One of the worst things about taking a year (or years) off before med school is that you forget how you study, how you memorize, and how you quiz yourself. It took me a good three weeks before I could confidently remember how I organzed my life academic. Spirals or binders? Loose-leaf or bound? College-ruled or wide ? Pressing, dire questions for sure.

But really, until you remember how you organize and categorize all your knowledge, it’s tough to get much accomplished. If you’re a visual learner and you try to process info audially, you won’t get far. I generally have to write everything out, even if it’s in my illegible Graham-scratch, if only because it locks it in my head better. And then after that, I have to pace back and forth, and talk through everything aloud. Yeah, it’s strange, but I’ve done a lot weirder things (cutting my own hair on a whim at three in the morning, drawing on my toes, playing video games for 13 hours straight), so I’m not too concerned.

It gets really bad sometimes with mneumonics. Sometimes it’s more work to actually remember the whole scheme you’ve put together to remember something like the pronator quadratus (mine started with something complex, like “Pretend you’re a Republican, so your thumb will turn _down_ at Nader). Or what’s worse is when you come up with some synonym and then tell yourself, “Okay, just remember it’s the _opposite_ of that.”

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