Microbiology Study Advice

Sidenote- I know many people ask for studying help. I decided to make a new thread to ask for help in this specific class

For me I got through micro by sticking with my lab partners. We met up a lot to study on weekends and just went over the material over and over. We were a support group for each other. We all got A's.

Read, read and read some more. Look at the wonderful photos, Smell them (many organisms have very specific smells). If you are near a hospital go and read APIC's magazine (American Professionals in Infection Control) because it will bring home what you are about to run into. If not try articles about microbiological stuff, especially pathogenic bacteria.

Offer to be a free lab assistant...

Though be careful. I loved Micrbio and would spend (it was nice that they let me) extra hours with the microscope staring at stuff. I switched from a Medical Tech (MT) program to RN. As part of the RN program we had a big project using one client. I chose a person with multiple brain abscesses supposedly seeded by gingivitis (bad teeth).

For some reason my clinical instructor really suspected the patient would die since they had not succeeded in culturing the organism nor had any antibiotic regime helped. I had read an article on anaerobic brain abscesses and they seemed pretty straight forward. 1) No culture would be successful and would fail and 2) Antibiotics would be in 3 to four stages. Stage 1, and 2 rarely succeeded. Stage 3 might show some success and when the others failed they'd use Vancomycin and Flagyl which had a very high success rate. (Flagyl hits "more advanced" micro pathogens). So I predicted this and outlined the likely antibiotic regime and predicted complete success. It seemed cookbook and turned out to be just that.

And almost got thrown out of the nursing program. My clinical instructor was furious and told me that I would be removed. Luckily to remove a student from the program an instructor must consult with the other instructors and one knew that I had quite a lot of chemistry and the MT background and I think he stood up for me, and the issues was dropped.

All turned out well with that instructor so there was no harm done.

But especially if you can approach microbio with a real-life bent, such as how organisms become multi-drug resistant, it actually might open doors for you. G'luck.

Wow!! Thanks for the advice :)

I'm doing micro over summer right now also, 6 weeks long 3 days a week for 4 1/2 hours. I've had 2 exams got an 98 on one and an 88 on the other. Our exams sound similar, what I do is just keep reading over my notes and write down stuff I have trouble memorizing. I also try and quiz myself by covering up the content in the notes and see if I have learned it. Good luck!

Thanks for the advice :)

Hey, thanks for this post. I am in Micro and have my first exam tomorrow. My class is 9 weeks and Mon-Thurs for four hours each day. The comments here are helpful.

Use your text, lecture notes/slides, and pictures to make your own study guides. That's what I did and got an A.

I agree with what everyone is posting, one thing that really helped me a lot during that course was to voice record the professor's lecture. I would play the lecture back while I studied and it helped me grasp the material better, and also helped me hear something I may have missed the first time around.

Good luck!

IH

Thanks everyone! I hope I can do this :)

Hey happy, how are you doing so far???

Hey happy, how are you doing so far???

Pretty well so far! I'm half way through the class now, and I have a low A. It's very intense, and I spend a lot of time studying my flashcards :) I'm worried for my next exam this Thursday, but hopefully I can do well on it!