How I study on a bus

Like most day-scholars, I lose a serious slice of every day to the commute. For most of my course, that time belonged to whatever the feed decided it belonged to. Multiply any commute out and you're donating whole working days each month to nothing.

The bus turns out to be a nearly perfect study environment for exactly one kind of studying: recall. Not reading — reading on a moving bus is nausea with extra steps. Not new concepts — those need a desk and silence. But retrieval practice? Twenty flashcards need nothing but a phone, one thumb, and honesty.

My rules, learned the hard way:

Load the night before. The decision of what to study cannot happen on the bus — decision-making is what the tired brain refuses. My due cards are simply there when I open the app; the only choice left is Knew it / Unsure / Guessed.

Cards only, never lessons. The bus gets retrieval; the desk gets understanding. Mixing them ruins both.

Interruptions are fine by design. A recall session has no "flow" to break. Conductor comes, you pay, you resume. This is the whole reason spaced repetition fits commutes and lectures don't.

The honest offline state: Meyshan Med installs as an app, pages you've already visited keep opening through dead zones, and guest study data lives on the device itself rather than on a server — so a review session doesn't much care when the network drops. Fully downloadable offline decks are still on the roadmap; the current version is good enough for the gaps, not good for a flight. When that changes, the changelog will say so.

The deeper point isn't about buses. Medical school systematically shreds your day into fragments, and the students who thrive aren't the ones who find mythical 4-hour blocks — they're the ones whose system makes 15-minute fragments count. The bus was just where I learned it.

Mitski would be proud of the streak — if she weren't asleep at that hour.

— Meyshan · Recall works wherever you are