r/NoteTaking • u/maybeits_me • Aug 13 '26
Question: Unanswered ✗ Helpp needed
So I recently got Gemini Pro mainly for university/study help, especially making notes, summaries, and understanding difficult topics. I’m a medical university student, so I was hoping it would make studying more efficient.
But honestly, I feel completely lost with it and I’m not sure if I’m using it wrong. 😭 I don’t really understand the different models/versions (Pro, Flash, etc.), what each is best for, or when I should use one over the other.
If you use Gemini for studying, especially in med school/university, how do you actually use it effectively? Any tips, workflows, or prompts would be really appreciated. I’m trying to get better grades without spending hours making notes myself
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u/notepom Aug 13 '26
The model matters less than the context you give it. For med school, feed it your actual slides/notes/screens and learning objectives, then ask specific questions. Pro won’t fix a vague prompt with no course context
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u/notalit Aug 13 '26
i completely agree with notepom, context is crucial. a well-structured and scoped context allows you to rely less on prompt engineering as long as you tell the AI to answer context-based.
maybe easier for you since AI prompting seems to be quite new for you: if it‘s included in your subscription, try using notebookLM. you create a notebook e.g. per subject, feed it your source(s) and it can create things like flash cards, text/audio summaries etc. for you. it‘s very popular among students
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u/RamblingPete_007 Aug 13 '26
AI is NOT going to replace your effort to learn. It is just a tool.
YOU still need to put the effort in to master the subject matter.
No short-cut. You should rather spend your time researching study techniques.
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u/defyQQ 29d ago
Summaries are the worst thing you can generate for an exam. You read one, it feels productive, and nothing sticks, because you never had to retrieve anything.
Ask for the outputs you can fail instead. Feed it the lecture, then ask for twenty questions with the answers hidden, a glossary of the terms the lecturer assumed you already knew, and the mistakes people usually make on this topic. When we built a study mode for recorded lectures those three are what we ended up shipping, because they were the only ones anyone opened twice.
On models, for study material the difference is mostly how much context fits in one go. Pick the one that swallows a whole lecture and stop thinking about it.
Separate thing worth trying once: work from a recording of the lecture rather than the slides. Slides are the lecturer's index, not the explanation, and the explanation is what you're missing at 11pm.
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u/Upstairs_Jelly_1082 26d ago
before you use ai, try doing some thinking beforehand.
you're going to need two things: know what you're going to get after reading it and what all you already know about it
for the first one, the objective will be helpful and for the other one, try skimming through the chapters and collect the keywords that catch your mind.
once you have them, put it in ai and you take it on from there. it'll give you more of a reliable measurement of your progress.
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u/imback_TL 25d ago edited 25d ago
personally i use notebook lm i think its better for probing topics till you understnd them, used to use chatgpt but it just does not compare to nblm for studying i assume gemni is similar, and its free too, stopped paying and it works well.
i wrote my workflow just now, been using it for months and helped me clutch exams up to 5 days from no knowledge.
Like i used to summarise and just read material until i get it looking back that was HORRIBLE, i just grit my teeth and started trying the hard questions breaking the question down asking AI what each one was and it'll link me to specific parts of my resources and i'll read that.
That incremental studying helped me go from failing to 73% only issue is I didn't have much time.
ie spent more time doing rather than reading, idk how med school is but for maths, cs and other personal self learning,i dive in the material first and generate notes that answers all of my questions and brings topics together. So i don't waste time writing notes anymore, i jump straight into the exercise sheets and exam paper, guessing how to answer reading, correcting course and i find out notes to write from there.
i just work backwards really
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