You've hoarded your study leave, swapped your nights into doing 7 nights in a row, left your significant other and shipped yourself off for a week in strange parts of the country you've never seen and never will again?
Or you've managed to escape the humdrum day to day work of the operating room to get yourself onto a day release course?
Well, here's a tip.
Don't take any notes.
Okay, perhaps that's a little exaggeration. Let me go into more detail.
EI previously noted the potential for Mind Maps in another post, and described how to use those. Here's another cunning ploy. Use only essential keywords. Take your mindmaps to the next level and only write down a few really key central points during the lecture, and focus your entire mind on what the speaker is saying. Even better: interact with the speaker (this will give your brain an extra "hook" to hang the lecture on.
Instead of keeping a record of the lecture on paper, use a dictaphone
to record the lecture. From the recording, using very simple software, almost always already on your computer, you can transfer the file from the dictaphone to an MP3 file which any player can play back. You can then take a look at your keywords document whilst you're eating breakfast in the morning, and listen to the lecture on the train/bus/walking/car journey to work, when you come to revise.Robert Whitaker over at InstantAnatomy.net has some excellent podcasts and audiovisual lectures on his CD, which you can use as an example (though his AV presentations are much more detailed than your notes ought to be). These were staple listening in the run up to the exam (MCQ/SAQ and the vivas).
You might think that this won't work for things like physiology/pharmacology etc, but you'd be surprised at how effective it can be. Try just jotting down graphs without the masses of detail, or the drug molecules off the board. Don't write down every single point, because that's where you get distracted. Give it a try....
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