My Ipad: A Crucial Life Saver In Medical School

Hello everyone, I hope you are all well! These Independence Day fireworks are still going off as I write this (smh), but I pray you are all having a peaceful and blissful summer. This is going to be the third of five blogs I will be writing before I start school again so be on the lookout for the last two! Anyways, before I started medical school, I wanted to know if getting the iPad was worth it. I was already going to spend a ton of money on tuition and fee, so I honestly did not want to fork over another thousand to expenses. I was seriously going to take notes the old-fashioned way with some pen and paper. But after talking with some friends and future classmates, I decided to get an iPad for medical school.

I bought the Rose Gold iPad Air with a pen and it cost me around $900. I used the education/school discount that Apple has during the school year which saved me money. I got the iPad Air instead of the iPad Pro because the Air is $100 cheaper and there really is not a huge difference between them. I had the option of getting wifi, or wifi + cellular, and to be honest, I just wish I bought the wifi only because that would have saved me another $100. But I got 256 GB of storage, which is helpful because I can store a lot of books and notes on my iPad without issues. Also, the discount comes with free AirPods which was definitely a great plus!

When I got my iPad, I downloaded Goodnotes. There’s a debate between Goodnotes and Notability but Goodnotes was cheaper and I also liked how I can swipe left and right while with Notability, you just keep scrolling down. Notability might be a little better on other things but, it really does not matter which one you choose.

I also downloaded OneNote. I HIGHLY recommend getting this for your iPad and laptop because the notes are transferrable and you can do so much. If you do not feel like spending money on Notability or Goodnote then OneNote is the way to go because it is FREE.99! The only downside to OneNote is that you cannot save large books on it as opposed to the other app options.

Now, lemme tell how how my iPad saved me. Because classes were online this past year, I used my iPad for everything! To take notes, read books, sometimes even to attend classes. I loved the fact that I could write on my PDF notes without having to print them off. I also liked how I did not need different colored pens to carry when it was all accessible on my Apple Pencil. I literally just stopped using pen and paper. I still missed writing the traditional way because I was used to it, but the iPad is here to stay! I have thousands and thousands of notes on there and I like how I can easily find it! I can also have my book and my notes next to each other in order to edit and annotate easily.

Here’s how I arranged medical school life on Goodnotes. First, there are all the main folders with the different years and miscellaneous information:

Then I divided it by classes, let’s look at my M1 year:

If we look at one of the classes, let’s do Origins, I broke it down based on weekly reviews, notebooks, books etc:

Here are all the books I had just for this class:

My professor’s slides which I annotated heavily:

My notebooks:

And let’s check out some of the notes I took while studying for Origins:

If I had done this on regular notebook paper, these pages would have been lost, but look the iPad keeps everything in check! I can even search for notes with the search tab!

This is how I arranged my OneNotes, it was soooo useful for anatomy and when I was learning about the different drugs:

Therefore, I cannot emphasize enough how the iPad is amazing and useful for medical school. Maybe my insight would have been a little different had school not been completely online this year, but I definitely think it is worth the cost. The lowest you can get it for is $599 so, it’s not too bad of a price and you will be using it for all long as it works (which is probably up to 10 years). I hope this helps in deciding whether or not getting the iPad is worth it for medical school. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns!

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