I have found the best way to balance Anki with other school requirements is limiting the number of new cards I do every day. This is the main challenge in Anki – to have the motivation to keep going and going and going. You have to do your reviews every single day! For the spaced repetition technique to be effective, the ‘due’ cards need to be reviewed on time. This is the most important rule to making Anki work. If after a few weeks, you feel that it is not working for you, it may be helpful to look into another deck. My tip would be to pick one and dive in to the deep end. These are my favorite premade decks but of course it is not feasible to do all of them. It is also organized very well into sub decks, so if there is one area of microbiology you struggle with you can choose that sub deck to work on. It includes screenshots from Sketchy and First Aid which makes it particularly convenient if you are anything like me and hate flipping through huge textbooks. This deck covers just about everything you could be tested on in the microbiology realm. Lolnotacop – a solely microbiology deck based off Sketchy Micro. The deck creator used hierarchical tags which makes it easy to navigate and especially good for Anki beginners. The best thing about this deck is the tagging. It has 22.5k cards and so it is definitely another long-term deck that requires time investment. Lightyear – this is a popular deck based on the ‘Boards and Beyond’ videos. Along with that, we also have a deck that goes with each video which can be used as a memory tool or in custom study mode to test what has just been learned. This will be most helpful for students who prefer the cloze style of Zanki/Anking and use Physeo as their primary study tool. Physeo – our team has been working hard integrating Physeo with the Zanki deck. The Anking team also upload helpful videos on their YouTube channel on the most effective settings and add ons to use – Anki Youtube It serves as a one stop shop for all of Step 1 (and some Step 2) needs. Among current M2s, it is the gold standard for Step 1! It covers pharmacology and microbiology too so no additional deck is required. The Anking deck is an updated version of Zanki which is edited and checked for errata constantly. It has a good mix of basic facts and also breaks down concepts into smaller, more digestible pieces of information. Zanki/Anking – this is the main deck I used through my study and I found it to be the most comprehensive. And it is! There have been days where my Anki time count has been over three hours, but putting that time in is what led to my success in board examinations, and hopefully yours too! The biggest qualm most people have with Anki is how time-consuming it is. Using spaced repetition to memorize information has been a proven technique for examination success and in recent years, thanks to our good friends Zanki and LightYear, there are specific resources made to improve Step 1 scores. It felt like sorcery and sometimes it still does. I was answering questions during lectures and tutorials that I didn’t even know I knew I was getting question bank blocks correct just from remembering the Anki card. Clicking the space bar for hours felt way less productive than ticking off the videos or questions I had on my to-do list but about a month into consistent anki-ing I finally saw the results paying off. I’m not going to lie – when I first started doing Anki cards everyday, it felt like such a chore. The algorithm is very advanced and shows your review cards just as soon as you would be forgetting them, making sure you hold on to those bits of information right up until test day. There are many things we have to learn as medical students and although some of them require understanding, discussion and thought a lot of them are memorizing the facts which is a lot harder than it sounds. So you and I know that learning each enzyme of the Krebs cycle probably doesn’t determine if you will be a great doctor or not, but unfortunately that’s not what the Step 1 is looking for. Here are some tips and tricks that I wish I knew before starting my Anki journey.Īnki is a flashcard app that uses spaced repetition to make memorizing all the tedious bits of medical school a little easier. These might be random words to most people and if they feel random to you, I guarantee it won’t feel so strange by the end of this article. As a self-proclaimed An-queen, I have perfected the art of spaced repetition and I’m here to make your Anki journey a little easier than mine was.
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