One of my pet peeves is just how many resources are available to students while studying. I have vented on this issue in the past, and I finally got fed up with the myriad PowerPoint presentations, syllabi, textbooks, and online references. It was too time consuming to refer to every single resource, and different ones used different acronyms or abbreviations to refer to the same thing. My frustrations reached a boiling point near the end of the second semester of my second year while studying for an exam on hemostasis in our Clinical Pathology course. I decided to channel the negative energy into the creation of a document that theoretically would come to serve as my be-all and end-all study material.
My goal in coming up with CLOT (a reference to hemostasis and acronym for “Comprehensive List Of Things”) was to get all important information “under one roof.” I figured that if I could consolidate everything into one document, I could easily use the function “control F” to search through it and find what I need. Despite preferring to go old school and take handwritten notes, the drawback with that method is that I would have such difficulties sifting through the sea of pages. CLOT has proved to be a rewarding endeavor. It is constantly being edited, but that is the beauty of the beast. The more I learn and can shift my understanding of topics, the more it takes shape in the document. I would recommend that anyone interested in developing their own study materials give a try to inputting information into one document.
