Summary: Episode 56: How to make audio recordings that are custom MCAT recordings specific to your particular needs. Download transcript: MCAT Notes Personalized MCAT MP3’s This idea came from a recent email I received from a MasterMind member and I wanted to read it pretty much in its entirety and comment on it and then go step-by-step with exactly how to make these audio recordings. Keep in mind that when I was a Pre-med we didn’t have all the digital technology even ten plus years ago such as exists in phones and digital recorders now. They came along in medical school of course, but at the time I was a Pre-med, I actually used one of those mini cassette recorders. I had a job where every weekend for two years straight from Friday afternoon at five to Monday morning at eight o’clock I was on-call for a three-state region to go and draw blood at nursing homes. Those were sick folks that couldn’t wait ’til Monday and they were difficult sticks. It was good clinical experience to hone my bedside manner and develop a rapport often with people that I would only meet once. While I was in the car driving all over the place, many hours every weekend usually, I would listen to the audio notes that I had made from the week before. I was a biology major and I would collect lots of them. MCAT Recording Technology The technology advance has made that a lot more efficient now. In other words, I wouldn’t have to listen to an entire cassette. With digital technology, you can make each individual question or lecture or whatever passage you have to memorize an individual digital file that can be deleted as you go through it. So, let’s go ahead and get started. I’m going to read this email to you. I’ll leave her name out. She says that she is one year post-undergraduate working full-time and finding it hard to prepare for the MCAT with frequent fifty-hour weeks. She’s working more than full-time at a job a year after graduating from college. She’s taken two Kaplan courses, first the basic Kaplan MCAT prep course and then the advanced course, but not made it past the content portion into practice tests due partly to crippling anxiety, which she describes as not feeling prepared and afraid of low scores. Pre-Med is the Time to Experiment I’ll pause there and say that undergraduate and MCAT preparation is a time to experiment with this idea of doing practice questions and practice tests before you feel comfortable. This is sort of like the minor leagues in baseball. Medical school is the big show, it’s the big game. The whole thing is designed around, “You are never going to feel comfortable and ready to take a test, you have to test yourself often and early before you are ready.” This only way you’re going to know if your study technique works and you need to do it in advance enough so that if your study technique is not working and your grades are not improving like you want, there’s still left some time before the test for you to adjust your techniques again. Blame Your Study Technique As I’ve stated previously in other podcasts, don’t blame yourself and beat yourself up if your grades aren’t where you want them, blame your study techniques. All of these things I’m alluding to here are wrapped up in several hours of study technique training that I had in the Medical MasterMind Community. So, we touch in on that right now. She’s stuck at that step. The email goes on to say, because she purchased an MCAT audio learner program and listened at work, but it’s not the best. There’s some really good news that she’s going to say in a moment about in her job she is able to listen to audio recordings, perfect candidate for the Medical MasterMind Community podcasts and the Pre-med podcasts and such. She downloaded all she could from iTunes and listens to them every day at work. They give her motivation in con[...]
