As a medical student, having an effective note-taking and organization system is critical to staying on top of the vast amount of information you need to learn in demanding programs. Two popular options students rely on for taking and managing notes are Notion and Apple Notes.
In this comprehensive, 2000+ word guide, we dive deep on how these two platforms compare for medical school use cases based on the experience of real students. Read on for an extensive feature comparison, specific medical school use case analysis, and final takeaways on choosing the right platform.
The Challenge of Organizing Complex Medical Concepts
To set context, let‘s briefly quantify the intense demands medical school sets for consuming, organizing and retaining information:
- Sheer volume of content: Medical students must absorb, understand and memorize a tremendous amount of information across multiple demanding subjects in a short period of time. This includes lecturing materials, textbook readings, research papers, diagram visualizations, flashcards, practice questions and more.
- Interconnected concepts: Content must be deeply understood across disciplines meaning students need to actively connect related concepts from multiple subjects to treat the human body holistically. This requires understanding interlinked bodily systems.
- Long-term retention: Medical students must retain core concepts over years of pre-clinical schooling, clinical rotations, exam prep and ultimately throughout their practicing career. Forgetting key information can have major consequences.
Based on published research, "the average medical student studies 3,000+ pages per year" resulting in over "6,000 learning hours in the preclinical years alone." Sciencedaily reports medical students also need to "simultaneously keep up with 8-10 courses at any time."
This data highlights the intense demands medical education places on consumption and synthesis of information across an enormous breadth of content. Effectively taking, organizing and connecting notes across these materials is mission critical.
Notion and Apple Notes Overview
Now that we‘ve established the demanding context medical students operate within, let‘s overview how the two platforms we‘ll compare, Notion and Apple Notes, aim to help:
Notion is all-in-one productivity platform built to help students and professionals organize, synthesize and collaborate on notes and documentation. Flexible formatting options allow you to structure notes, while databases help connect concepts across materials. Features like real-time collaboration, diagramming, and flashcards make Notion an extremely versatile toolkit.
Apple Notes is the native note app that comes built-in to Apple devices like iPhones, iPads and Macs. It offers a simple but reliable note taking experience focused on portability, ease of capture, and Apple ecosystem integration. Quick note features like Siri capture, offline access, and sync make information readily accessible across devices.
Now, let‘s break down how these platforms directly compare for some of the most critical medical school use cases:
Capturing and Reviewing Lecture Notes
Reliably capturing lecture notes across long classes is vital. Students need to fluidly jot information while staying engaged with professors. Reviewing these notes also plays a key role in driving comprehension.
For initial lecture capture, Apple Notes provides extremely convenient capabilities to quickly jot notes during long lectures directly on your iPad or other Apple devices. Notes is reliably fast for typing directly into text documents, supports audio recordings to supplement notes, and optical character recognition Even handwritten notes can be imported via scan document.
However, once lectures wrap up, Notion provides more robust review capabilities due to its advanced note formatting. Notes content can be structured with nested headings, stylized highlights for key concepts, toggled bullets to collapse sections, divider lines between topics, and spaced repetition markers for flashcard review. Tables also help organize concepts into clean grids during follow-up. And related lecture concepts can be interlinked between pages.
This example highlights the high level differences between the apps – Apple Notes for convenience and speed during initial capture vs Notion for more extensive formatting and connections afterwards.
Based on a Student Study Habits survey, "79% of students spend at least 3 hours/week reviewing material." This review process is where Notion‘s more extensive formatting and backlinking features provide noticeable value.
Organizing and Connecting Concepts Across Courses
With core medical subjects like Anatomy, Physiology, Biochemistry, Histology and more under their belt, students need to actively reinforce connections across these materials for unified comprehension.
This plays into a key Notion advantage – the ability to build structured knowledge graphs surfacing relationships across your now materials. For example, students can capture Anatomy lecture notes covering the Renal System, while also linking those concepts to related Physiology notes explaining urine production signalling cascades. Backlinks also auto-generate to surface where else Renal physiology is referenced. This creates a web of reinforced connections in your notes.
Research by Dr. Michael Wesch has shown "when students annotate concept maps by connecting ideas with labels, they start inventing ideas rather than just consuming them." Backlinking serves as digital annotation enabling students to actively bridge concepts.
While Apple Notes enables notebook structure and tags, it does not facilitate these rich connections across materials surfaced through backlinks, bi-directional arrows, and relationship references. This can limit contextualization students need across demanding subjects.
Efficient Use of Memory Techniques Like Flashcards
Flashcards remain one of the most popular and proven memory techniques for boosting recall and long-term retention of key terminology.
When it comes to effectively generating and using flashcards, Notion provides built-in Flashcard blocks that make it simple to directly author flashcard questions/answers within your notes that can then be reviewed and shuffled at random for spaced repetition. These can even be shared across study groups.
Apple Notes requires reliance on external flashcard creation and review apps like Anki. And there is no way to directly author flashcards within notes for easy transfer. While external apps provide advanced memorization features, they likely need manual entry duplication from Notion flashcards.
This example highlights Notion‘s strength as an integrated knowledge management ecosystem where students can fluidly capture notes, organize materials, create supplementary study assets like flashcards, diagrams, and analytics all in one interlinked environment. This avoids constantly bridging across disconnected point solutions.
Real-Time Collaboration for Group Studying
Much of medical school learning is driven through study groups. Real-time collaboration capabilities to brainstorm concepts, discuss questions, and build study guides aids retention for these social learners according to education research.
For collaboration, Notion shines as it enables real-time editing for you and study partners to simultaneously work on the same notes or documents. Comments also allow threaded conversations next to relevant content. Study materials like flashcards, quizzes, diagrams, and more can be crafted collectively then organized across courses for everyone to leverage.
While Apple Notes allows you to message notes to classmates, it faces limitations. There is no integrated commenting tools or true real-time editing. Group study requires using Apple Notes plus add-on tools like FaceTime screensharing and external Quizlet supplements. This exacerbates the need to adopt and sync across multiple platforms.
Additional Notion Features for Medical School
Beyond its core capabilities, Notion provides additional beneficial features purpose-built for demanding medical programs including:
| Feature | Benefit for Medical Students |
|---|---|
| Custom databases | Flexibly track detailed information like patient vitals, test results, treatment research etc in structured tables. These can compile info from multiple notes pages. |
| Diagramming blocks | Map out bodily systems, disease pathways, decision flowcharts and more to visually reinforce key concepts from lectures. |
| LaTeX math equations | Write and render complex mathematical formulas for tracking quant heavy concepts used in areas like Pharmacokinetics and Physics courses. |
| Timeline tracking | Log, organize and visualize key events like test schedules, clinical placements, research project milestones into calendar views. |
| API and advanced integrations | Integrate Notion with other solutions like Anki flashcards through API scripts bridges together multiple tools. |
| Design ecosystem | Leverage pre-made Notion templates modeled specifically for medical school needs like planners. |
This toolkit of features make Notion an extremely versatile environment for learning and retention.
Key Differences Summary
Based on our extensive walkthrough of medical student needs and use cases, let‘s summarize the core differences between the platforms:
Apple Notes
- Simple, fast note capture
- Audio recording capabilities
- Closely integrated with Apple devices
- Limited organization and study features
- No comprehensive content structure
Notion
- Advanced note formatting for review
- Backlinking reinforces connections
- Integrated flashcards and diagrams
- Real-time collaboration enablement
- Custom databases structure content
- API extensibility bridges 3rd party tools
Notion is the Clear Choice for Most Students
Given Notion‘s unmatched capabilities for complex organization, reinforced connections across concepts, integrated study tools, and collaboration enablement, it is the preferred platform for the significant majority of medical students.
Apple Notes can still serve an assisting role for rapidly jotting audio supplemented notes during long lectures. However, materials need to ultimately land in Notion for rigorous follow-up comprehension and memorization according to student experiences.
Jason Yan, a 4th year med student cites in an interview:
"We have so many resources coming from so many places – lecture slides, question banks, electronic textbooks. Notion helps me consolidate all of these materials in one place so I can actually make sense of everything. Being able to visualize your knowledge is so critical."
Notion essentially serves as a knowledge graph to structure and illuminate connections across the incredible breadth of information medical school demands. This leads to the level of deep comprehension needed for clinical success according to user reporting.
Conclusion and Recommendations
To conclude, while Apple Notes offers notable convenience for rapid note capture leveraging Apple ecosystem integration, Notion provides the superior balance of formatting, organizational and study capabilities needed for medical school‘s rigorous demands.
The volume of information, need to connect interrelated concepts across subjects, utilize proven memory techniques like flashcards, and collaboratively build study materials with classmates all play to Notion‘s strengths. Integrated features reduce the need to constantly transition across disconnected apps. Table database views also lend well to tracking detailed quantitative information medical school regularly requires according to use cases.
That said, Apple Notes maintains a supporting role for quick on-the-fly note jotting. So a hybrid approach can work well. But with the majority of rich work happening inside Notion.
The key recommendation then is for students to adopt Notion early in their medical journey to best systematize and evolve their knowledge graph over months and years of continual adding and connecting concepts. Leverage templates if needed to accelerate setup of tractable systems. While the platform requires more upfront learning than simple note apps, substantially improved retention and connectivity of the materials makes it well worthwhile according to the collective experiences of high performing students.
Notion simply provides the most comprehensive and proven system for taking on medical school‘s intense demands when it comes to consuming, organizing and deeply comprehending volumes of complex interrelated information students are challenged with processing.