Starting a Co-Study Group in My Class
It's been over a month since I came to school, and I've gradually gotten to know all my classmates; at the very least they all know something about me. These past few days, I took some time to post a proposal in the class group chat to start a co-study group. My initial plan was to recruit 10-15 classmates to form a study group, where we would divide the work and collaborate to learn the professional knowledge. Unexpectedly, the 15 spots filled up quickly, with one extra person at the end.
There were other classmates who wanted to join later, and even the counselor, after learning of this, hoped I would expand the group. But I considered that organizing an overly large study group would be hard to manage and could easily end up in chaos, starting strong and fizzling out. I ultimately decided to first establish just a group of fifteen or sixteen people, and expand the scale once it runs more maturely.
The recruitment message I wrote is as follows:
Dear classmates, I am now setting up a co-study group. What I want to recommend to everyone is the group study method that is widely used in undergraduate education at foreign universities, also common in our country's graduate education, and is being piloted at some undergraduate institutions. That is, 10-15 classmates form a study group to learn professional courses together.
After the teacher's classroom teaching is completed, we will collectively conduct in-depth, topic-based study of the chapters we've covered. Through discussion, we will break things down into individual small topics; for example, for osteology we could break out a small topic like "common fracture sites and the clinical symptoms and management methods for fractures at each site." Then each person is responsible for one or several small topics, looking up materials and enriching and organizing the content of those topics. Then all the group members study together the topic content that everyone has organized.
This learning method is very suitable for deep learning and can significantly improve our professional level. At the same time, we also plan to compile a simplified version of the key exam points to make them easier to memorize. If any classmate wants to join, you can contact me.
Because of the earnest studying spirit I've shown in class over the past month, my classmates have quite a lot of faith in me, so this recruitment went much more smoothly than I expected.
The reason I want to start such a study group is, first, that I genuinely felt such a need during the actual learning process. Because the study of medicine is truly a tangle of countless threads, and a person working alone can only learn very limited things; group learning can improve efficiency. Second, I hope that through such an action I can help foster a good class culture and form a diligent, upward-striving learning atmosphere.
Doing this while also doing military training is actually exhausting. But although it's tiring, I still put my heart into it. I think doing this has some meaning: at the very least, among the hundred-plus people in our class, it can drive some to study efficiently and autonomously, and cultivate in them some general abilities, such as communication skills, teamwork ability, self-learning ability, time management ability, literature retrieval ability, and academic writing ability. These can help them become better doctors and save more lives.