How I Study Difficult Topics that STUMP Most Other Students

Studying can be challenging, especially when we encounter topics that seem too complex or confusing for us. We might feel frustrated, overwhelmed, or even give up on learning. But what if I told you that there is a simple and effective way to study difficult topics that most other students overlook? It’s called mixing, and it can help you improve your understanding, memory, and performance on any subject. In this blog post, I will share with you how I use mixing to study medicine and how you can apply it to any field of study.

What is mixing, and why does it work?

Mixing is a learning technique that involves using multiple resources and methods to study a topic from different perspectives and angles. For example, instead of just relying on one textbook or lecture, you can also use videos, podcasts, articles, quizzes, flashcards, and other tools to learn the same topic. Mixing works because it exposes you to different ways of explaining, presenting, and applying the information, which helps you form a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of the topic. Mixing also helps you avoid the illusion of competence, which is when you think you know something well after learning it just one way, but in reality, you don’t. By mixing up your learning, you can test your knowledge, identify your gaps, and fill them in with more information.

How do I use mixing to study medicine?

Studying medicine can be very daunting, as there are so many topics, concepts, and details to learn and remember. I used to struggle with studying medicine until I discovered the power of mixing. Here is how I use mixing to study medicine in two steps:

Step 1: Mix up how I take in information

One mistake I used to make while learning was accepting that I really understood something after learning it just one way. For example, when I first learned about high blood pressure, it was in the context of the heart, certain chemicals in our body, and the nervous system. I understood this relationship very well, but once I started clinical rotations and I started caring for patients, there were so many nuances about high blood pressure that I didn’t understand well enough to make decisions about treatment or management. How do the kidneys affect it? How does our endocrine system affect it? What about medications?

In order to fill in all those gaps in how I understood this complex topic, I needed to mix up the way I learned. So, what did I do? I had different residents and attending doctors teach me the way they conceptualized high blood pressure. I read journal papers and clinical trials about the topic. I watched YouTube videos—not just a few; I watched playlists. I just needed new perspectives, and the more I consumed, the bigger the puzzle about high blood pressure seemed to grow. Sometimes we don’t even know how little we know about a topic until we mix up the way we learn about it. I probably still don’t know everything I need to know about it, but now my understanding is strong enough that I can confidently counsel a patient about their condition.

Step 2: Mix up how I study that information

A common mistake I would make is to study one topic for way too long. Because whenever I had a test coming up, about a week before, I would plan out a review schedule. And like most students, I approached it sequentially and logically. Like, I’ll review lectures one and two today, and then three and four tomorrow, and then so on. That way, before the test, I’ll have reviewed everything, right? It just seemed logical. But the issue with this approach was that on the day of the test, I would get a question about lecture one or two, and I would just completely blank out. Because I hadn’t actually looked at that material for almost a week. And this was really frustrating.

So instead, a solution I found was to study a bit of every topic each day. Instead of dedicating an entire afternoon to just lecture one, I can touch all the lectures in the afternoon, but just bits and pieces. And then mix back and forth between them. Sometimes I find that I know certain topics better than others, so that is when a revision timetable can be really helpful. I’ve already discussed this in a previous blog post, but you can use something like a revision timetable to really hone in on your problem chapters.

So that’s how I like to think about mixing up my studies. Thinking back to our map, there are many ways to mix it up for understanding, and there are also many ways to mix it up for remembering. And this is when you can check out some of the resources I recommend below. But obviously, they’re not free. They’re going to cost you a like on this blog post.

So, for example, I like using flashcards, which is why I use RemNote, which shuffles all my topics and then spaces them out for me using a built-in algorithm to offload any study planning that I need to do. As for problem sets, I like to do them at random. Because when I mix up all these different types of questions, I often uncover hidden information or viewpoints about how topics are related. So ultimately, it just helps me make all these connections between everything that I’m learning. And it’s also good practice, because I’ll bet you big bucks that your exam is going to be randomized as well.

Conclusion

So, to summarize, mixing is a simple and effective way to study difficult topics that most other students overlook. It involves using multiple resources and methods to study a topic from different perspectives and angles. By mixing up your learning, you can improve your understanding, memory, and performance on any subject. I use mixing to study medicine in two steps: first, I mix up how I take in information, using different resources like teachers, videos, podcasts, textbooks, and so on. Second, I mix up how I study that information, using different tools like RemNote, flashcards, problem sets, and so on. Mixing is best when you use it in combination with other evidence-based techniques, which you can find in my other blog posts.

I hope you found this blog post helpful and informative. If you did, please like, share, and subscribe to my blog for more tips and tricks on how to study smarter, not harder. Thank you for reading, and happy studying!