Crash-course on succeeding in your first-year anatomy class.
Anatomy is usually one of those first few courses you take in medical school – it was for me at least. From the start, we were given the expectation that the class was going to be very difficult and unlike anything we’ve experienced before. Looking back at it now, I’ll agree that it was difficult, even giving the impression of being eerily similar to those pre-med weed-out classes from undergraduate school. However, anatomy is far from impossible with proper planning and dedication. I’ll outline my approach and some tips I found useful for the class.
What tools did I use for anatomy?
In my experience, anatomy is a topic that’s best tackled with spaced repetition learning. What is spaced repetition learning? It’s a technique that involves the use of presenting information to the learner in gradually increasing intervals based on familiarity with the content. This is typically best implemented with tools like Anki. Essentially, anki is a flashcard platform that shows you certain cards based on the premise of spaced learning. I used it and loved it. I think a big issue students encounter when they first start to use anki is the relatively poor user interface. It’s a bit confusing to set up intervals, know how to add addons, and understand how many cards you should be doing. I’ll run through that in another post.
How did I approach learning musculature?
A huge part of finding success in anatomy is breaking down big chunks of information into smaller chunks. In terms of learning muscles, two methods I used that helped me were layering and mnemonics. If we start dividing muscle parts into superficial versus deep layers, the list of arm and back muscles is split in half. From there, I would try to find existing, or create new, mnemonics for the different layers to remember the names of each muscle.
When it comes to areas of attachment or actions, I would try to use the basic principle of how a muscle works. When a muscle is excited, sarcomeres within the muscle fibers start to come together to contract and bring the muscle belly closer. We can use that to our advantage when finding our muscle actions and action points. Let’s utilize the supraspinatus muscle as an example; it’s a muscle that originates in the supraspinatus fossa and attaches laterally on the greater tubercle of the humerus. If the muscle contracts, the muscle shortens, then the humerus is going to be brought upwards laterally. We can also use this concept to figure out attachments if we know the action.
How did I approach learning nerves, arteries, and veins?
To better understand blood flow in arteries and veins around the body, I took some time to orient myself with their arrangement in various illustrations. Afterwards, I’d try to draw them out either on a white board or in a notebook. I think this process was more helpful than just straight memorization because it helped me understand the body from a broader perspective and its anatomical caveats. Nerves were always difficult for me to identify, but I think my biggest piece of advice with them is to know your different types of plexi. Learn to draw out the various plexuses and recall them from memory – it’ll help you remember spinal nerve levels for certain peripheral nerves. Test yourself repeatedly and eventually you’ll be able to remember them all. It’s tedious but it works.
Why do I recommend using anki during anatomy?
When I started taking my first few real medical school classes, I figured I would make notes on everything just like I did in undergraduate. However, it soon dawned on me that I was making these notes but never really looking back at them. Maybe, I’d look at them once or twice before getting swamped by more and more notes. So, I realized that this wasn’t working out and that’s when I tried Anki. I had used it a bit in undergraduate but not too extensively. There is definitely a learning curve associated with learning how to use it but it can save you an immeasurable amount of time. The algorithm is made so that it knows to show you cards that you don’t know while stowing away the cards that you have repeatedly gotten correct. It’s especially useful when you’re being thrown all sorts of information every day.
How did I use anki during anatomy?
My first roadblock with using anki was that I quickly noticed that making cards during class was too slow and looking at recordings of previous lectures was taking up too much time. I soon realized that the only way to be able to actively follow and minimize the time I was using post class to make cards was to just prepare them before the lectures. Before every lecture, I would run through the lecture PowerPoints and create a few cards. I would create mostly blank cards with pertinent images or simply put broad ideas from the slides into some cards. These cards would serve as a sort of foundation for me. During lecture, I would view these pre-made cards in browse mode and edit them throughout the lecture, which helped me stay on pace and actively pay attention during class. When the lecture ended, I would more often than not be done with cards for those respective lectures. One additional thing I would do after every lecture is try to review any relevant supplemental information for things I didn’t understand or any clinical supplements and create cards for those. This allowed me to grasp a full understanding of the material.
Some general advice
Medical school is going to be hard, especially the first few weeks of it. You’ll be learning a lot of new topics at lightning pacing. Don’t be afraid to try new things and ask for help. Most importantly, take care of yourself. It might be easy to disregard mental health but it’s crucial to have something to help control your anxiety during this hectic time. Although I found success with anki, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any other methods to succeed. I know some colleagues found success in taking lecture notes while others made physical flashcards. I think one of the key things I learned during my first semester was to be honest with yourself and if you realize something isn’t working, switch it up by trying something new. If you keep trying something that isn’t working for you, then you’re not going to find much success with it.