USMLE STEP 1 STUDY TOOLS AND TIPS

Where do you recommend getting textbooks from? (renting, buying, online etc)

well textbook companies are evil and sometimes you have no choice but to buy a textbook new, but for other times where that’s not the case i’d recommend you check out slugbooks! ^_^ they compare a bunch of different sites selling the textbook you need so you can find it at the cheapest price :) it’s like the kayak of academia lol!

saga in black and white

revisiting some of my old sketches and book notes inspired by leonardo da vinci.

Physics exam in two days!!!

What I think is really interesting about the papyrus account of the workers building the tomb of Rameses III going on strike to demand better wages is really fascinating to me because if you look at the description given by the royal scribe you see that there was an attempt to satisfy the workers by bringing a large amount of food at once but that was rebuffed by the workers who declared that it wasn’t just that they were hungry at the moment but had serious charges to bring that “something bad had been done in this place of Pharoah” (is poor wages and mistreatment). They understood themselves as having long term economic interests as a -class- and organized together knowing that by doing so they could put forward their demands collectively. It so strongly flies in the face of narratives that are like “in this Time and Place people were happy to be serve because they believed in the God-King and maybe you get some intellectual outliers but certainly no common person questioned that”. If historical sources might paint that sorta picture of cultural homogeneity it is because those sources sought not to describe something true but invent a myth for the stability of a regime.

one of my favourite quotes by frank ocean!

How to Study Like a Harvard Student

Taken from Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, daughter of the Tiger Mother

Preliminary Steps 1. Choose classes that interest you. That way studying doesn’t feel like slave labor. If you don’t want to learn, then I can’t help you. 2. Make some friends. See steps 12, 13, 23, 24. General Principles 3. Study less, but study better. 4. Avoid Autopilot Brain at all costs. 5. Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time. 6. Write it down. 7. Suck it up, buckle down, get it done. Plan of Attack Phase I: Class 8. Show up. Everything will make a lot more sense that way, and you will save yourself a lot of time in the long run. 9. Take notes by hand. I don’t know the science behind it, but doing anything by hand is a way of carving it into your memory. Also, if you get bored you will doodle, which is still a thousand times better than ending up on stumbleupon or something. Phase II: Study Time 10. Get out of the library. The sheer fact of being in a library doesn’t fill you with knowledge. Eight hours of Facebooking in the library is still eight hours of Facebooking. Also, people who bring food and blankets to the library and just stay there during finals week start to smell weird. Go home and bathe. You can quiz yourself while you wash your hair. 11. Do a little every day, but don’t let it be your whole day. “This afternoon, I will read a chapter of something and do half a problem set. Then, I will watch an episode of South Park and go to the gym” ALWAYS BEATS “Starting right now, I am going to read as much as I possibly can…oh wow, now it’s midnight, I’m on page five, and my room reeks of ramen and dysfunction.” 12. Give yourself incentive. There’s nothing worse than a gaping abyss of study time. If you know you’re going out in six hours, you’re more likely to get something done. 13. Allow friends to confiscate your phone when they catch you playing Angry Birds. Oh and if you think you need a break, you probably don’t. Phase III: Assignments 14. Stop highlighting. Underlining is supposed to keep you focused, but it’s actually a one-way ticket to Autopilot Brain. You zone out, look down, and suddenly you have five pages of neon green that you don’t remember reading. Write notes in the margins instead. 15. Do all your own work. You get nothing out of copying a problem set. It’s also shady. 16. Read as much as you can. No way around it. Stop trying to cheat with Sparknotes. 17. Be a smart reader, not a robot (lol). Ask yourself: What is the author trying to prove? What is the logical progression of the argument? You can usually answer these questions by reading the introduction and conclusion of every chapter. Then, pick any two examples/anecdotes and commit them to memory (write them down). They will help you reconstruct the author’s argument later on. 18. Don’t read everything, but understand everything that you read. Better to have a deep understanding of a limited amount of material, than to have a vague understanding of an entire course. Once again: Vague is bad. Vague is a waste of your time. 19. Bullet points. For essays, summarizing, everything. Phase IV: Reading Period (Review Week) 20. Once again: do not move into the library. Eat, sleep, and bathe. 21. If you don’t understand it, it will definitely be on the exam. Solution: textbooks; the internet. 22. Do all the practice problems. This one is totally tiger mom. 23. People are often contemptuous of rote learning. Newsflash: even at great intellectual bastions like Harvard, you will be required to memorize formulas, names and dates. To memorize effectively: stop reading your list over and over again. It doesn’t work. Say it out loud, write it down. Remember how you made friends? Have them quiz you, then return the favor. 24. Again with the friends: ask them to listen while you explain a difficult concept to them. This forces you to articulate your understanding. Remember, vague is bad. 25. Go for the big picture. Try to figure out where a specific concept fits into the course as a whole. This will help you tap into Big Themes – every class has Big Themes – which will streamline what you need to know. You can learn a million facts, but until you understand how they fit together, you’re missing the point. Phase V: Exam Day 26. Crush exam. Get A.

I kind of wish that the idea that you can just be was a little more mainstream.

Like, having drive and ambition is great. But it gets drilled in kids’ heads that there is some pressure to constantly be looking for the next move up, to be bigger than life. It wears you down to never be satisfied.

Not everyone is destined for greatness. It just doesn’t suit some people.

There’s nothing wrong with having a quiet life, making enough to get by, having a small apartment where you’re comfortable, and just living. You don’t have to constantly be looking to go onward and upwards. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to just be.

Hey! Im thinking of doing computer science in uni next year and I wanted to know if my computer will be sufficient? Got any recs?

Hi there! While I am a huge tech nerd, and would love to recommend cool devices for your use during your degree, I honestly think that most of the basic laptops are sufficient to complete a Computer Science degree. The flashy added features are mainly for aesthetic and are mildly time saving. You are rarely actually going to build projects that make use of all of your excessive RAM space or multithreading capabilities. The most of your degree is just going to be pulling up PDF’s and using your internet browsers. A lot of schools allow remote connection to stronger servers if you need a heftier processing power anyway. All that being said, here are my top tips when deciding on a device for your Computer Science degree: 

Focus on battery life and keyboard comfort (for your hand size and typing style). You are going to be typing a lot, and you don’t want your device dying on you randomly in class. *shudders in lost code* 

Invest in the largest solid state drive (SSD) that you can afford. Avoid hard drives as internal storage. Please. Your computer will constantly scream if you don’t. SSD’s are so much faster.

Good screen quality helps, especially if you play games and watch videos on your device like I do

Invest in an external monitor (or two!). The extra real estate is a life saver when coding, as you can pull up documentation, stack overflow, and multiple tabs in your IDE all at once. Really helps optimize your workflow

If your thirsty for cool tech, a dedicated GPU helps (but it will hike up your price a lot). It mostly comes in use if you are doing a lot of video editing, gaming, animation, machine learning or data science tasks. Don't really need it otherwise

If you try and get a good deal on a setup that provides most of the above, you'll be golden. Don’t stress too much! You don’t spend as much time on your computer in this degree then you think you might.