Among the many crazy ideas and projects I have bouncing around in my head, I’ve wanted to develop a daily study calendar.
I’ve received a lot of feedback over the years that some of the major challenges to learning ophthalmology include the overwhelming volume and the lack of overall structure in how to study the material comprehensively. Bhullar and Venkateswaran argue this in a 2022 review article (1). While there are many general reading schedules and suggested options available (some here for free!), these still only direct the learner to textbook pages, with little instruction on how and what to study.
So although this is a massive undertaking, I started thinking of how I would design a step-by-step curriculum for a pre-ophthalmology (PGY-1) or first-year ophthalmology (PGY-2) resident. My goals were to:
Cover all the major topics in ophthalmology at least once
Span around 30-35 weeks (July 1 to OKAP in mid-March is about 37-38 weeks) to allow sufficient time for review
Specify learning goals for each day to direct attention to important concepts and topics
Allot for an average daily study time of one hour on work days, 3-4 hours on the weekends (including one day off per week for either no study or unstructured study)
Incorporate active learning techniques such as generation, elaboration, effortful recall, spaced repetition, and interleaving
The result is a 35-week study calendar that covers the majority of ophthalmology topics 2-3 times. This allows residents who are planning on taking exams in mid-March to start studying at the beginning of July and finish the study calendar with 2-3 weeks remaining for review.
Because learning is an iterative process, the first four weeks are structured as an “introduction to ophthalmology" and covers the afferent visual pathway, eye movements, periocular anatomy and function, and intraocular anatomy and function. These fundamentals are reviewed in subsequent weeks as we dive into most common conditions in ophthalmology (ordered anatomically), and followed by a deeper dive into the “high-yield” topics in each subspecialty.
The challenge with this approach, of course, is that the textbook correlation may be more scattered and voluminous. After all, some sections may reference almost a hundred pages of textbook in a single day, which is not a really feasible prospect.
So, as an attempt to make each day’s reading more accessible (and to the level of detail I was intending), I put together a sample section to see if this would be helpful.
Let me know what you think in the comments below! You can also reach me by email at ophthreview [at] gmail [dot] com, @ophthalmologyreview on Facebook, or @ophthreview on Twitter, Mastodon (@med-mastodon.com), or Instagram.
Paramjit K. Bhullar & Nandini Venkateswaran (2023) Ophthalmology Residency in the United States: The Case for a National Curriculum, Seminars in Ophthalmology, DOI: 10.1080/08820538.2022.2152713