Once I recovered from my first year exam shock, though I passed, I knew that I needed to strengthen my study strategy to survive my next set of final exams. I believed it was beginner’s luck which helped me pass MBBS first year exams. My one year of vacation was sufficient to pull me back into the game. Without wasting even a second, I was studying parts of anatomy, physiology and biochemistry which I had skipped. Finally, I was understanding the subjects by referring to Netter’s, students’ Gray’s, Guyton and Satyanarayanan. Just like other Indian students, I too believe the fact that, students memorize for exams but study later to understand. That is what I did and even the terms didn’t seem to be so confusing anymore.
My savior subject in second year of MBBS was Pathology and Robbins was the Gita. I spent 6 months familiarizing pathological research and even though I didn’t understand a word, I tried to read research articles. I thought by the end of 6 months, I would magically learn Microbiology and Pharmacology but it didn’t work out that way. So I tried strategies to become proficient with the various terms of micro and pharmac, for which I took another 6 months. By the end of a year, I had studied Pathology but was in the beginner level for Micro and Pharmac, and all I knew in Forensic was what I had seen in post-mortem postings.
How I learned Microbiology which included General Microbiology, Bacteriology, Virology, Mycology and Parasitology is a huge mystery. My strategy to learn Micro was to get used to the bacteria names alone first, followed by noting down all the criteria to classify bacteria, and I made a table for all the special investigations required for diagnosing a bacteria. Once I had a complete idea of the bacterial world, I did the same for virology. My Micro textbook had a simple and concise portion for Mycology and for the first time ever I understood Micro at the first read. Later I chose to raise the bar for Micro by reading Panicker and loved the illustrations given there. That is when I realized that Micro was a beautiful subject and our opinion depends on the source we read from.
As I was getting comfortable with Microbiology, Pharmac was another lunatic world. Using the same strategy as micro, I made a note of all drugs names in a small notebook for my easy reference. I watched online videos and used google extensively to familiarise myself. Though the indications for use of any drug was easy to grasp(thanks to patho and KD Tripathi) I never could learn the adverse effects and contraindications for all group of drugs. And the vast anti-microbial spectrum for each antibiotic was a huge pain. Finally, I gave up the day before my pharmac 2nd theory paper and it’s still puzzling how I miraculously scored more than 50%.
With all the tricks I had, patho, micro and pharmac were manageable but I was out of ideas to study forensic. It was then when I found this amazing app ‘Random Number Generator’. Though I wanted to read the Forensic textbook, I didn’t want to have false expectations and blindly bought Singi solved questions papers book. My one and only guide book in whole of MBBS. With the app, I used to select a particular page number and study only those questions on that page. Yet another wonder, I passed forensic too.
The reason why I’m surprised to have passed any subject in MBBS is that my study standards until PUC were pretty high and MBBS was a whole new game. I had to change my perspective, formulate new plans and lower my expectations to study, perform and to guess results. So by the end of 4th term, my mantra was to get 50% or more. It has helped me survive till final year now.