Behind the Night, the surgery podcast, relevant and engaging content designed to help you dominate the day.

Behind the Night listeners, the weather's game warmer, the days are game longer, and that can only mean one thing. It's time for a new intern to hit the hospital.

Don't worry though, we've got your back. I'm Shanas Hussain, and I'm Nina Clark, and this series will give you some practical tips and tricks for dominating your intern year.

Today, we're focusing on your learning. Intern year feels a lot like drinking from a fire hose. While you're shuffling through your list and the normal daily to-dos that surgical patients require, you're also somehow expected to know about those patient's disease processes and study for that abset exam that's looming in January.

Today, we're going to talk through some specific resources and tips for staying on top of it all. Shanas, how did you structure your studying as an intern?

I went through so many different tries to figure out what worked best for me, so if that's the case for you, don't feel like you're doing something that's completely normal.

I originally started with reading a textbook that was very dense, and I would sign myself to read a chapter over the weekend because I just figured I didn't have enough time during the week.

And honestly, when you're learning to first kind of manage to work life balance while working 12 to 13 hour days, I think that's okay to maybe not study right off the bat when you get home during the first couple of weeks, but I would say that strategy, but not a success for me.

Once I got about our handle of working those full days and maybe not passing out immediately when I get home, I found a way to read a couple of pages a day.

I had a senior Tommy that if they read about eight to 10 pages a day over the course of the year, you can really get through a textbook without feeling like it's too much of a burden on your time.

And the main key thing is whatever structure you choose, try and not only read specifically about the rotation you're on, but trying to read about some high yield topics for absite.

You know, what did you do?

Yeah, I totally agree with that kind of chunking things out and doing a little bit each day was really the right balance for me and intern year and frankly now even.

I typically take a relevant textbook chapters for the rotation that I'm on and read those as I go throughout the rotation and that's I also do a little bit every day.

And then I also in the background and constantly doing kind of random mode questions in a question bank throughout the year.

And so that's kind of how I try to balance my learning not just so that I'm only seeing what I'm on for rotations, but also getting up, you know, the breadth of general surgery, which obviously is huge throughout the year as well.

And I totally agree, whatever structure you end up using, the best thing to do is to ideally get through at least the very high yield topics for absite before January.

And hopefully we'll we'll be able to provide some resources that can point you towards what those are.

My general tip is just to always be doing something even if it's 15 minutes a day of reading it all adds up.

You can get through a textbook in a year, like Shana said, you can get through a question bank a couple of times that you're actually if you do this.

And it is will really set you up for success as you progress in your own career because this never stops.

Even when you finish residency, you still have to be learning constantly.

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