All Hail the King
Now that I’ve made it through medical school, I’ve thought a lot about what helped me get through: family, friends, and Anki. There isn’t one gold-standard approach to studying medicine. Nearly every stage of med school requires students to adapt and learn completely differently than what worked in the previous phase. Ask any student what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll get a different answer each time because the secret to studying in med school is this:
There is no one way to do it right.
That being said, in the Kingdom of study habits, AnKing was my benevolent ruler.
Meet the King:
I had a chance to speak with the king himself, Nick Flint – Co-Founder of AnKing, about his journey to medicine, the origins of AnKing, and where the future of his company may go.
Nick is truly a jack-of-all-trades. A dermatology resident, entrepreneur, self-taught programmer, missionary, and loving husband and father. Growing up, he knew he wanted to be a doctor. Before Medical School, he worked as a medical assistant with his father, a dermatologist and inspiration for pursuing medicine (dermatology itself!). Nick was also a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, serving two years in Taiwan. He didn’t know it then, but this would lay the foundation for what AnKing would become.
“While in Taiwan, I was learning Chinese through thousands of flashcards. I used something called the tunnel method, which funny enough was essentially spaced repetition. So much of the way I would later learn stemmed from this time.”
Nick’s Mandarin flashcards while on mission in Taiwan
So naturally, when Nick found Anki, it was love at first sight, right? Wrong.
“I found Anki when I started studying for the MCAT. Everyone around me recommended it, it was almost impossible to avoid. I was optimistic, but I hated it. It was just too frustrating to use! Bear in mind, this was roughly around when Anki first became popular, so its complicated UI and card customization options were a bit overwhelming. With such a big learning curve, I honestly opted towards Quizlet, which is so funny to think about now.”
When Nick began medical school, he had a few competitive specialties in mind, and those who had excelled at boards all swore by Anki. So, he decided to give it another chance. While he didn’t have a technical background, Nick is a self-described “tinkerer of tech.” He began learning basic programming and tinkering with Anki to optimize the app for his med school experience. Word got around, and pretty soon, Nick was regularly helping classmates navigate Anki to excel on their own. Eventually, Nick took a crack at YouTube and put together a series of how-to videos for students to begin mastering Anki.
Then, Reddit blew the whole thing wide open.
The Road to the Throne:
“Links to my videos exploded across subreddits. The next thing I knew, we had 1000 subscribers. Not only that, but we started connecting with other Reddit Anki decks like Zanki and Lolnotacop with the idea of compiling one, gold-standard source of med Anki. I learned some Python and worked with coders from across the world to work out how to keep the decks updated, fix misinformation, add tags, clean up duplicates, and keep up with the growing list of study resources.”
The growth of the Kingdom
What started as a fun, small project evolved into an international resource. The AnKing brand has garnered over 100,000 followers across social platforms, and 12+ versions later the AnKing Step deck has been downloaded over 300,000 times worldwide.
BTS of the deck updating dilemma Nick and The AnKing Team needed to solve
Nick will be the first to admit the road to the throne was covered in pitfalls. At first, solving the duplication problem seemed impossible. Anki being open-sourced was a double-edged sword in that regard. They were also only med students at the time, so time and money were not factors on their side. When they first invested a few thousand dollars into expanding their software, they crashed and burned. They were told they would need roughly $60,000 to get The Anking Step Deck to where it needed to go. Call what happened next “Divine Intervention.”
“We didn’t have that kind of money, are you kidding? We were med students. Plus, this was already a risk with how much time we were spending building this up without knowing if residencies would even care. It was pretty much the end of the road, and then one morning I received an email from a grateful user overseas. He said he wanted to donate €10 to help our cause, and I thanked him and said every little bit helps. Then, he asked for our banking information because PayPal was having a problem with a transaction of that size…he was trying to donate €10,000!
Meet the team behind AnKing!
Of course, I thought it was a scam, but after a quick Zoom call, we found this man wanted to use part of his inheritance towards our tool to improve medical education. We couldn’t believe it, and the next thing we knew, he donated nearly $25,000 to our cause! With that huge step, we had to capitalize. Over the next few weeks, we campaigned for donations to make sure we could finally do what we set out to do. We hit our $60,000 goal, and the Step Deck survived.”
It sounds like I made that up, right? I laughed when Nick first told me the story. It just sounded too good to be true. Thankfully, for the state of medical education, it was real.
Recently, Nick had the chance to give a keynote address to the New York College of Medicine. In the talk, “Breaking the Mold: Chasing Passion over Conformity,” Nick walks through his journey to medicine, entrepreneurship, and all the failures and successes that brought him to where he is today. Here are the lessons his journey has taught him:
Lesson 1: Try everything twice: the first time is rarely the best.
Lesson 2: If what you’re passionate about doesn’t ‘fit the mold’, just make it fit.
Lesson 3: don’t worry about what others think, just start helping people.
Lesson 4: believe in yourself. It only takes one person to follow you to start a revolution.
Lesson 5: money isn’t evil, what you do with it determines its value.
Lesson 6: If you work hard, others will see and offer to help as well.
Lesson 7: Launch before you’re ready.
The Most Important Part: The things you will not be able to buy are your time and your health. Make your priorities your #1 passion!
Distilling his speech into just his lessons does a disservice to the why behind these lessons, so please go watch his full address here [link]. As someone navigating writing and medicine, I loved learning more about his insights and tips for balancing pursuits. He has poured everything into the various passions of his life, even when doing so wasn’t “the proven way,” because he knew it was the only way to carve the life he wanted while helping the most people.
The Future of the Kingdom:
AnKing has grown incredibly over the past few years. They’ve worked side-by-side with med-ed services like Boards & Beyond, Sketchy, and OnlineMedEd. They’ve started partnering with schools all over the country. Most recently, they’ve expanded the kingdom with AnkiHub: an add-on service that allows users to create, subscribe, and collaborate on decks of their own!
It harkens back to the original purpose of AnKing, only now it gives even more power to the people. I created a deck through AnkiHub with a fellow classmate (we used music production to fabricate auscultation findings to help prepare students for the wards), and the project became one of my most asked-about activities during residency interviews. It just goes to show that residencies are looking for curious people actively pursuing their passions. I believe AnkiHub may provide students everywhere to engage with their passions to a far greater length than previously possible.
“There’s a great article called The Self-Directed Medical Student Curriculum that really hits home at what we’re trying to address. Med school curricula grow larger every year, and students often feel ill-prepared to learn everything they need to know following their schools’ strategies. The rate at which med students are taking ownership of their education and self-directing their learning through online resources has drastically risen in the last five years. Hopefully, we can help make that learning easier and more manageable.”
So, what’s next?
Nick believes there are endless directions AnKing could go, and he wants to stay open to any possibility. Could AnKing become integrated into med school curricula? Could AnKing explore the rise in AI? Nothing is off the table.
“First things first, I want this to be as user-friendly as possible. Let’s allow users to make this as tightly integrated with their learning needs as we can. Let’s improve our tutorials and add-ons to give users more customization. Maybe reevaluate what even makes a good card in the first place. Let’s explore AI! Tie-in q-bank generation and commonly missed questions with spaced repetition. Use AI feedback to help users understand why they’re missing what they’re missing. There’s so much possibility, here. I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.”
The Royal Family :)
Thank you so much, Nick, for taking the time to share your life, insight, and heart with readers. Your work and passion are truly changing the landscape of medical education, and I think I can speak for students everywhere when I say thank you. Keep up all the incredible things you and the entire AnKing team are pushing forward to help build a better future for medicine! Be sure to follow @ankingmed and check out www.theanking.com to stay up to date with the kingdom.
Until next time, stay healthy, and happy reading!
More by Tyler Beauchamp at www.tyler-beauchamp.com
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