Alec Palmerton, MD — I Reviewed 28,655 Flashcards Every Day for 17 Years. I Barely Had to Study.
Source: YouTube Channel: Alec Palmerton, MD (24500 subs) Duration: 23:18 Views: 242252 · Likes: 9144 Video: Watch on YouTube
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I Reviewed 28,655 Flashcards Every Day for 17 Years. I Barely Had to Study.
I reviewed 28,655 flashcards every day for 17 years, and it allowed me to remember everything while studying less than 30 minutes a day. In this video, I break down the exact spaced repetition system I used to improve retention and stop forgetting what I learned for medical school and board exams.
If Anki feels overwhelming or your scores are not improving, this will show you how to use it the right way. Learn how to focus on high yield concepts, retain more in less time, and perform better on USMLE Step 1, Step 2 CK, shelf exams, and ABIM.
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Key Insights
I reviewed 28,655 flash cards every day for the past 17 years and it’s the reason I barely had to study for the last four major exams of my career. I scored in the top 0.1% on my medical boards at Stanford. My top choice at Harvard called me to offer me a residency spot days after my interview even though they had months of interviews left. People thought I was one of the smartest people in our class, yet I wasn’t. I just never forgot [music] anything. And this technique is so simple yet so powerful that I did it on my wedding day, my honeymoon. It takes less than 30 minutes a day and the longer I do it, the less time it takes. Now, in case you’re wondering, I’m not a genius. This is a skill and after 17 years and coaching thousands of students, I’ve made and seen every mistake so that you don’t have to. By the end of this video, you’ll know exactly how to start remembering everything you learn and you just have to start with five cards in five minutes tonight. When I got to Stanford Medical School, I did what had always worked for me. I wrote and rewrote [music] all of my notes. In high school, this had worked really really well and I think a lot of you can probably relate to this where you may have gotten by with just outworking other people, right? And so that was me. I would write tons of notes. I would rewrite them two or sometimes even three times until the material stuck. This works because the volume of information was not that much so I could just keep repeating the same thing again and again. In college, I could still mostly make it work but I was already starting to see the strain because the volume was increasing. Now, medical school completely broke things. They say it’s like drinking from a fire hose and that is a very apt description. I did not have enough time to write even just notes on all of my classes let alone rewrite all of the notes every single time. I remember once I was learning embryology, I think I’d spent like hours learning these like developmental pathways and I knew my notes cold. I genuinely understood it. But two weeks later, not even like months but like literally a couple weeks, it came up again in a different lecture [music] and I remember thinking, “Oh my god, I don’t remember any of this.” And I went back to my notes and I was like, “I know that that was my handwriting but I literally do not remember writing this thing.” That moment was terrifying for me and what was so scary was when I started to think about the [music] math. If I couldn’t remember embryology after two weeks, just imagine I had a final in like two months. What was I going to do that? And then I had my boards in like two years. [music] What was going to happen then? And then in 20 years in my career when I need to use, I mean maybe not embryology but like when I needed to use some other information, what would I do if I had all of this information that I needed to know and lack of an ability to remember it. What I realized when I started to talk to friends and other colleagues was that we all were struggling with the same thing. The things that had worked for us in high school and the things that had worked for us in college [music] were not working for us as we had more and more material. For some of us, it broke maybe earlier but we were all ultimately reaching the same sort of threshold of, you know, what had worked for us previously wasn’t working for us now. And in particular, what was breaking down was our ability to remember the things that we learned. When the material was less, we could get away with relearning the same things over and over again because there just wasn’t that much stuff. But now we had a problem. Then the course structure at the neuroscience program at Stanford changed everything and frankly, I still don’t know to this day if he even realized how much it impacted my life. So his name was Ricardo Dolmetsch. He was a Stanford neuroscience professor who had a child who actually had a rare neurologi
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