Tag: organization

How I Stay Productive with a Paper and Virtual Calendar

Posted on by Analise

2024 is the year of working with my brain instead of against my brain.

Specifically, I’m talking about with organization and planning.

I am a pen and paper person, I find that if I write things down I am 95% more likely to remember it and do it (this statistic is made up by myself).

The problem is that I can walk around and people make plans and schedule meetings with me all the time and I don’t have my planner handy.

This is how I am using both my paper planner and my digital planner together this year.

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How to Choose A Word of the Year

Posted on by Analise

Hey guys! We made it through and I cannot believe that 2023 would do us like this and be over in the blink of an eyelash. 

I know that I am not the only one who felt like it was literally JUST February 2023? 

It’s that time of year, so I have been thinking a lot about next year and planning and praying. This year, I am doing a much smaller version of the vision board that I won’t feel like I have to throw away when we move (see updates here)! This small version of the vision board is in my START planner. I love it because when I am trying to make plans, I can just refer back to my vision board in my planner to inspire me.

I’ll have to pull the planner things into another post in the future.

“Yes, yes, Lise, but what is the word???”

Continue reading “How to Choose A Word of the Year” →

4 Things I Wish I Had Done Before Starting Medical School

Posted on by Analise

Before I got to college, I knew that I wanted to become a doctor. I just wasn’t aware of all the time and effort it would take to complete this journey to MD.

Disclaimer about this post: I am going to forever keep it real with you guys. I am not afraid to share my failures in hopes that someone else can learn from them. I can’t pretend to be perfect.

I went to college with a goal in mind, but I didn’t attack my classes and my life in general as a future physician would. I pretended as if I didn’t already know my weaknesses (Hey Math, I’m looking at you). Flailing around and hoping for the best was my mode of operation because I was brilliant, right? Answer: no, Lise is not brilliant, and even if she was, I don’t know that it would have helped her.

 

Some things I wish I had done:

  1. Hit the ground running with my classes.

I was taking some of the hardest classes on campus, yet I thought I would be able to keep up with the same apathetic high school class work effort. I went to all my classes, but I didn’t go to them prepared. I wasn’t focused and I essentially went as if I was going to watch a rom-com. I did this every day for an entire semester! You would think I would have learned sometime in the middle that I needed to get my life, and quickly, but no.

I didn’t keep in mind that I was LEARNING a lot of this stuff for the first time. In high school, I was just memorizing facts that I knew would be on an exam. It came easily to me then, so I thought it would come easily to me this time around.

This was a completely different ball game. “You mean anything is fair game? Even if we didn’t talk about it in class? So you don’t have to use the questions that you gave us on the study guide? There is a book associated with this class?”, were all questions that went through my head as I drowned in my first semester. I learned later that all this information I was avoiding learning would be resurrected when I was studying for the MCAT.

Why is this even important, Analise? Because when these topics showed up again on the MCAT, I wasn’t prepared. As much as I hate to admit it, I should have been taking notes and learning like I wanted to be able to REVIEW (instead of truly learn it the first time) it to prepare for this exam.

 

  1. Focused MCAT prep.

I had MCAT prep classes, I did the studying. However, if I had studied for the MCAT as I have studied for STEP 1 and STEP 2, it would have made a huge difference in my score (Hindsight is always 20/20 right?). This just means that when I studied for the MCAT, that was supposed to be my job. I was supposed to set a schedule and have a plan, but that is not how it went. I was haphazardly studying here and there, getting distracted then coming back to it, and wasting time and then wondering where it went… and then I took the test. That is not how I succeed in life, I’ve learned.

I could have taken the time to delve deep into my studying and given myself the freedom to put everything else on hold for that short time. 

 

  1. Learned more about how I study best.

I knew that there was no way to simulate the situation that is medical school. I was told this many times before I started school, and now that I have almost finished school (Yay, 2 weeks away!), I completely agree. There is no reason to try and simulate it, nor do I think any simulation will be accurate.

However, I do think that having a plan when beginning matriculation is invaluable to success. This is especially important in the beginning when we learned so much, so fast. I simply didn’t have time to sit and think about how I was going to study. My study style changed when I went through the different classes and years, but the tried and true methods were good places to start.

The way that I studied for the MCAT was an excellent way to start off with studying.

 

  1. Organized my life.

I wish that I had taken organization seriously! After my first year in college, I realized that my same methods that I employed in high school would still work, I just needed to make fit my schedule more. I started doing them and didn’t look back. If I had employed these methods in my first year, I would have been less dazed and confused and more prepared.

 

Love you guys and hope this helps!

Lise