Optimize learning in your study group with these strategies
Joining a study group sounds like a logical way to prepare for exams in medical school. You find a group with your peers, show up, study, ace the test. Rinse and repeat. While that seems like a sure bet, that’s not quite how it usually works out. To get the most out of them, study groups require forethought and a little bit of strategy.
Setting Up a Study Group for Success: Strategies for Med Students
In this episode, host Ryan Orwig sits down with Dr. Jim Culhane, Assistant Dean for Student Academic Success Programs and Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Notre Dame of Maryland University School of Pharmacy. Part two of this miniseries discusses the strategies med students can use when setting up a study group for success.
“I think it’s really important for people that are joining a study group or forming a study group that they’re really honest with themselves and with one another about what their goals and objectives are. Because some people are looking for that emotional support group, some are looking for a social group to join. Some people are just: ‘hey, I don’t care as long as I can pass this class. That’s my primary objective.’ And then you’ve got the gunners; they want the A no matter what. If you all don’t have at least one shared reason why you’re there, that can really lead to a lot of discord, I think, amongst group members. I like your idea of setting the stage first. That’s the way things are gonna be.” – Dr. Jim Culhane
Maximize your efficiency with the right study strategies for you. With the STATMed Class, we teach you strategies to get the most out of your study sessions.
Subscribe to the STATMed Podcast!
Transcript
Announcer: Welcome to the STATMed Podcast, where we teach you how to study in med school and how to pass board-style exams. Your host is Ryan Orwig, a learning specialist with more than a decade of experience working with med students and physicians. This episode is the second of three in which Ryan sits down with Dr. Jim Culhane, Notre Dame of Maryland University School of Pharmacy. They discuss ways to set up a study group for success and dig into the different roles students can take on in these groups.
Jim: I think that it’s really important that at the end of every study group, that the members reflect on, okay, what do I know and what do I don’t know? We’ve talked about this already, right? Identifying what do I really know, what am I familiar with and I think that I know, and what do I really not know? And then use that information to strategically drive your studying after you get outside of the study group, right?
Ryan: Well, that’s amazing. That’s amazing, I think.
Jim: Right.
Ryan: What can be done solution-wise, setup-wise to really make the most out of study groups? Look, some people are required to be in study groups. Some people just really wanna be in study groups ’cause they wanna be around other people, and anywhere in between, right? Maybe I think, and this is something I think I could see the two of us doing at some point is building a course, like a course where it’s like, this is what you do to set up your study group, right?
Jim: Yes, yes.
Ryan: But you’ve got a lot of thoughts on this. I’ve got some broad thoughts, but everything for me largely sort of falls into: take the STATMed class, learn all those skills, learn to study autonomously. And then if you wanna bring that into a study group, by all means, do it. But I think you’ve got a little more, I don’t know, thought-out, discrete thoughts on this. So what can you tell us about some of your thoughts on the setup of a study group and solutions to maximize study groups?
Jim: Yeah, sure. Again, I think the thought that I put into this and the approach, again, just is due to the environment that I’m in as a faculty member and as an academic coach, right? So I’m trying to get students together that have a similar skillset so that they can use and take advantage of that when they’re learning. I mean, the scenario that you just described, where you have a student, let’s say, that has gone to the STATMed class, has got frameworking down and all the other great things that you teached them, and then they go back to their study group and they try to pass that information along or convince other people that this is the way that they should learn, and it falls flat.
Ryan: It could, yeah, that’s true.
Jim: Yeah, right?
Ryan: Yeah, it could.
Jim: So I think if you’re going to join a study group, I think it’s really important that everybody’s on the same sheet of music and has a similar skillset and understands what they need to do. So, when I think about.
Ryan: Let me just interject really quickly here. Yeah, so that’s certainly true from a STATMed class student going back in, but I think largely, what you’re setting up here is true for pretty much anybody, right?
Jim: Yep, absolutely.
Ryan: So, If you’re a med student, you’re a pharmacist student, you’re in some other medical professional program and you want to be in a study group. These recommendations are fantastic. Again, when you were laying these out to me, I was like, ah, so obvious, right? But it’s not because so many people don’t do this and this it’s like a great invention. Like everybody will say the cliche is like, oh, I should have invented the post-it note. You shut up. Millions and millions of people did not. It’s just the hallmark of a good invention is, ah, so obvious.
Jim: It’s pretty simple.
Ryan: And that’s what this is, but it’s about being deliberate, it’s about being explicit and it’s about setting it up at the beginning, because it’s really hard to change group dynamics once the train has left the station. So give us some of your thoughts on this.
Jim: Yeah, so, okay, great. So I have two real inspirations for what we’re gonna be talking about. The first inspiration comes from a lot of the cooperative learning literature. In the educational research that talks about group dynamics and things like team-based learning where different members of the group, so those your medical students that are listening out there that are at a team-based learning institution, you are already light years ahead of maybe some of the other folks that aren’t, because you recognize that in any particular group that you’re learning in, whether it’s in a classroom setting where you’re in team-based learning or whether you’re studying outside of class, that different members of the groups should have different roles and responsibilities. There should be, again, key goals that are set by the group members and clearly delineated responsibilities that everybody has to buy into. The other real inspiration comes from the sort of the business literature. The blog post that I’ve written for you that I think you’ll have up on your website in the near future, I referenced a New York Times article that was written by a regular contributor to that, Adam Bryant, and the title of the articles, How to Run a More Effective Meeting. Because as I think about study groups, there are a lot like committee meetings that I’m involved in a lot as a faculty member. I’ve been in really effective functional committee meetings and unfortunately, I’ve been in a lot of committee meetings that aren’t well run and are a waste of time. So I think that’s really important.
Ryan: Oh, yeah. What I have found over the years is that as I was building the time management and time management sections and building out the tools that we teach in the class, it was from reading about like business and entrepreneurship. That’s where the best tools came from for flipping this over for the med student learner. I think that these students have got to learn to run their lives like entrepreneurs. Your business is getting through the program and all this sort of, ’cause entrepreneurship is obsessed with efficiency and productivity. Productivity, right, workflow, generation. I think one of the big things where people fall off is they’re sort of carrying an office drone mentality, like punch the time clock. Like like people will call me and they’re like, “I don’t get it, I’m studying 10 hours a day. Why am I failing?” I’m like, all right.
Jim: Where do you begin?
Ryan: I don’t know, I don’t know. That tells me nothing. Other than telling me like, you think just by punching the time clock, you’re gonna make the money. But as a business owner, you know it doesn’t matter how many hours I work, it matters what I’m doing with it and then where my efficiencies are. So, yeah, you sort of have this inspiration from the cooperative learning literature and this sort of business oriented article about running a more effective meeting. We’ll put those in the show notes, so that you guys can link to those articles as well. So where does that take you? I’m sort of thinking about this like setting up a good study group.
Jim: Yeah. In the article, Bryant talks about, the article, and he’s got five basic principles, at least five that I cited, that have come from his conversations with over like 500 major chief executive officers from major corporations. The first recommendation that he has that I think works really, really well for study groups is to set a regular agenda. Okay. A meeting agenda or a steady group agenda, what it does for you is it provides you with a real clear purpose for what the meeting is about. Okay. Bryant puts it in his article, it’s a clear compass for conversation. So it’s gonna tell you things like when and where your meeting is gonna take place. So everybody’s on the same sheet of music about that. From a steady group standpoint, on your agenda, what subjects or subjects are gonna be covered during that meeting time. So what are you guys going to do? What are you gonna be talking about? How long will you spend on each of those subjects? It’s really easy to go down a rabbit hole with a subject and you only intended spending 45 minutes on it, but three hours later, you’re still talking about the same concept and you haven’t moved on. So setting a timeframe for that. What’s the responsibility that each of the group members has in that particular meeting? Maybe it’s something as simple as, hey, you’re gonna bring the snacks to this study group meeting. Or person B, you’ve got to read chapter 20 in the textbook and maybe generate some retrieval practice questions that you can quiz the group with. There’s a whole slew of things that we can do, but I think, what is your responsibility as a group member and then ultimately listing down what types of learning strategies are you going to use during the study group meetings. Putting an agenda together is not something that should take 45 minutes, right? It really something, especially once your study group gets rolling, this could be something that takes five or 10 minutes for someone to put together and disseminate to the group before the meeting, so that everybody knows what the expectations are. But it’s hugely important. I think that one of the major things that you can get a setting and agenda is that it can help you to avoid that illusion of productivity that you and I talked about. Is that if you have a clear list of objectives and things that you want to get through with, if you’re using that SMARt goal format, SMART as an acronym stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, if you’re using that format to set the goals for your study meeting, at the end, you can go back and check and see, did I accomplish A, B and C, because those goals are very specific? You can measure whether you attain them or not. Hopefully, they’re attainable in the timeframe that you have decided to meet in. There are relevant for everybody. And that you’ve set a specific time period that you want to accomplish that goal in.
Ryan: I think it’s great. I think it’s great. I think it’s all about setting this up at the beginning.
Jim: Yes, absolutely.
Ryan: Groups are like organisms. They have their own like heartbeat in life and directionality almost. So David and I, my partner was that med, when we start, we met running an adventure camp in Baltimore. It was an educational adventure camp for dyslexic kids with ADHD. It was residential. So we, David and I live with these kids for six weeks. Like residential, 24 hours a day. So in the morning, it was all like intense academic learning. Orton-Gillingham stuff to rehabilitate the dyslexia. But then the rest of the time was just running around like crazy with these kids and just wearing them out. Making it like the sugar to go with the remediation stuff. You bring these counselors and these college kids. Well, what we would talk about is like, your control over the group is only as tight as it is on the first day when you meet them, this first few days. Same for classroom teachers, for coaches, whatever you want it to be. So you set that lasso tight and it’s only gonna get looser as you go. So you have the counselor coming in like, hey, I’m your buddy. Like, oh, no, they’re gonna eat him alive, like “Lord of the Flies”. You’d watch it every year. We did this for like six to seven years. Those kids are just savage that poor counselor. And then the counselor is eventually gonna get mad and be sad and miserable. They don’t understand, like you set guy, I was always a believer, make the rules external and explicit, be consistent. Kids will respect that. Then you can loosen it up later on. You can always loosen it, but you can’t make it tighter so much harder.
Jim: Like house get out of the barn and the horses get out of the barn. It’s hard to get them back in.
Ryan: Yeah, I can’t imagine. When you come into the idea of the study group, the idea should be, let’s set some ground rules from the beginning. Let’s build some goals and expectation. I think being explicit and external with this is really important. That just means writing it out. This is what we’re going to do. This is we’re gonna agree to. And then if everybody agrees to it, like it makes it a lot harder to buck the system and go rogue.
Jim: Yeah. I think the other thing too, Ryan, is that I think it’s really important for people that are joining a study group or forming a study group that they’re really honest with themselves and with one another about what their goals and objectives are. Because some people are looking for that emotional support group. Some people are looking for a social group to join. Some people are just, hey, as long as I can pass this class, I don’t care. That’s my primary objective. And then you’ve got the the gunners, they want the A no matter what. If you all don’t have at least one shared reason why you’re there, that can really lead to a lot of discord, I think, amongst group members. I like your idea of setting the stage first. That’s the way things are gonna be.
Ryan: That’s real. That’s something that translates. I bet a lot of people in this situation would say, I don’t even know what I want. I want an outcome. I wanna get fit. So I’m gonna go to the gym. But what are you gonna do at the gym? I don’t know yet. And that’s okay, that’s not wrong. But if you wanna optimize, you wanna optimize the experience. Again, once med school starts, once the farthest semester starts, there’s not a lot, I mean, you don’t have a month to figure it out. So I think asking it of yourself and the group is it can be a healthy thing. It can be a healthy thing to say like, let’s ask that question. Let’s see what that is. Let’s see what in and then we can sort of shape it, okay.
Jim: Yeah, and there’s not a right or wrong answer here either.
Ryan: Not at all, not at all.
Jim: Not at all. I mean, I think that it’s just really important for you to be honest with yourself and with your fellow group members so that everybody’s understands where they’re coming from.
Ryan: Absolutely. I think it’s really important stuff. What else? So that was sort of talking about managing, was that right? It was sort of managing degree.
Jim: The agenda does one other thing I think. Well, it does a lot of things, but there’s one other thing that I wanted to mention here too. It really helps to facilitate the use of an evidence-based learning strategy called interleaving. This is a strategy you and I have talked quite a bit about in the past. So in study groups, one of the temptations, I’ve seen them with my students is that study groups when they get together, they only wanna focus on one particular subject. Usually, the subject they’re focusing on is the one that they have an exam in two or three days. That’s when they’re getting together to test themselves and go through the material. Interleaving is a strategy where, just so your listeners are familiar with this, is a strategy where, let’s say, during a study session, you can do this independently or with a group that instead of studying only one subject, you interweave or intermix a different but related subject material together. So for example, instead of studying anatomy and physiology in a study group for four hours, I would recommend, okay, when you set your agenda, let’s spend an hour and a half on A and P, and hour and a half on biochemistry and maybe an hour on histology or some other biologically related biomedical discipline. When you interleave, the reason why that’s so powerful is it introduces what researchers call a desirable difficulty into your learning. It makes your learning more difficult but not impossible. That desirable difficulty is really, really important. Where that comes from is having to shift gears from one topic to a different topic over a short period of time. So you guys are all intensely focused on, let’s say A and P, and then all of a sudden that time’s up and you’ve got to shift to biochemistry. Now your brains got to shift gears. Okay. Students don’t understand, well, why would I wanna make it difficult for myself when I’m studying? Why do I wanna introduce this, quote, unquote, desirable difficulty, and why is it desirable? Well, the analogy we’ll use with them to explain is let’s say, I love your gym analogy, right? If you’re going to the gym and you’re working out and you sit down on a machine and you start doing reps on the machine with no weight on it. Are you working out? Well, yeah, technically. Is it easy? Absolutely. Are you getting any benefit out of it? No way. So you’ve got to put some weight on that machine and you’ve got to make it difficult but not impossible to finish reps. Learning is very similar to that. So interleaving hugely powerful strategy that you can use in your study group if you set up your agenda right.
Ryan: A few things on that, where to begin? My favorite gym analogy is my buddy who worked out all through high school, sophomore, junior, senior year, and our senior year and I was in a big weight, weight room person, but we’re all hanging out in the weight room. Somebody is talking about adding more weight to their bench press. My friend’s face got a little like ashen. He was like, wait, you’re supposed to add weight. We’re down for three years at the same weight the entire time.
Jim: Ooooh. Wow. Okay.
Ryan: He’s a physician. But yeah, the idea of like, or me imagine, like when I was lifting weights and nobody taught me how to do it, you start bench press, bench press. I get to rep 10 and it’s like, ooh, I’m starting to feel it. I’m done. I’m not pushing out those last five reps, that’s where the actual depth where you put muscle on, when you’re in that phase of near exhaustion. So likewise, this interleaving is training our brains to understand a switch. When we then come back to the thing we switched off of, it’s saying, hey, I’m not just learning this and putting it away and being done with it short term. When I study topic A and then B, C and I come back to A later either within that session or later, I’m training my brain to say, this is something that needs sustainability over the long-term. I’m cross-training my ability to come back to it within that desire difficulty. What else?
Jim: I think, the other piece to that too that’s really important is that when you interleave subject material or you’re not siloing it, and you’re actually forced to make connections between, that’s why I said between the material you’re studying. That’s why I said, when you interleave, you don’t want to interleave radically different subjects. Like, okay, I’m gonna study biochemistry and then medieval philosophy, okay. There’s probably very little connection between the subject areas. But if you’re studying related but different subjects, it’s really powerful to make connections between.
Ryan: You will organically, inherently make connections. You’re shattering the silos. You’re shattering. So subconsciously and actively making those aha connections.
Jim: So, great example, yeah, great example of this, you might be studying, let’s say, cardiac output. Let’s say, you’re doing the cardiovascular section of your physiology course, you’re studying cardiac output and you’re learning how the autonomic nervous system regulates heart rate and force of contraction and things like that. And then in your biochemistry course, you’re learning about adrenergic receptors and signal transduction. If you’re studying those separately or learning those separately, you may not see the connection that, hey, wait a minute, there’s adrenergic receptors that regulate heart rate and force a contraction and all of these signal transduction pathways that I learned about chemistry. Yeah, that’s what’s going on in the heart when the sympathetic nervous system is activating beta receptors. Right there, boom, light bulb moment. You’ll remember that.
Ryan: Everything’s right. Everything’s gonna stick so much easier and be so much more retrievable. And then other things are gonna stick to that, making the learning around that more sticky.
Jim: Absolutely.
Ryan: And then another thing about this agenda is it’s offsetting the locus of control. This is getting out, this is more in group dynamic. Now, the locus of control is it on like, well, like Ryan wants to study this. It’s not about Ryan. It’s about the list. The list goes off of the individual or the individuals, and it’s about the agenda. Any kind of agendas for independent learning and for individual learning and for group learning, if you can flip the locus of control onto an agenda, it’s gonna run itself better. The experience is going to be that much tighter, because it takes some of the emotion out of it. It takes some of the messiness out of it. Obviously, that’s a skill that can be grown and you can get better at. The idea is like, I wouldn’t expect a group to run perfectly from the outset. You reflect, you adjust, you reflect, you adjust. After a few sessions, you’re really cooking with this stuff. What else can we say about setups and solutions to groups?
Jim: Sure. The second major recommendation from Bryant is set starting and ending times to your meeting and stick to them. As you said before, one of the most valuable commodities that students have, their currency is their time. It’s really important for group members to be very respectful of one another’s time. So if you set a specific start time for your study group and an end time, you should stick to that, because frankly, different members of the study group may plan something before the study group or after the study group. You wanna be respectful of that. Is it okay to go over the agreed on ending time? Well, if everybody agrees that, hey, we’re being real productive, we haven’t gotten through everything that we need to, and yes, we’re all okay. To continue forward, I say, great, go for it. But you wanna have that group consensus. So I think that that’s really important.
Ryan: Yeah. Well, I mean, again, that’s just an entrepreneurial mindset. Think of treat each other professionally and think about is it just because you want more time or one of the people wants more time. Think about it as the growing the organism as a whole. What else, what else do you have?
Jim: Well, I love that there’s a book there on entrepreneuring your way through medical school, I think is a great book. You should write that Ryan.
Ryan: I’ll added to the list. I’ll added to the list.
Jim: Yeah. All right, so number three, end with action in mind. So that’s it, this is another one. So when you get done with the meeting, what are you going to take away from that meeting and what are you going to do with that information? So I think that it’s really important that at the end of every study group that the members reflect on, okay, what do I know and what do I don’t know. We’ve talked about this already. Identifying what do I really know, what am I familiar with and I think that I know, and what do I really not know. And then use that information to strategically drive your studying after you get outside of the study group.
Ryan: That’s amazing. That’s amazing, I think. What I would say is what do I do with that as I’m coming to those things? I guess, I wanna do that analysis ideally as soon as possible at the either at the end of the group or right afterwards. I wanna write it down. I do not wanna trust my head to hold that stuff in place. Your processor is already running hot, offload as much stuff as possible. Keep a dedicated document where you are offloading this stuff and you know what’s gonna be there and you can then check that. And then that can springboard you transitioning out of group study into independent study.
Jim: Absolutely. I think even another idea too, instead of even waiting until at the end of the meeting or after the meeting, during the meeting, you should be-
Ryan: Offloading constantly.
Jim: Yeah, constantly offloading. You could do things like writing down concepts on a separate piece of paper that you know and you don’t know, color coding your notes or your framework with different colors. Red meaning maybe you don’t know something. Green, you’re good to go. Yellow, you’ve got familiarity but you don’t know. Some way of tracking that, like you said, you can be very strategic with your studying outside of the group.
Ryan: I just really liked this notion that we’re doing something specific during the group and immediately afterwards, that is going to then transition us and springboard us into independent study. Just that idea that when the study group is over, that doesn’t mean it’s all wrapped up and tied off with a bow. Like there is more to come. ‘Cause I think a lot of people talk about the struggle of transition, transitioning from, I don’t know, getting home and starting studying, or taking a break and starting studying again. This idea of like, what can we do to cut out that transition time? If I wanna watch a show on Netflix, I mean, I should be able to do that. I should stop it when I’m done, but I don’t wanna take 30 minutes of just blah. Inefficiency to transition out of watching that show to getting truly engaged with the study. I mean, that’s junk food time. That’s wasted time. Or if I’m coming back from a walk or a hike, like how long does it take me to get done and set to actually get started? So this idea of transition from study group into study, active, engaged study, on point independent study, I think this idea of like having this agenda offload that I can then check and say, this is where I’m gonna start, this is where I’m gonna go. Fantastic. It’s great insight.
Jim: All right, so the next one is actually not from the Bryant article, but from a cooperative learning article, from the Journal of Student Centered Learning. It was authored by, the primary author on that was one of my favorite figureheads in this, in the area of learning, Barbara Oakley. She is a engineering professor at a institution in Michigan. I’m trying to remember specifically what it is. I can’t remember. Off the top of my head. But she’s written a book called “A Mind For Numbers” and also created a massive online open courses on Coursera called Learning How to Learn, which has been wildly popular. But in this article, she writes, the articles entitled Turning Student Groups into Effective Teams. One of the pieces of advice she gives in there is to be aware of what she calls hitchhikers and couch potatoes, okay. I know you’ve got your cannon fodder and your ringleader. Well, she’s got some pretty crazy creative names for some of the people that can bring it down, yeah. So Oakley, I’m gonna quote her on this. It says that, “hitchhikers are group members that do not respect group norms, do not show up for meetings or are chronically late, may do substandard work, complain about all the work that they must do and do not accept constructive feedback about their performance. Hitchhikers can be manipulative and usually are out for their own self interest.” Okay. Think about that. Yeah, and then couch potatoes, she said, she says that they share some characteristics with hitchhikers but are a little bit different. Couch potatoes as the name implies are people that mainly, they just don’t pull their own weight. Okay. They’re less toxic and manipulative than hitchhikers, but they’re just not doing the work that you need them to do in the study group, they’re not contributing to the same level at everybody else is. These two types of characters can really bring down the productivity of a group, whether you’re working in team-based learning environment, in the classroom, or whether you’re in a study group outside, I think those same types of personalities can find their ways in the group. If you have someone like that in your group, get rid of them. If you are that person in the group, shape up and change your behavior, so that you could stay in your group.
Ryan: Well, I guess for me, those probably fall under the chaos agent monitor. But for me, I wonder sometimes if our canon fodders, it’s due to misalignment that they might appear to be a couch potato, or maybe. I mean, I don’t wanna exonerate the couch potato, especially the hitchhiker. But maybe some people slide into those slots because of the mismatch. Mismatch.
Jim: Yeah, exactly.
Ryan: I’m inclined to be like, and I don’t know, I can be a pretty harsh judge to people. So I don’t know why I’m being so like fluxus. I’m like. The couch potato may just be under misunderstood or they might just be misaligned with the group. So I think it could come from two directions. It might just be that they’re a bad fit and they need to shape up or ship out. Or it might be somebody who’s trying to shape up and ship up. They can’t because all the aforementioned misalignment issues that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation.
Jim: Absolutely. I agree a 100%.
Ryan: Interesting, but it’s important to add. I really like all these ways to assess the group dynamic and really step back and say, where is this thing working, because at the end of the day, maybe you can make modifications to make the group work. But if not, then you gotta look elsewhere. What else do you have on your thoughts on?
Jim: So there’s one more major kind of general strategy that I wanted to mention is, and again, this comes from Bryant’s article, we’re back to that, and he recommends doing a meeting audit. The CEO’s will do a meeting audit to kind of find out what worked and what does. I think that’s a great strategy for study groups. Taking the time. Let’s say you’ve got a steady group that you’re meeting with all semester long. Maybe at the midterm, you can take one of your sessions, half an hour and do kind of a review or evaluation of the effectiveness of your study group. What are the strengths of this group? What do we really like? Where do we feel like we could improve as a group of learners? What are our weaknesses? Was there a learning activity that we do that we like or we find to be helpful? And maybe what are some activities that we engage in maybe aren’t so helpful? So I think that can be very powerful and really help make study groups much more effective.
Ryan: I bet you, people love the idea, but hate the actual feeling of. I would almost wanna say, okay, we’re setting up the group in January or whatever it is. Put it on the calendar for March 15th or whatever. That’s when it’s like, schedule it from a ways out. And then it’s like, we know what’s coming and we’re gonna do it. I can see all kinds. I mean, look, this isn’t always about what’s easy. This stuff matters. Like studying matters. The time, again, is so limited. You and I see these people in there, the suffering and the fear and failure. I mean, failure is a thing that happens and we wanna offset that. Or maybe the fear of failure is very bad and unhealthy. They’re not gonna fail but the fear of it. So if we can ease that, I mean, these are not necessarily easy answers, but again, this isn’t about being an office drone. This is about being the entrepreneur. Look, being an entrepreneur, it’s not always easy. It’s not always easy. It’s work, it’s self-reflection, it’s self-monitoring, it’s having these personal meetings with yourself or with the team. Yeah, something David coin was the weekly business meeting. So like on Sunday, we have our students have a meeting with themselves where they sort of evaluate their schedule from the previous week and their study agenda from the previous week, 30 minutes. What did I do right? What did I do wrong? Okay, ’cause like the idea you’re making your plan for the following week. If you do that every week for a month, six weeks, for six weeks down the line, you are going to be better off. Is it easy? Is it fun? Do we like looking at our behaviors and our inefficiencies? No, none of us do, but again, if I’m just saying, oh, I wanna lose five pounds because that’s fun, well, then maybe you’re not that motivated to do it. But if it’s like, you have a heart problem and the doctor’s like, if you don’t do this, you’re gonna to die. Well, that’s different. For me, like I’m a person with a really bad, I’m a person with a thrice, surgically repaired back. My motivation to sort of keep my core strong and exercise, it’s not just because, hey, I wanna be fit, which is a great motivation, but fear of spinal fusion and pain, it’s different. You can speak to that. We need to think about this and study it. I think this is a really fascinating conversation here where it’s we’re talking about problems with the study groups, but I mean, the heart of this conversation has been really about how you can set up and really maximize study groups.
Announcer: Thanks for tuning in to the STATMed Podcast. Be sure to look for part three of this conversation. If you like the show, we hope you’ll subscribe. You can find more test taking and studying strategies specifically developed for med students and physicians over at our blog on STATMedlearning.com. Thanks for listening.