Kiandra Bennett and the organizational chaos of med school

When Kiandra Bennett finished high school she had one goal: become a doctor. Home for her is a small island in Honduras, a long way from the universities she needed to achieve her dream. But from day one, she’s been unstoppable.

“Slowly but surely I raised the funds I needed,” she says, in a free moment between her classes. Eventually – through crowdfunding and hard work – she got accepted into a medical school.

“Now I’m in my fourth year of medical school in Argentina.” She has two more years to go.

The problem: staying on top of things

Kiandra is hyper-organized. She needs to be. “My family is far away, I’m working, I’m studying – where do I find time in the day to do things?” she asks.

She’s been a lifelong note-taker, but medical studies took it to the limit. “I always took notes by hand,” she says. With her intense study schedule – and everything else she needs to fit in around it – this meant she was staying up every night until 1am re-writing study notes.

She needed to find a way to get her time in order – and free up her hand so cramps don’t keep her from the surgery theater.

The answer: going digital

“Last year I transitioned to doing everything by hand to doing everything digitally,” she says. Her tool of choice? Lumin.

Kiandra was looking for an app that would link with Google Drive, where she was keeping digitized notes. While Docs was good, it wasn’t perfect. “It’s quite simple, and it doesn’t link as well to other accounts,” she says. Then she tried Goodnotes, but found the free plan very limited.

Finally the clouds parted and a light shone down. “I stumbled across Lumin and thought ‘hey, this might work,’” she recalls. 

“I would stay up until 12am or 1am studying. Now by 10pm I’m already finished. I have good track of my notes from class and they’re date stamped, so I can easily review what I did and jump to that part.”

Date stamps are one of her favorite features. “I use date stamps to organize when I’m going to be in a hospital or when I’m going to call my Mom.”

Kiandra uses Lumin to:

• Sync notes back to Google Drive
• Separate her notes into subject-specific folders
• Complete group projects using comments and annotate
• Track when she’s completed tasks using date stamps
• Study distraction-free with offline mode
• Highlight important information
• Bookmark pages to come back to

It’s her go-to organization and note-taking tool. She laughs when she describes how often she uses Lumin. “It’s almost all day, every day.”

Kiandra’s favorite tool: Bookmarks. “I don’t have to search through 200 pages, I can just open the bookmarks and say ‘OK, today we’re reviewing this topic’.”