasey Chen (the social media manager at Voovo) and naturally, I was once a medical student! And I also found myself struggling to find ways to keep up with my studies… so much so I wasn’t even thinking about the possibility of having a decent social life 🙈. Eventually, I found some study tools that really helped me. A tool that really stands out is flashcards!
I started off by making physical flashcards in my first months of medical school to using Voovo in my last years, so perhaps I can call myself a seasoned flashcard user. 👏
As a self-ordained expert flashcard user and a fresh medical school graduate, I have compiled a guide on how you can study with flashcards as a medical student! Keep on reading to attain some of my wisdom 🤓 (kidding! But, read on).
The first and most important question: why flashcards? 📚
In a nutshell: Flashcards are a time-tested, invaluable study tool that combine active learning and spaced repetition to speed up your study process and enhance your long term memory — allowing you to memorize larger amounts of information in shorter amounts of time. 🚀
Speed and efficiency
This is especially important for med students because of the huge amounts of information you have to memorize. The honest truth is that you will never feel like there is enough time to study for an exam. You may often find yourself in a constant feeling of overwhelm. 😵💫 But it’s not hopeless!
If you can use your time efficiently, you’ll be able to cover everything in a reasonable amount of time! Flashcards are especially effective because they break down complex topics into manageable subtopics which allows you to focus on one subtopic at a time.
Long term memory
For a medical student, long term memory is important because your knowledge is cumulative from the beginning of med school until the day you receive your diploma and start working. Actually, the importance doesn’t stop when you start working, because you will be depending on all the cumulative long term knowledge when treating patients!
The power of flashcards as a study tool stems from the fact that you are actively studying, as opposed to passively reading material. You are using active study methods when you have to recall or remember a piece of information without a hint, because your brain is actively trying to recall a piece of information. 🚀
For example, a flashcard will present you a question (What are the 3 parts of the trigeminal nerve) and you have to actively recall what the answer is (ophthalmic, maxillary and mandibular branch). The neuronal firings that happen when you actively try to recall a piece of information actually helps strengthen neuronal connections and enhance long term memory.
How to Make Flashcards for Visual Subjects like Anatomy
Anatomy is a subject that is completely centered around diagrams upon diagrams upon diagrams 😵💫. The beauty about flashcards is the fact that you can add pictures to them!
If you are making physical flashcards…
You can always draw out anatomical (or physiological, biochemical, pathological, etc) diagrams… lable the individual terms with Numbers, and then put the answers on the back of the flashcards.
You can also print out the diagrams and cover the labels with a piece of paper or white out!
I did exactly the above in my first years of med school and it helped me a lot to get As on all my anatomy exams (and other subjects). Unfortunately, the con is that it can be quite time consuming to do this! This where our Voovo Flashcard App comes in to make your life extremely easy with Diagram Flashcards. 😍
Voovo was actually created by another medical student who had the same problem that I did — the fact that making flashcards was extremely time consuming, even if you use a flashcard app like Anki! So, he created his own flashcard app (Voovo) that tackled all the problems that he (and I) encountered in med school. The first problem the he tacked was that of diagrams… which he solved by diagram flashcards / image occlusion cards. 📚
What are diagram flashcards?
Diagram flashcards, also known as image occlusion flashcards, are an AI powered solution that allows you to make up to hundreds of flashcards from diagrams in under a minute! Below, you can see a picture where a diagram flashcard is being studied on Voovo, in which the blue box covers a text label of a heart.
How to actually Study Your Flashcards
Make sure to fully embrace studying with active recall.
This means that when you are going through your flashcards… focus very hard on recalling the answers BEFORE you flip the card! This process of trying to remember something will help form new neural networks to make you remember something better and help you retain information for a longer period of time.🤓
The scientific basis of this is something called synaptic plasticity: the connection between your synapses (the connections between neurons) cam ne increased or decreased over time, based on how frequently you use the particular synapses. 👏
Each time you successfully recall a piece of information, the synaptic connections become stronger and more efficient, making it a lot easier to recall the said information in the future!
Utilize Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition is a method of reviewing flashcards at increasing intervals. This technique is highly effective for long-term retention. Flashcards are the most effective tool for implementing spaced repetition into your studies. You can create traditional, physical flashcards (a more hands-on way to study) or use modern digital apps like Voovo.
Digital apps automatically track your performance and adjust the time intervals between future review sessions based on how well you perform! If you can recall a concept accurately, the app will schedule a review session at a farther away time and you will see it less frequently. On the other hand, if you struggle to remember a card, the app will prioritize it so that you can review it frequently until you’ve mastered it!
The same system is implemented when you study with physical flashcards, but you do it manually. You can divide your flashcards into piles based on how well you know the material — “Mastered”, “Review occasionally”, and “Needs Practice”.
Schedule review sessions throughout your day!
Consistency is truly the key to effective studying throughout medical school. You cannot cram an information dense subject like pathology in a week, even if you are (most likely) a genius! The beauty of studying with spaced repetition flashcards is that the key is to have short (30 minute) study sessions spaced out throughout your day… you can study while you are on the bus to your campus, between classes, on the couch before dinner, basically anytime and anywhere.
Use Voovo App to Master Studying with Flashcards 📖
Voovo is an all in one spaced repetition flashcard app that was created with a single goal – to make studying what it should be: easy, efficient and enjoyable. We are here to make your study sessions more effective and less stressful so that you can have both a fulfilling personal and study life. 💪 are you ready to transform your learning experience? Download the Voovo app for free from the App Store or Google Play!
We hope that this was a helpful guide and that it inspired you! Do you have any tips or hacks for the other fellow students reading this? If so… be sure to leave a comment below. Also, subscribe to our substack for future blog posts about studying, med school, and educational news!
Happy studying, and may your journey through medical school be both rewarding and enjoyable! 📚✨