Study Hacks

Note to Readers: I’m hitting the road this afternoon for a four-day trip. Because of this, I’m posting Friday’s article one day early so that you’ll get a full three pieces this week. Please excuse me if I’m slow to moderate comments or answer e-mails in the near future, my computer access will be limited. Enjoy your weekend!

Med School Mania

Students looking to medical school are often some of the most overworked, overstressed students on campus. It has become accepted wisdom that going pre-med is one of the toughest academic paths you can follow.

But does it have to be this way?

Over the past few months, I’ve heard from a variety of students who have recently gone through the med school admissions process. I also had the privilege of talking with someone who could offer an insider view of how the admissions decisions are made at an elite medical institution (which will remain nameless). In this article, I have two goals. First, I want to draw from these conversations to identify the factors that really matter for med school admissions. Second, I want to discuss how to design a low stress schedule that still maximizes these key areas.

Following the standard Study Hacks approach, my goal is not to offer hidden shortcuts, but, instead, to help you eliminate the waste and inefficiency that makes what could be a reasonable journey unnecessarily hard.

What Matters for Med School

To the best of my understanding, the following factors are what matter for a med school admissions decision:

1. Where you went to school.
2. Your G.P.A.
3. Your MCAT score.
4. Evidence that you have a real interest in medicine and a good understanding of what the lifestyle entails.

That’s it. Keep this in mind: med school is not college. The admission decisions do not come down to who has the more extravagant (and punishing) collection of extracurricular activities and the hardest possible combination of majors. For most schools, if you have high grades and MCATs, and a solid collection of relevant activities, you’ll get in. A big goal of this article will be to free you from the degenerate mindset that if you’re not suffering on your way toward med school then you’re doing something wrong.

How to Accomplish these Goal with a Minimum of Stress

The happiest med-school bound students I’ve met, have followed, more or less, the following advice:

1. Major in whatever you want. Just make sure you also take the required pre-med courses.
2. Spread out your pre-med courses to avoid killer terms.
3. Don’t participate in any time-consuming extracurricular activities during the school year. Just do light things that you find fun and that relax you without eating up your time. (Worry not, we’ll return to when you can do extracurriculars in points 6 and 7.)
4. Make your courses your main focus. If you find yourself working late the night before exams, you have too much on your plate. Cut back on activities and spread out hard courses more to keep your schedules more manageable.
5. Definitely do not double-major in biology or chemistry and something else hard. This will make avoiding killer semesters almost impossible. In fact, it’s not a bad idea to avoid majoring in biology or chemistry all together. For someone who is not naturally drawn to these subjects, taking the required pre-med courses is easier than taking the required pre-med courses plus all the other courses needed for those particular majors. A lot of pre-med types feel like they are so supposed to have punishing course loads. This is not true. Go out of your way to avoid it.
6. Every summer, focus on something that exposes you to the real world practice of medicine. This is perhaps the most important point underpinning this low-stress philosophy: isolate med school related extracurriculars to the summers. The resulting stress reduction is intense without reducing your impressiveness.
7. If you’re competing for spots in the best possible med schools — those in which all applicants have top GPA’s and MCATs, here’s the secret to making your extracurricular pop: organize your own program. Often this entails taking an experience from earlier summers than adapting it somewhere new. For example, perhaps you intern at a clinic one summer, then the next summer you organize a similar internship program at a different clinic. Another insider tip: consider a senior thesis on a topic involving community-level health issues. This provides the rationale — and makes it easier to find student funds — to launch a pilot program or gather firsthand experience. Under no circumstances, however, should you try to pile up a large quantity of vaguely related extracurriculars during your school year. I know this is your instinct. I know this is what you think got you into college. But med school is not college! Such an approach will saturate your schedule in stress, and it still won’t provide more impact four summers of focused, medicine-related, self-initiated work.
8. Start studying for the MCAT very early. Get to the point that you can score high without breaking a sweat. These are really important. Much more so then the things that cause pre-meds the most stress (i.e., too many majors, too hard course loads, too many unnecessary extracurriculars.) Take advantage of this reality by putting your focus here, where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.

Why This Works

This approach generates what has been identified to me as the ideal med school applicant: someone with high grades, high MCAT scores, and a solid collection of relevant medical activities. The key, however, is that you can accomplish these goals without having to have your semesters overflow with multiple hard courses and demanding activities. Or so I hypothesize…

As usual, I conclude by turning things over to you guys — the real experts. What are your insider tips for finding a relaxed path into med school?

(photo by Okky Pyykko)

The Student’s Curse

After spending years confronting the peculiar peccadilloes of the student set, I’ve learned that one problem, in particular, looms above the rest. I’m talking, of course, about procrastination. For many students, it’s the personification of academic troubles: “if I could only stop procrastinating on my work, I would be doing fine.”

My experience has revealed that there are two types of procrastination. The first, which I’ll call light procrastination, is the standard resistance to shutting down e-mail or turning off the TV that we all feel. I’ve posted before on hacking this issue; simple tricks, like working according to a regular schedule, starting early rather than late, and keeping yourself well-fed.

The real monster, however, is what I call deep procrastination. This is a state, reached by an alarming number of students, in which the pressure of starting at the absolute last minute becomes necessary to motivate any work. Students who suffer from deep procrastination pull frequent all-nighters and are often found begging for extensions on assignments they couldn’t bring themselves to begin before the deadline.

This is a serious problem, and I want to offer an unconventional solution — born from experience — for eliminating its worse effects.

The Roots of Deep Procrastination

The most common reason given for procrastination: work sucks. You assume you delay because the chore itself is brutal. But is this true?

Think back to the last assignment that you put off until the minute. Now imagine during the upcoming fall semester you have no courses to take. Your professor says he believes in your talent and that he wants you to complete this one assignment at your own pace.

For most students, the work would be rather enjoyable. Be it a research paper or a big chunk of reading, there is something very satisfying about mastering material over time. It makes you feel competent (one of our three basic psychological needs), and most people, when not under incredible pressure, actually enjoy learning new things.

The reason, then, that some students suffer from deep procrastination: their schedule as a whole is too demanding. Put simply, there is too much work and not enough time. Night after night they forced into a situation where they have to work, probably late, and this sucks. After a while a resentment grows toward their schoolwork — it is making their life miserable. And once they resent the work — and get none of the joys of competency and learning and mastery that classes could provide — their mind starts doing whatever it can to avoid getting started.

Curing Deep Procrastination

So what works? Stricter schedules and more intense productivity rules won’t cut it. The problem is not disorganization, it is, instead, a deep-seated antipathy to student work in general. If you want to cure deep procrastination you have to remove the source of resentment. And this means doing less; much less.

Student’s who shift to schedules with much more free time find themselves handling their workload without pain. Without the pain, they don’t grow to resent their schedules. And without the resentment, no deep procrastination will arise.

This is somewhat unexpected, as making your schedule lighter makes it easier to procrastinate in the sense that you can get away with more last minute heroics. However, for most students, the opposite occurs. The light schedule takes away their fatigue, and a true interest in their work blossoms again. Guess what? When you’re interested in your work, it’s not that hard to get started…sometimes even real early.

Are You a Deep Procrastinator?

If your procrastination has gotten to the point where your grades are starting to suffer, or you’re frequently working into the twilight hours to make deadlines at the last minute, seriously consider why this is happening, then ask yourself what you might gain by rebuilding a happy relationship with your schoolwork.

Here are a few past articles to help you get started:

• The Zen Valedictorian
  Take a look at law #1 (underschedule) for a discussion of how and why to keep your schedule light.
• The Radical Simplicity Manifesto
  No-nonsense advice for achieving an underscheduled lifestyle. It’s based on the Rule of One: one major, one course load, and one extracurricular.
• How to Be Happy
  If you understand the science behind your happiness, you’ll be more likely to take you course load seriously.

A Note from David

I recently received an e-mail that caught my attention. It was from a reader named David, and it outlined a set of unorthodox study habits he had used to tackle his final years of university. One habit, in particular, shone through: he doesn’t take notes.

To quote David:

I changed my attitude on note-taking. Basically, I don’t.

Just to keep things interesting, I should also add that David scored six perfect A’s at the end of the first year of his no note-taking experiment, and, by the way, he also had a kid; three weeks before final exams. So before you complain that you’re short on time just remember this: he has much, much less free time available than you.

Could You Go Note-Free?

In this post, I want to briefly describe David’s note-free studying method. It won’t work, of course, for all class types, and certainly not for all student personality types, but, if something about this decidedly Zen Valedictorian style approach sparks a glimmer in your eye, it’s worth taking out for a test drive.

David’s Note-Free Study Method

We’ll let David explain the system in his own words. I’ll occasionally interject my commentary to keep things appropriately over-intellectualized.

I recorded every lecture and occasionally wrote down a few points if I thought they were important enough. This meant I was paying full attention in class: unconcerned with taking everything down. This is key: I could engage fully, and even if I forgot the details, I absorbed the big picture.

A great insight lurks here. The idea of paying attention fully — complete engagement, no energy expended on typing notes or remembering some point that sounded important — seems novel compared to the standard college classroom experience. But imagine the effectiveness with which you could absorb big ideas if your full attention was harnessed to the cause?

When it came to review, I didn’t have to wade through piles of notes, stripped of their context, and try to make sense of them. I had one sheet for each class, onto which I added a few-lines of abstract for any important texts we used that week: names, dates, and main arguments.

Now comes the cool part…

My technique was to take a quick look at one such sheet, and then listen to the lecture on an mp3 player as I went about my business — walking to work, washing dishes, drying diapers, even, on occasion, in the pub. Much of my studying was spent in the garden or walking by the river — no stress, no effort. But as I listened, it went in. Things the lecturers stressed once or twice began to leap out as important on re-listening.

This is worth reiterating: he studied in the pub! And also in the garden, and while doing chores, and while walking by the river. David has taken our tentative adventure studying concept and pushed it to a new level of comprehensiveness. You simply glance at a one-page summary and then re-experience the lecture, listening carefully. By the time a test arrives: you’re an expert.

Trouble-Shooting the Note-Free Studying Method

Some common objections that we can easily address:

• My class has a lot of material that has to be memorized!
  Separate the memorization from the big-idea ingraining. You can flashcard or focused-cluster the material to memorize and save the listen and think approach for the big idea learning.
• I’ll never remember the important little details if I don’t write them down!
  That was David’s fear too. However, he was surprised by how the combination of listening to the lecture carefully the first time, plus one or two subsequent careful listening — with a few notes jotted down for the main arguments and sources — really stuck the material in his mind. You might want to try adding a quiz-and-recall element to the process. Every 10 minutes or so, stop the recording and try to summarize the main points, out loud, hopefully without startling your pub mates.
• Is this different from stealth studying?
  Yes. It’s similar in spirit, but stealth studying still has you take classical Q/E/C notes. I think of note-free studying as a cool variation of the stealth method — one that goes where I was too afraid to go before.
• This technique will never work for my science/econ/anatomy/math class!
  You’re right. It won’t. Save it for liberal arts classes that center on papers, essay exams, and big, interesting ideas.
• I don’t have time to listen to full lectures more than once!
  Think critically about how much time is taken up by the studying this method replaces. Also remember: David has a baby…

Conclusion

The technique is not for everyone. But it’s cool. And it highlights just how much flexibility you have when you reject standard study conventions and start experimenting for yourself. David’s a great example of the Zen Valedictorian philosophy in action: reject a deferred rewards approach to school; demand a good life now; then squeeze as much as possible out of the time you spend working.

[Update: I wasn’t clear about this in the original post, but I am excited to hear about not just college experiences, but also high school and graduate school experiences. Just shoot me an e-mail if you have something interesting to share…]

Experience-Based Advice

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big believer in experience-based advice giving. This philosophy maintains that most advice devised in an experiential vacuum — constructed only to sound cool — fails to provide much utility to real people. To counter this, I try with this blog, and through other avenues, to keep in constant contact with real students, their issues, and, most importantly, their attempts to solves those issues.

Are You a Zen Valedictorian? Tell Me About Yourself…

With this in mind, I want to hear from you. Specifically, I am looking to chat with students who have integrated parts of the Zen Valedictorian philosophy into their life. I want to learn more about the realities of this approach to the college experience.

For example, do you…

• Have a more relaxed and happy student life than many of your friends, but do just as well (or better) academically?
• Have a story about radically simplifying your life and reaping benefits?
• Have some activity your involved with that’s really innovative and interesting?
• Have a unique take on student life? The meaning of life? Or how to be happy?
• Have a “conversion tale” to tell? For example, realizing that a million club memberships isn’t helpful or that a lot of the work your friends do is just because they feel that’s how students are supposed to behave.

If any of this applies to you, please e-mail me. I want to hear more about your experiences and thoughts on college life.

The Power of Innovation

At the core of the Zen Valedictorian philosophy is the idea that if you really understand the psychology of impressiveness, you can, in effect, hack your image — making yourself outrageously impressive without having to become outrageously hard working.

I introduced two techniques for achieving this goal. The first, focus, stated that becoming very good at one thing was more impressive (and less time consuming) than becoming kind of good at many. The second technique, innovate, was more difficult to parse. It stated that any activity that made someone think “how did he do that!?” would yield rewards that were disproportionately large compared to the effort put in.

In this post, I dive into the details of this idea and describe both why the innovate factor is so strong and how you can achieve it.

Some Innovative Examples

Let’s begin with some examples. Below are three activities that generate the “how did he do that!?” response. Each is based, loosely, off of real students:

1. A high school student who designed a technology-based curriculum recently adopted by several states.
2. A college student who setup the U.N.’s first youth advisory council and led the effort to write a youth rights constitution adopted by the Arab League.
3. A high school student who ran a web design company that involved the managing of a dozen contract employees and servicing 5-figure corporate contracts.

Each of these examples, most will agree, are impressive. These students, no doubt, will have many interesting opportunities afforded to them: they’ll get accepted to good colleges (relative to their grades) and have their pick of cool jobs. Lurking behind this reality, however, is an insistent question: why, exactly, do these activities command so much respect?

Some Non-Innovative Examples

To help answer this question, consider, as a point of comparison, the following list of more standard activities:

1. A high school student who was the president of two student clubs and was a member of the varsity tennis team.
2. A college student who did well in a double-major and also sat on two different student activity councils.
3. A high school student who played trumpet in her state’s regional orchestra.

Compared to the previous list, these three activities probably did not elicit the same level of admiration. Certainly, these students are more impressive than the average schlub, but, on the other hand, we don’t imagine them necessarily breezing into top colleges or having their pick of post graduation jobs. Whereas the students in the first list might be called superstars, these latter students might be stuck with the moniker of “grind,” “hardworking,” or, pronounced, no doubt, with a note of disdain: “ambitious.”

Why do we judge these two student groups so differently?

If pressed, you would likely guess that impressiveness is a function of talent and hard work. The above examples, however, falsify this hypothesis. The activities of the second list require just as much hard work, and, in many cases, such as varsity tennis and regional orchestra, more natural talent than the activities of the first list. Yet, the first list strikes us as much, much more impressive.

Indeed, the real reason the first list is so much more impressive can be attributed to a little understood phenomenon…

The Failed Simulation Effect

When presented with a student biography we tend to oblige our instinct to mentally simulate the path that led to that student’s achievements. For example, when we hear about a student holding down two different club presidencies and a spot on the tennis team, we imagine the hectic, running from meeting to meeting lifestyle that supports that volume of tasks. We have no problem with this simulation. We know students like this. We feel that, with a high enough tolerance for pain, we too could be that busy. It’s hard work. But it’s not mysterious.

What happens, however, when presented with the story of a student who works with the U.N. and drafted a constitution for the Arab League? Our simulation apparatus fails. We don’t know how, exactly, one becomes a player in major international organizations.

The effect of this failed simulation: a sense of novelty and wonder.

And it is exactly this feeling that we end up interpreting as the sensation of being “really damn impressed.” In other words: The first three sample students elicit great admiration not because they are harder working or more talented than the second list, but because we cannot simulate the path they took to their achievements. This failure intrigues us. We don’t feel like we could have done the same. We don’t feel threatened. A sense of novelty and wonder sluices through our synapses.

Leveraging the Failed Simulation Effect

Understanding this subtle mental effect allows you to maximize the impressiveness you reap from the effort you expend in activities. The key, we now understand, is to push activities into a realm where most people cannot easily imagine the steps that got you to your destination. Here’s the good news: such pushes are a function more of planning and creativity than of hard work.

From my experience in deconstructing the paths taken by these types of students, I can identify three steps that will help you get to this impressiveness sweet spot:

1. Enter a Closed World and Exceed Expectations. The first step is to get involved as an insider in a world that interests you. This might mean landing an internship, or shadowing someone, or joining a relevant club. Once there — and this is key — tackle the opportunities given to you with vigor. Complete them fast. Go slightly above and beyond. In such entry-level, non-full time situations, the people above you will be pleasantly surprised that you are getting things done. You will soon be rewarded for this.
2. Package Insider Connections. After you’ve proved yourself in this world, you’ll begin to notice interesting opportunities that only an insider, like yourself, would know about. Look for an opportunity to lead a project that would be available only to someone on the inside. Leverage your insider knowledge to its fullest extent.
3. Escalate. The solo project from (2) will defeat most people’s simulation apparatus as it was built upon connections available only to insiders. In this final step, leverage this effect, and the good job you did your past project, to shake loose an even more un-simulatable project. Repeat this process a few times, with each iteration ramping up to an even more insider-supported, harder to simulate project.

Case Studies: How The Three Example Students Applied These Steps

Let’s examine how these three steps were applied by the sample impressive students at the beginning of the article.

Case Study #1: The high school student who wrote the curriculum.
She satisfied step (1) by taking a student internship at a well-known technology company. She then satisfied (2) by getting involved — and following through — on an internal project involving the application of the company’s technology to educational settings. Finally, (3) was satisfied when she volunteered, as her main intern project, to package up these findings into a full curriculum. By doing a good job and following through, she got the company to pitch the curriculum to their school partners; several picked it up.

None of this required any more effort than the standard high school summer job. But because it leveraged opportunities only available to someone working inside the education department of a technology company, it appears, to an outsider, to be un-simulatable — “how do you get states to adopt a curriculum you wrote!?” — and thus really damn impressive.

Case Study #2: The college student who worked with the U.N. and Arab League.
Attending school in the middle east, this student met up, by coincidence, with an old friend who had started an international youth activism network. To satisfy (1), he agreed to start a chapter of the organization in his own neck of the woods. He pushed the chapter to meet regularly and grow. By doing so, he met some important contacts and identified some important youth issues in the middle east. To satisfy (2), he made a lateral move to start his own organization focused solely on middle east youth issues. By attending conferences, and making phone calls, people got to know him. Finally, to get at (3), he leveraged this status and his connections to get invitations to help lead relevant initiatives at the U.N. and the Arab League. No mystery. He ran a youth organization in an under-represented region. These international bodies wanted to work on these issues. It was a natural fit.

This was hard work. But no more so than the running of any large club. Because, however, it dealt with an insider world — a vibrant sub-culture of international youth activism — it yielded rewards — involvement with the U.N. and Arab League — that, to an outsider, seem absolutely inexplicable.

Case Study #3: The high school CEO.
I’ll come clean: this story is based on the company I started in high school with my friend Michael Simmons. Mike and I knew how to design basic web sites because we were, well, nerds. Hoping to make some money, we stumbled across a local guy who ran a business directory web site for the Princeton area where we lived. To satisfy (1), we setup a little deal to help small business he listed build simple web sites. To satisfy (2), we leveraged the portfolio and experience this provided us to strike out on our own. One of our key insights working with the business directory was that it was easy to find sub-contractors that would, for a cut of the fee, tackle most of the time-consuming tasks of designing web sites. We landed a few clients and made some money. Finally, to satisfy (3), we leveraged the fact that our company looked like a big deal to hire a CEO, print some fancy marketing materials, buy suits, build up our team of sub-contractors, and, most importantly, raise our fees.

The company was fun. We never had more than one or two clients at a time. And our responsibility was mainly keeping them posted while our sub-contractors did the work. Looking back, Mike and I estimate the time we spent was roughly equivalent to being the president of a student club. The rewards, however, were so much higher. Because we leveraged the insider knowledge gained by working with a local web portal, we were quickly able to get to a point that foiled most people’s simulation apparatus.

In Conclusion

I apologize for the length of this article, but the subject of activity innovation is tricky. It is also, I must admit, one of my favorite issues to explore. If you’re looking to make an impact in this world — and you want to do so without suffering a steady stream of stress-induced panic attacks — you need to look beyond the standard exaltations to simply “get started!” and “work hard!” and “follow your passion and it will all work out!” Instead, think carefully about how impressive achievements really come about. When you know what you’re doing, you will be surprised by how soon you can get somewhere that earns serious admiration.