In summary,...

I've started going over my old summaries - partly to do some half-hearted revision, but mostly to just tidy them up a little to make life easier for myself when I get onto hardcore revision in a couple of weeks - only to realise that some of them DON'T EXIST. That's right, they just aren't there. I'd forgotten, but every now and then throughout the semester there was a week when I just couldn't really be bothered summarising it properly. To be honest, it's only within the last few weeks that I've really gotten then hang of doing neat, tidy summaries, all nicely formatted with pretty little diagrams. Of course, it figures that the weeks that I didn't do summaries for are mostly the kind of messy weeks that I didn't particularly enjoy or were full of difficult concepts. Oh well, at least I have some form of notes for everything - it's just a matter of pulling it all together.

If there are any aspiring med students reading this, my one big tip for you when you get in is: SUMMARISE EVERYTHING! And do it as you go. In undergrad, I used to leave my summarising until swotvac, and compiling my summaries was essentially my study. It worked fine for me then, but trust me, if you try to do this in med school, there is no way you will actually get through all of the material to summarise it all. I find what works best for me (and it could be completely different for you - part of the difficulty in med school is figuring out what does work best for you) is to summarise each night - lectures, pracs, whatever it is we did that day, I try to summarise it that night, in particular reference to our week's learning objectives. The learning objectives get sent out by the school at the start of the week, and essentially involve a list of everything we're meant to learn that week. At the weekend, I can go through and see if there are any learning objectives I've missed, and fill in those. Then I try to condense it to what I really need to know, and in an easy-to-read format. I guess the exam will be the time to see whether my method worked.