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4. The Resources I Use
142 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, I talk about all of the Learning resources I use to be successful in PA school as well as reduce my stress. There are links for all the things I talk about.
Disclaimer some are affiliate links so that if you decide to try it out you will get a nice discount.
Picmonic
https://www.picmonic.com/insiderhookup/6MEYO8NSPP6TLDK21
Rosh Review
Osmosis (wait for it to be half off)
https://www.osmosis.org/plans/pa?source_cta=navbar
RemNote
remnote.io/invite/yAXZomqbwtE4RiQZT
Pance Prep Pearls
--- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/appRecommended
Transcript
How to podcast during PA school?
00:00:00
Speaker
If you have been wondering how I could do this podcast in PA School, I'll tell you, I use an anchor. This is the easiest way to make a podcast. Let me explain. First, it is a free hosting platform which allows anyone to start a podcast with no upfront cost. It has built-in tools which allow you to edit and record a podcast. You can even record it from your phone.
00:00:23
Speaker
Anchor will distribute your podcast for you so it can be heard on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and other major podcast platforms. You can make money from your podcast with no minimum listenership. Anchor has everything that you need to make a podcast. They make it so easy for you. Download the free Anchor app or go to anchor.fm to get started. That's anchor.fm to get started today.
Introduction to Episode Four: PA School Resources
00:00:53
Speaker
This is the PA School Experience Podcast, episode four, the resources I use. Welcome to the PA School Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Sebring Sands, and we'll explore what it's like to go through PA school and give you a glimpse into the excitement of becoming a PA.
00:01:20
Speaker
Welcome everyone to another episode. I'm glad to be back again talking to you guys.
What are the top resources for PA school?
00:01:25
Speaker
And this week I am going to be talking about the resources I use. A lot of people ask about either one resources go over another or the things that we use in PA school. So I'm just going to give you my take on the things I use. I think that are very valuable that other people would be able to benefit from them.
00:01:46
Speaker
Okay, so one of the first things that I'm going to talk about is rush review. So if you haven't heard about rush review for the PA curriculum part of it, it's awesome for prepping for your main pathology classes. In my school, we call it principles of medicine. Basically, it's the usual vignettes that you see in your different body systems, such as cardiology or nephrology or
00:02:16
Speaker
right now we're doing we just got done with MGI and next we're doing ortho so has questions that you see most likely see on exams and they're probably not as you know intense as clinical your questions because those help you prep for the pants I feel like they're the right difficulty level for didactic here and
00:02:39
Speaker
And it's great because there's 100 and something most of the time, almost 100 questions per module, which is a really good exam prep for me, because that is one of the hardest classes because it's so quick. Like, for instance,
00:02:55
Speaker
for this GI module we only had two weeks with lecture before the exam and they go really quickly so that's an added thing to help me kind of bring together all the information I've learned and studied over the semester and put it in and apply it into clinical situations, vignettes that you will probably see on the exam. But for my study habits I usually don't do it until a few days before the exam
00:03:24
Speaker
just because I like to know and study the information so I can pull it in and apply it to the question. I think a lot of people, some people do it maybe right when the module starts and they just kind of do it over and over again a few times. I've seen that happen as well. So it is a broad tool to help you with that, but it's an incredible tool. So I highly recommend you getting it in didactic gear.
How effective is Osmosis for PA students?
00:03:51
Speaker
This next one might be a little controversial, but I've really put it to the test and found out that this program is actually really amazing, but a lot of us don't take advantage of it. So osmosis is amazing. At first, when I started PA school, I didn't see the utility of it. I felt like a lot of the things were just, you know, explanation videos. So if you don't know what osmosis is, it's mostly a
00:04:15
Speaker
a pathology, pharmacology, and physiology explanation videos. But probably which are the best explanation videos? It's very high yield. They're condensed to the information you really need to know about something. I always refer back to it when I'm learning physiology and really trying to learn
00:04:35
Speaker
a pathology that it's confusing. Because that's really going to help you learn and retain the information is when you understand the mechanisms, the pathophysiology and osmosis really helps you do that. But another key aspect of osmosis is people don't really know about is there's work space feature. So I learned about that. First, it was very confusing, but you can stick in all of your classes PowerPoint. So I
00:05:03
Speaker
I put in all the PowerPoints on the day, the time that I have them. And in that feature, when you click on it, this feature isn't well baked into it. It's supposed to analyze your text, and then next to it refers to other resources, either videos of osmosis that refer to that specific topic or flashcards that osmosis has made for that specific topic. It works well enough. Some things aren't there that you can find on other parts of osmosis.
00:05:32
Speaker
but it's there. You can type in right next to the PowerPoint. You can make your flashcards there. You can make notes. It's really useful. I started doing that a lot. That's all I use to look at my PowerPoints. And then I use the osmosis flashcards, mostly for anatomy now because I've switched to other things, but it is very handy. The space repetition is very nice.
00:05:57
Speaker
And I like that I like the layout and the user interface more than Anki because it gives you a rating you have it has you rate how comfortable you are with that thing. And then it gives you this the interval which I really enjoy rather than the interval already like an Anki that has a specific space to time it gives you your confidence level.
00:06:17
Speaker
which I feel like helps me more accurately know how I'm feeling about that flashcard and to better use it in the future. So that's what I do with osmosis. Osmosis would be amazing if everyone got on board at the beginning of the Didactic year because you can share everything. You can share notes, you can share questions that you made, multiple choice questions, you can share flashcards with your classmates. That would be amazing. But by the time I learned about it,
00:06:45
Speaker
as already everyone was doing their own thing it would be too hard to switch everyone over.
What makes RemNote a standout tool for note-taking?
00:06:50
Speaker
The next one, this one's kind of a unicorn. I've heard about this right at the beginning of Didactic Gear right when it was kind of starting to become a thing and they're starting the developers are starting to add more features but it wasn't quite baked all the way.
00:07:05
Speaker
to where I needed it for a PA school. So this program is called RemNote. If you ever heard of it, I kind of stumbled upon it with a YouTube recommendation because I followed a lot of Anki YouTubers and that was a recommendation. I tried it out, it was really, really interesting. So the thing behind is you make your notes
00:07:22
Speaker
and say it's a toggle based note system. So you just have tiers of things. But at the same time, just with some keyboard shortcuts, you make flashcards with that. It does take a little bit of time to get used to how to make good flashcards. I mean, flashcards, they're usable and are beneficial. But basically, it's not your traditional flashcard. You don't write really questions you can if you wanted to.
00:07:50
Speaker
But it just goes off of your tiers. So for instance, if I had a tier of GI and then under that would be a disease, then under that tier would be a certain maybe etiology and then those things that are under the etiology. So when you look at the flashcard, you see all of that. You see the etiology, you see above it the certain disease and above that GI. So everything is in context, which I really enjoy and has really good space for repetition as well baked into it.
00:08:19
Speaker
Anki used to be the only thing with good space repetition, but everything else kind of compares to it now. Anki still is a very powerful tool, which depends what you use it for.
00:08:31
Speaker
And so RemNote, I love about it is because you can then study the space repetition per page that you have. So I subdivide it to like, for instance, principles of medicine. So I subdivide into the different systems like GI or neuro, ortho.
00:08:52
Speaker
And then I can study that individually. And that's really nice. Do it that way. And it just helps me. I usually supplement that with something else. So RemNote I use, I use a lot of it for farm because a lot of farm things I can't get anywhere else just from the power, just from the lectures and things I have to memorize. And also the anatomy stuff, you can use occlusion, which is an Anki feature. So basically blur out things on a picture, but you have to pay for that. And I don't want to pay for it because that's,
00:09:21
Speaker
would be the only thing I would use in the paid version of Remno. It's a very good app in the free version so I recommend you try that out. I was using Notion for a while because I felt like that was the only thing with the toggle system because what the toggle system does for you is it helps you be more active using active recall because you're hiding
00:09:45
Speaker
kind of the children sub sub bullets because in a traditional like word document you see everything so it's kind of hard to hide things and kind of test your memory and talk through things but with the toggle system it's very nice and i was using notion but notion wasn't perfect because the formatting was weird i was having i was
00:10:07
Speaker
having to switch between toggle and bullet point. That was cumbersome. And some of the other things were just a little bit more cumbersome, but it's also very good feature. And for students using your student email of whatever you're going to, it's free for the lowest paid tier, which is plenty. I feel like for anyone, even the free tier would probably.
00:10:27
Speaker
be good for that post. So that's why I started Switch from RemNote is I had that flashcard feature which I use it more as a helps me space repetition my notes and I look at it to like that but I just have to give myself enough time to go through it all and to let space repetition do its work. It's sometimes hard with space repetition when things because you only have it for a couple weeks and you feel like you don't have enough time to really
00:10:54
Speaker
Review it and it's not a very understandable, but just kind of working on a little bit of time I felt like in my study It's really helped me and RemNote helps me do that I was using Anki for a while just because I knew how to use it I was doing it, but I think a big problem. I was just burning myself out with creating cards and reviewing cards because for my first semester or trimester in PA school We had Durham was our first pathology module
00:11:25
Speaker
And I made probably six or seven hundred cards just for that module. And I was just, that was the only test we had that was studying for at the time. So I was just working as hard as I could to get through them, to review them all. And then the ENT, it became a thousand. It just became so overwhelming. It kind of burned me out a little bit.
00:11:45
Speaker
And then I found that Osmosis had this feature, so I was starting to use that a little bit. But then I switched over Complete to RemNote just because it's so much easier to not have to do outside work other than just studying. Because I have a family, I don't have as much time as my single peers. I really want to be efficient. And with Anki making cards, I was spending hours
00:12:11
Speaker
outside of class making cards. That made sense to me. But with RemNote, it's so easy. As I'm taking my notes, I am making flashcards. So I don't have to do it outside of the lecture. So I'm able to use my lecture time very efficiently. So when I do have study time, I'm just reviewing and active learning and recalling rather than trying to organize all my stuff. And that's been very helpful for me and it's been amazing.
00:12:38
Speaker
So I highly recommend that if you to check it out, if you haven't learned, looked at it. And if you're in the middle of a semester and you want to check it out next semester or a trimester, whatever your school is doing, I highly recommend that as well.
How can Picmonic enhance learning with mnemonics?
00:12:52
Speaker
OK, this next one, this is amazing. It's really helped me come out of my burnout last trimester, my first trimester in PE school, and that is Picmonic.
00:13:03
Speaker
I don't know if anyone's heard of Picmonic, but it's amazing. It is really, it really has changed my love of learning medicine, the effectiveness of it. It just really is amazing. So what Picmonic is, it is, I've finally, I've mostly found that it's effective for me learning pathology, pharmacology, and those are mostly the main things. There's some labs, there's some anatomy things that are
00:13:29
Speaker
really good to help you remember some really difficult things to remember but it's not very much and there's a lot more pathology and the farm really helps me remember farm because farm is just this totally different language it's hard for me to pronounce anything and it helps and when I can't pronounce something I have a hard time remembering it
00:13:49
Speaker
So that really helps what it is it assigns pictures to a concept or to a key fact about pathology. So for instance like penicillin it's a pencil villain and it's what's really good about it is these pictures are phonetic so it helps you remember how to say it and also very visual and a lot of people discount it
00:14:14
Speaker
because they say I'm not a visual person, but if you give it a try, you'd be surprised how easy it is for someone to just remember the picture of the Picmonic. But the problem with that is you just have to review it enough times. But amazing thing about it is it has space repetition on all the facts. So what you do is on a lot of the pre-made ones that Picmonic has made,
00:14:39
Speaker
They have a quiz feature, which you then there's a multiple choice quiz on each of the key topics or facts and you can review everything. And it's so amazing.
00:14:51
Speaker
And it kind of adds up a lot. So this, for this next, I have an exam this next week for GI and I think I have over 700 facts to study from Picmonic, but it's so quick, I can easily remember it and I've practiced it so much. I can go through probably 250 to 300 in an hour. So it becomes very doable. Just a few hours of reviewing every, the whole module for pretty much every major
00:15:18
Speaker
pathology and everything like that. And I am trying, I feel like I'm trying to make this my personal mission life is to make Picmonic a hundred percent comprehensive for pants review. It isn't quite there yet. I'm trying to add more myself on the blueprint because it isn't a hundred percent there, but most of it is, which is nice. And another great feature of it is you can make your own Picmonics.
00:15:42
Speaker
At first, I was even skeptical of this. I felt like this would take too much time and too fidgety. At first, it was trying to learn it and understand it. But now I can make a Picmonic fully flushed with good quiz questions and probably five to 10 minutes, depending how big it is. And that's been very, very helpful. Some things I don't really do just because it's a big thing. And I just felt like it's easier doing on RemNote. So I do supplement RemNote with the things that I don't put in Picmonic for my pathology.
00:16:12
Speaker
And my pharmacology, just because it's easier for me, and these last couple modules have been super quick, I just haven't had time to make them. But hopefully I can get some of my fellow Pikmonic users to help me make them, but I don't know if they know how to do that. So that would be a really awesome thing just to go in, and if there's a lot of it,
00:16:33
Speaker
that isn't done, which I haven't started doing dermatology, ENT, some of those other ones that they're not there. And some people, you can find a lot of the other people of Maine, but the problem with that is a lot of them have not included quiz questions and it almost makes it impossible to learn well from them. You just have to remember, it just comes with an automated quiz question that like, what's this key point on this disease? And it's not very helpful for me at least.
00:17:03
Speaker
Cause you just have to remember the picture. The quest, the quiz question really helps you think about what the answer could be. And it's just a lot more effective doing it that way. So I've just been making my own, but that takes time, but highly, highly, highly recommend it. It's amazing.
00:17:20
Speaker
And shameless plug, I'll put in my referral code in the show notes so that you can get discount because it's amazing. You should try it. There is a free version, but it's pretty much unusable. It's just to be able to try it out. You can only do one Picmonic a day and 20 quiz questions, which is basically one Picmonic worth of.
00:17:42
Speaker
worth a question. Some are 10, some are 15, but you can't really study from it. So if you want to check it out before, try the free version. You can use the my referral code down the show notes if you want to try it out because you get a discount, which is the way to go. And I forgot to mention with Pecmonic, with Osmosis,
00:18:03
Speaker
they always have discounts osmosis i feel like is a perpetually 50% off because i think that's what the true price is rather than the i don't think they expect people to pay the full price because that's way expensive but it's always 50% off pretty much any holiday they have it off if you make an account and do like a seven like a 14 day free version and
00:18:26
Speaker
cancel it, you'll always get promotions for 50% off. So I highly recommend that for osmosis. It has increased in price, but it's well worth it. Because someone said to me, you know, you're paying hundreds of dollars on all these resources. I probably paid $600 or $700 with all these resources that I use, but it's to help me succeed in PE school. And you don't want to waste your money not succeeding in PE school. And it's free to help you with your future career. For Picmonic, I'm planning on using this for pants review.
00:18:55
Speaker
also my practice because it's it's a nice way to review a lot of high yield information and just keep it up and because it's space repetition you just keep reviewing it and keeps pushing it out so it's extends your forgetting curve which really helps you retain information
Essential tech tools for productivity in PA school
00:19:11
Speaker
Okay, now I'll talk about some of the tools I use, some of the technology that I use, because I really love it. But you don't have to do it. Everyone has their own thing. So the laptop that I use is a MacBook Pro 2020. I know. I used to be a Windows guy. I grew up with those. I understood Windows. It was just more comfortable for me. My wife has used Mac pretty much her whole adult life since using a computer.
00:19:36
Speaker
And for some reason I got an iPhone a couple years ago in 2019 and just it was amazing experience. I'm not knocking on Android. Android is great too. It just depends what you believe in and what you enjoy, the features you like. But I really enjoyed the iPhone and I was thinking, well,
00:19:56
Speaker
I was thinking about getting a Microsoft Surface laptop. I was actually thinking about getting a Surface Pro, but my program discouraged it because the software program, I didn't know this at the time, but the software program from Exasoft called Exemplify, they have a hard time recognizing, because they basically lock down the whole computer. And because it has a detachable keyboard,
00:20:23
Speaker
Sometimes I think it's caused issues in the past where it just doesn't work because it thinks you're cheating or it's detaching something and just kind of doesn't work. And I think I had a couple, there's a couple people in my program that have either a Surface laptop,
00:20:39
Speaker
or an S surface laptop, a Surface Book Pro or Surface Pro. And it's worked for them for the most part, but I just decided to get a MacBook Pro because I even think I needed right on the screen feature. A lot of people do have iPads and they use it a lot, but I just don't work like that. I love just being on my laptop.
00:21:02
Speaker
You know, it is really nice having to be able to send things via air plates from my phone to my laptop. It's really nice. I can use all the things I can use on Windows I can find on my MacBook Pro.
00:21:17
Speaker
And I just noticed this now. I use Chrome for most everything because a lot of the websites I use for school don't work on anything else. You can now download web apps, which are amazing. They pretty much look like a native app and you can use the functionality as an app. That's what I'm using with RemNote. I just decided to do a web app because I need spell check. If you didn't know that I need spell check,
00:21:43
Speaker
That's one thing I hated about, like I switched from Notion when I was using Notion from the PC or from the MacBook app to the web app because I couldn't, there was no spell check. It was a really poor spell checker. I need spell check because I'm misspelling everything and especially when I'm writing fast, I'm not taking the time to really spell it. So that's why I love that feature, but I can find everything that I need on a MacBook Pro, which is really nice.
00:22:09
Speaker
So I highly recommend it, but really anything works. I like it because it's so thin. It feels nice. Type's nice. I'm in the Apple ecosystem, so that's really nice as well. But any premium laptop is nice. Spend a good thousand dollars on the laptop because it's gonna be your
00:22:30
Speaker
So it's a very good investment. And in my program, they gave us a good chunk of money budgeted out for a laptop. So it is really important because you won't succeed well if you don't have a good laptop because you don't have a good laptop.
00:22:45
Speaker
You learn from it. You study from it. You take tests on it. You just do it. All your resources are on the computer. So I highly recommend getting investing in a good one that you feel good about. So I also use a mouse, external mouse. A lot of people don't, which I understand just the ergonomics for me just makes more sense. It's a lot more comfortable using a mouse rather than a trackpad. Like a MacBook trackpad is really good. And sometimes I use it if I don't want to get out my mouse, if I'm feeling lazy.
00:23:13
Speaker
But I use a Logitech MX Master 3, and it's amazing. It seems bulky, and if you have a small hand, it might not work for you, but it's amazing. It's a really good Bluetooth mouse, external mouse, and it has a really good scroll, and it's rechargeable. I don't have to put batteries in this, which is really nice.
00:23:31
Speaker
And you can connect it to three different devices. You just have to press a button to connect it to a different device, which is amazing, too. But I love it because it just feels nice that the ergonomics are really good. And also has a side scroller. And I use it a lot, especially with editing this podcast. I use it the side scroll. I side scroll lots of different things. And it's really it feels really nice. I recommend that is $100, but it's a good investment.
00:23:55
Speaker
So for my planning, I used to be kind of a, when I was planning my day, I used to be a Google calendar guy, but I just wasn't using it very effectively and wasn't as satisfying. So I started kind of experimenting with actual paper notebooks for planning my day. I am a disciple of Cal Newport and especially time blocking.
00:24:18
Speaker
So I have tried time blocking various ways. I did try the time blocker that he puts out, which is very good. It's only 20 bucks, 21 bucks on Amazon. Very affordable, especially for helping you plan and be productive, which is almost priceless in cost, but that's very good. And the thing I love about time block planning
00:24:44
Speaker
Is that I know what I'm going to do. I look at my day and the time that I do have, I can fill it with study time. I can really plan what I need to do, especially for the week. I do weekly planning so I can see what things I need to accomplish and what tasks I need to do. And then I, every day.
00:25:02
Speaker
or the night before I plan what to do and it really reduces my stress a ton and makes them be very efficient. With the Cal Newport Time Block Planner it gives you space to rewrite your schedule because the kind of the principle that is if you get off your schedule the remaining time that you do have
00:25:20
Speaker
It's just to help you be intentional with it. So you cross it out in your space to write your new schedule with the time you have left. And if that, if you deviate from that, you can cross it out and write a new one as you can do it four times. So you're just using your time intentionally. I found like I don't do that very much. I don't really use the time block bladder the way it was kind of created to do it. My wife got this other manual, it's called a monk manual.
00:25:46
Speaker
It is a bit more pricey. It's like double the price. But I think they want you to kind of experience it. And it is a lot cheaper when you do a year worth of it because it's a it's a 90 day planner. But I love it because it helps me reflect on my day. It helps me kind of be more mindful about my life and my day as as well as gives me a place to be able to time block plan.
00:26:12
Speaker
which is great. I don't really deviate from my schedule, so I don't need the cross out feature as much. I love that I can set my priorities, I can set the things I'm grateful for, my reflection of the day, which I feel like it's best for me and my mental health. And it's just been really enjoyable using it. I've been using it for a few weeks now.
00:26:31
Speaker
Very enjoyable, but the principle is time block planning. I highly recommend it because it helps you use your time the most effectively. And then during those time block plans, you try very hard to stick to your schedule and would be focused and to not be distracted by things to get the work done. And since doing this, it's increased my productivity a ton. I could probably study, you know, if I didn't do this, probably two or three,
00:26:57
Speaker
more times less productive without doing time block planning. So very effective, highly recommend
The importance of quality headphones for studying
00:27:03
Speaker
it. Okay, I'm gonna go on a headphone rant because my headphones that I use kind of suck. I wish I got something different. So I got, I was looking into noise canceling headphones for peace, cause I feel like in noisy environments, it might be nice to reduce the noise level and everything. Well, I found out noise canceling headphones don't actually cancel all the noise, which is disappointing.
00:27:27
Speaker
It mostly does, mostly just, you know, white noise background, talking it, it kind of does, but doesn't completely. I listen to music to cut out the noise and I could talk about that in a different episode, but I use the Microsoft Surface headphones, which they're nice. My problems with them though is the connection is kind of poor. It doesn't connect with my iPhone very well.
00:27:54
Speaker
maybe because it's not android or because it's you know apple didn't make them to you know interface with them seamlessly and they get my ears a little too hot which in the summer it's kind of painful but the most part they work they have a good quality sound to them i think but i wish i'd just gotten them air pods because they work so much it's so much less hassle it just works instantly it connects instantly i don't have to
00:28:19
Speaker
fiddle around trying to get my podcast to connect with my headphones. That's a different story, but a good pair of headphones are very important because first of all, if you aren't able to have a study room, like my program, we only have three study rooms. We can only have three people in here, mostly because it's COVID. Later on when those restrictions are lifted, still only a few people can be in those rooms. Only 40 people in my program.
00:28:48
Speaker
So you might be in the main rooms and people might be talking, so it might be good to have good headphones to listen to music, to cut out the noise, to be able to focus. So that's looking to what drives with you. If you have an iPhone, I highly recommend
00:29:04
Speaker
either of the AirPods. Maybe don't run with them if you feel like they're going to fall out and break because they are a little expensive, but they work well. They instantly connect. They have good sounds. They'll do it for you. The newer ones, the more expensive ones have noise canceling if you like that feature, but I highly recommend getting a good pair of headphones.
00:29:23
Speaker
So this episode was a little bit longer than I was expecting. I kind of love talking about the things I use because it's helped me reduce my stress. It's helped me become successful. Pikmonik really helped me get out of my burnout because it became more fun to do it now and it was more effective. I'm able to learn more effectively because of it.
00:29:43
Speaker
So resources can help make or break your preschool experience.
Why is Pants Prep Pearls essential for PA students?
00:29:47
Speaker
Oh, I forgot one more thing. I forgot pants prep pearls. This is the Bible of preschool. Some people on Reddit have mentioned that a lot of things are inaccurate. I haven't noticed that it is an issue, but pants prep pearls, it's only 50 bucks. It has every
00:30:04
Speaker
Pathology basically has each section for everything in the blueprint. It has everything you need that's in the pants blueprint. A lot of us supplement it, especially if it's a lecture that's not clicking with us. It doesn't make a lot of sense. We refer back to that for all the high yield stuff.
00:30:23
Speaker
the basically everything you never need to know for every pathology for the pants and for your exams, which is very nice. The newer version, the version three, the formatting is better. It's easier to follow. It's less cramped like than the previous ones. So highly recommend it. Dwayne Williams does a really good job with this product and it's super cheap. Highly recommend it. You should get it.
00:30:49
Speaker
Okay everyone, that's all the stuff I have for you today. I hope to talk to you next week and have a good rest of your day and hope you have an amazing rest of the week.