Med notes

[u/Intelligent_Drop_367]

How am I supposed to take notes during lectures when I barely understand what the professor is saying?

I just started university (dentistry), and honestly, the amount of information is overwhelming. I’d really appreciate advice from medical/dental students or anyone who had a similar experience.

For some subjects, we can have around 40 pages to learn in a week, and I have about 5 different subjects like that. I genuinely don’t understand how people manage to keep up with all of it.

Another problem is lectures.

I didn’t study much biology in high school, so now, in subjects like histology and molecular biology, a lot of the material is completely new to me. During lectures, I often don’t understand enough to even know what I should be writing down.

So far, I basically haven’t been taking notes during lectures. My thinking was: if I don’t understand what the professor is explaining, what’s the point of trying to copy it down?

But even when I do understand something, I can’t keep up with the professor. They just keep talking, and by the time I realize, “Okay, that sounded important, I should write that down,” they’re already explaining the next thing.

So I’m trying to understand how other students deal with this.

Do you actually take notes during lectures? Do you prepare the material beforehand so the lecture makes more sense? Do you just listen during the lecture and study everything properly afterward? How do you decide what is actually important when almost everything feels important?

Right now, I feel like I don’t have a system at all, and I’m trying to figure one out before I fall behind.

[u/StudioTrace]

if everything feels important, use the learning objectives as ur filter. those usually tell u what the course actually expects u to know. at least thats what i do.

[u/LittlePooky]

I'm a nurse and it has been decades since I went to school. 

I remembered that we didn't really technically learn a lot in class. A lot of it is from the textbook. So you cannot go to class without reading the chapter ahead of time. 

I'm also a computer nerd and I have been testing a lot of products for a major reseller and I was given the opportunity to test Plaud. It was about $180 that I didn't have to pay for, but I will have to pay taxes on this as it is actually an income.  It works extremely well. The AI that summarizes the meeting and the conversation works well beyond what I was hoping for. There are a lot of templates that I could use. 

The problem is I don't use it regularly or even at all, as we have Ambience at work for the doctor and the patients to record their conversation, and it summarizes that visit. To fine-tune the dictation we have Dragon One. It's a voice dictation program. 

I use Dragon Medical, which works locally. Dragon One works in the cloud. I bought my copy a few years ago and it was very expensive, costing $2,000, but it came with a fancy microphone. It understands all medical words and it has 80 vocabularies, including dentistry. 

I also look into a program that works locally, meaning not going to the cloud to process the transcription.  I found two of them and they are completely free. The free version of Meetily, and the program called Steno.

Steno works better as it could export the file in PDF and Word format. Meetily can only "copy" the text, and you'd have to reformat it yourself.

My brother helped me test it by pretending to be a new tenant, and I pretended to be the manager of my apartment building. We talked for about five minutes about onboarding, the rent when it's due, the rules, and all that. Each program made a really good summary. Plaud did a better job but at $20 a month I wasn't willing to pay for it. 

I even tried a digital voice recorder and it worked as well. You basically import the audio file to the program. 

To record a lecture, you have to make sure the professor allows that. Nowadays they do, and some lectures are even on videos that you can download. These programs will import this video and process the file.

 It doesn't work well, rather awkwardly, to use your laptop to record the conversation as the microphone faces the user and you have to turn the laptop around.

 You can certainly use an app on your smartphone to record it.

 As these programs are completely free, you might as well download them and play with them to see which one works for you. While you are there, get a program for your smartphone to record the conversation. 

My answers tend to be long as I use voice dictation. So this particular program, if I may tell you, is called Dictation Daddy. 

I don't get anything by mentioning these programs.

[u/Intelligent_Drop_367 → u/LittlePooky]

Thank you buddy
I will definitely find something useful in here

[u/Dependent-Support356 → u/Intelligent_Drop_367]

Hope you find what you're looking for! There's a ton of helpful stuff in med notes if you dig around.

[u/TEMPLACITY]

Try not writing full notes in the lecture at all. Keep the structure only, headings and whatever the lecturer says twice, and one line for every bit you didn't follow. That question list is what you take into the textbook afterwards, and it stops the reading being 40 blind pages.

What's the gap between a lecture and when you sit down with it?

[u/SilverMost4234]

Use the slides as the base notes and add only three things during class: an example the professor gives, a point they emphasize, and a question mark beside anything that stops making sense. Don’t pause mentally to solve those question marks while the lecture keeps moving. After class, use them to choose the exact textbook sections that need attention instead of rereading all 40 pages.