Preclinical
How to Study in Medical School
by Mike
Apr 11, 2026 · 9 min read
Preclinical
by Mike
Apr 11, 2026 · 9 min read
M1 and M2 have two jobs. You need to pass your courses, and you need to get ready for Step 1 and the wards. If you study well, those are mostly the same job. The students who have the hardest time are the ones who study passively, or who wait until dedicated to see high-yield material for the first time.
The one rule I'd keep above all the others is to study actively. Reading and rereading your notes feels like work, but not much of it sticks. Doing questions, doing flashcards, and explaining things to yourself out loud work much better.
Decide early whether going to lecture is worth your time. It depends on the school and on the professor. Some lectures are great and you can't get them anywhere else. Others cover what you could learn faster from outside resources.
A lot of students watch recorded lectures at 1.5x to 2x and fill in with board resources. If attendance is required, use the time. Annotate the slides, make cards as you go, or work through the material with a question in mind.
Don't spend all your time on lecture material and none on board material. Your school's exams count, but the overlap with Step 1 is where the effort keeps paying off.
If your school runs on PBL, TBL, or a flipped classroom, your own study time matters even more. Let the curriculum tell you which topics to cover, and use high-yield resources to learn them to board depth.
Stay current. Falling behind snowballs. One week you didn't review becomes two weeks of catching up. Set a schedule that keeps you within a few days of where the class is.
Work in blocks. Focused sessions of 45 to 90 minutes with short breaks beat all-day marathons. Plenty of people like Pomodoro (25 minutes on, 5 off).
Always be doing something. Answer questions, make cards, draw the pathway, say it out loud. If you're only reading and highlighting, you're spending a lot of time for not much.
You don't need every resource out there. Pick a few and use them the whole way through. My full take is in the Preclinical Resources Review, but a solid core setup looks like this:
Anki is a flashcard app that uses spaced repetition. For holding onto the sheer volume of medical school, nothing I've used beats it. The catch is that it only works if you do it every day.
Anki shows you each card again at longer and longer intervals depending on how well you know it. Cards you miss come back soon. Cards you know come back rarely. Over time that moves facts into long-term memory with less total review than any other method.
Use a pre-made deck. Writing your own cards takes forever, and they're usually worse than the established decks. Most people use the AnKing deck, which pulls together cards from Pathoma, Sketchy, Boards and Beyond, First Aid, Costanzo, and others. Every card is tagged by resource, organ system, and topic.
Start with everything suspended. When you cover a topic in class or in a resource, unsuspend the matching cards by tag. That way your reviews line up with what you've actually learned.
Do your reviews every day. If you're going to use Anki, this part isn't optional. Skip a day and the reviews stack up fast. On busy days, do the reviews and skip new cards.
Keep new cards reasonable. Too many new cards a day turns into an impossible review load within a few weeks. Most people can keep up 20 to 40 new cards a day for the long haul. Adjust for your schedule.
Starting with 100 new cards a day. It feels fine for a week and then it buries you.
Missing a couple of days. The backlog can take days to dig out of. Showing up every day matters more than how many cards you do.
Unsuspending at random instead of by tag.
Making all your own cards. Only write cards for things the deck doesn't cover. Your time is better spent reviewing.
Lingering on cards. If you're averaging more than 15 to 20 seconds a card, either the cards are too complicated or you need to go back and learn the material first.
A normal day might go like this:
Fold board studying into the day instead of treating it as a separate project. If you're watching Pathoma while you learn pathology in class and doing the matching cards, you're studying for the block exam and Step 1 at once.
If your curriculum runs by organ system, line your resources up with the block. Starting cardiology? Watch the cardiology chapters of Boards and Beyond and Pathoma, unsuspend the cardiology cards, and filter Amboss to cardiology. You see everything from several angles in the same few weeks.
Protect at least one day, or at least half a day, every weekend. Burnout in the preclinical years is real, and it hurts retention. A schedule you can keep for two years beats an intense one that falls apart in October.
If you're using board resources alongside class, you've been studying for Step 1 since day one. Formal prep usually means a dedicated period of 4 to 8 weeks, depending on your school and how ready you feel.
In M1, build the basics: physiology, biochemistry, anatomy, immunology, and early pathology. Start Anki early and use Boards and Beyond or Pathoma alongside class. You don't need UWorld or practice exams yet.
M2 is when it picks up. Keep up Anki. Work steadily through Pathoma, Sketchy micro and pharm, and Boards and Beyond, and do Amboss or Rx questions alongside class. By the time dedicated starts, you should have seen most of the high-yield material at least once.
Dedicated is for UWorld, practice exams (NBMEs and the free 120), a hard pass through First Aid, and filling the gaps. How much of dedicated is review and how much is first-time learning depends on what you did in M1 and M2. People who kept up with Anki and board resources the whole time usually find dedicated a lot more manageable.
Studying passively. Rereading, rewatching without doing anything, and highlighting without testing yourself don't stick.
Waiting to do questions. Questions teach as much as they test. Start in M1, even if you miss a lot of them. Working through the question and reading the explanation teaches you more than another pass through your notes.
Using every resource. Pick three or four and go deep. Hopping between eight gets you shallow coverage and wasted hours.
Starting and stopping Anki. If you won't do reviews every day, Anki may not be for you, and that's fine. Starting, quitting, and restarting is the worst of both.
Skipping physiology. Pathology and pharmacology are high-yield, but physiology is what makes them make sense. Once normal physiology clicks, pathophysiology gets much easier.
Cramming and forgetting. Medicine builds on itself. If you cram for each exam and lose it after, you're making dedicated and third year much harder. Spaced repetition is the fix.
Not taking care of yourself. Sleep, exercise, food, and friends are what the studying runs on. Students who give those up for more hours tend to burn out.
Medical school is years long, so your habits have to last.
Sleep 7 to 8 hours. Memory consolidates during sleep, and cutting it to study more stops paying off after a night or two.
Move. Even 20 to 30 minutes most days helps your focus, mood, and energy.
Schedule rest. One full day off a week, or at least half a day, keeps you going for the long haul.
Keep your friends, in and out of medicine. Study groups can help when you're actually discussing things, not just reading next to each other.
If you're overwhelmed, anxious, or depressed, reach out to your school's counseling services or a mentor you trust. It's common in medical school, and nobody should handle it alone.
Every day: Anki reviews, lectures with the matching board resource, 10 to 20 questions at minimum, and unsuspend cards for what you covered.
Every week: stay current, keep the Anki streak, protect your rest.
Before a block exam: switch to course material 3 to 5 days out, keep reviews going, and redo practice questions on that system.
Before dedicated: finish Pathoma and Sketchy micro and pharm, get through most of the Anki deck, and see most high-yield material at least once. Save UWorld for dedicated.
Best of luck!
Mike
Disclaimer: StrudelMed / Strudel Academy LLC is an independent medical education resource. The content above is not medical or clinical advice and is intended for educational purposes and general guidance only. Curricula, grading structures, and resource availability vary by institution.