Narrowing Down What to Actually Study (RN)

00:01 Fun fact. So you know how a lot of your professors will assign you an insane amount of reading every week, like the whole book? And when you look at it, you're like, "How could they possibly expect me to read all of this?!" It is quite literally impossible to read all of your assigned readings, eat and sleep and just survive.

00:18 And what's really annoying about this, your teachers know this.

00:21 They don't expect you to actually read at all.

00:24 So...

00:25 Why do they assign it? That's a really good question.

00:27 And we'll have to ask Prof.

00:28 Lawes about that, because I am not a teacher, so I cannot give you an answer to that. But I can share some tips for how you can focus your studying when the entire book is assigned.

00:39 Step one: Narrow this down.

00:42 I want you to go find your syllabus.

00:44 Ideally, your professor should have broken things down into modules and each module should have an objective.

00:51 These objectives are the key to understanding what your professors actually want you to know out of all of the information that they are handing you.

01:00 Now, next, once you have these objectives, I want you to go grab your notes and on your notes, write the objective you need to know at the top of a sheet of paper, one objective per page.

01:12 Next, go searching for the information that will help you fulfill all of those specific objectives you wrote on the individual papers.

01:20 And when you find information related to the topic, take notes below the corresponding objective to keep this information focused on that page where you need to learn it and really easy to come back to later.

01:32 And when you've done all your notes, you've reviewed the topic, and you feel like you have sufficiently answered the objective, move on to the next one.

01:39 This will make your studying so much more guided, instead of you just like reading through everything and trying to pick out what's the most important on your own. But if your professor does not provide objectives for the modules, I don't want you to panic. You might just have to put in a little bit more work to find the most important information on your own.

02:00 And in that case, before you read any text, I just want you to go through the section you're assigned and read all of the things that are highlighted in boxes and look at all the images.

02:11 If the publisher put the energy into making an image or a table related to the information, that specific topic is probably important.

02:21 I want you to focus on those topics and seek to find out the safety information related to that.

02:27 Also, Lecturio has a magical feature called Bookmatcher, where you take a picture of a page that you're assigned in your book, and it will automatically identify the key topics found on that page and send you videos to literally watch.

02:41 So it will teach you. So, honestly, do not panic if your teacher doesn't assign you objectives and stuff.

02:46 It's going to be okay.

02:47 So let's recap really quick here.

02:49 Safety when you're reviewing everything, safety is key here.

02:52 No matter what you are reading or the objectives are or you're hunting for information on your own, whatever it is, be constantly asking yourself, "what is the safety implication of that information that I just read?" While you study, as you're going through everything, "what is the safety implication of that?" Because nursing school exams will always, always focus on safety.

03:12 More on that later.

03:13 And next, let's figure out how if reading a book, maybe that's not even the best way that you actually learn.

03:19 And what are your other options?