Alessandria for medical students
Medical cohorts share the work: a rota assigns each lecture to someone, who turns it into flashcards for everyone else. Alessandria doesn’t replace that — nothing is shared inside the app — but it removes the dependency: your own lecture is written up in full shortly after you upload it, with a glossary of the terms that were actually said, and the cards come from that lecture rather than from a stranger’s deck.
Updated on
The rota, and what it actually costs
Most medical cohorts run some version of the same system: a shared spreadsheet, every lecture assigned to someone, and at the end of the week everybody pools what they made. Some medical schools have gone as far as founding an Anki society. It works, and it is genuinely one of the better things about studying medicine in a big cohort.
The cost is not the typing. It is a debt of work between people: whoever has the week loses an evening for everyone else, usually the week they were already behind. And whoever misses their turn — placement, illness, a commute — is quietly outside the material.
The rota isn’t a laziness problem. The hours it takes are real, and somebody pays them.
A flashcard has already lost the lecture it came from
This is the part that makes a shared deck different from shared notes, and it is worth being precise about. A card is a question and an answer. The reasoning that surrounded it — why that mechanism follows from that one, the caveat the lecturer added — is not in the card. It was in your head when you made it.
When the card is someone else’s, that context never existed for you. And there is no way back: you cannot check a card against the lecture it came from, because the lecture isn’t attached to it. A wrong card and a right card look exactly the same at 11pm.
Your own card is a memory aid. Someone else’s card is a claim you have no way of checking.
And whose curriculum was it, anyway?
The large decks that circulate are mostly American, built around American exams. Even inside the UK, two medical schools don’t share a curriculum: what your school examines, in what year, in what order, is its own. A deck that is 80% relevant is not 80% useful — it is a deck where you cannot tell which 20% you are wasting evenings on.
The honest version of the advice you will get from second years is: make your own cards, borrow sparingly. That advice is right. The problem has always been that making your own cards means first having the lecture written down.
What Alessandria changes
You upload the recording yourself
An audio file from your phone or laptop — an iPhone voice memo is fine — and shortly afterwards you have the lecture written up from the first minute to the last. Not a summary: the whole thing.
The cards come from that lecture
Flashcards are generated from your own lectures, and the written-up lecture stays next to them. When a card looks wrong, you can go and read what was actually said — which is the one thing a downloaded deck can never offer.
The rota becomes a choice again
If your cohort wants to keep pooling work, it can. But nobody ends up without material because they missed their week or because the deck never got shared.
The arithmetic changes like this: the written-up lecture stops being something one person has to produce for everyone, and the group’s time goes back to what groups are actually best at — explaining things to each other.
The terms you can’t afford to get wrong
Medicine has the largest vocabulary of any degree: Latin, Greek, the surnames of the people who first described things, acronyms, drug names. The glossary collects the terms that were said in that lecture, defined from the way the lecturer used them.
- Only what was said. If a term wasn’t in the lecture, it isn’t in the glossary.
- Dates are never invented. On the timeline, a step without a certain date stays without one.
- A glossary per lecture. Come exams, that is the list of names you need to be able to say, not just recognise.
What Alessandria doesn’t do for your cohort
Alessandria is not a sharing platform, and it is better to say so before you sign up than after: nothing inside the app goes to anybody else. There is no function to send documents to coursemates, no shared folder, and no download button — that is a decision, not an oversight. The only way out is publishing your notes to your own Notion.
Your cohort’s deck stays exactly what it is, and it has things no app gives you — someone in the year above who already sat the paper. What changes is the obligation: whoever didn’t take their week still has their lecture written up.
And Alessandria takes no slides, no PDFs, no images and no video: here a lecture is an audio recording or a text file, and that is all. A lecture handout in PDF doesn’t go in.
Five minutes of physiology, and what’s left of it
…right, the baroreflex. Where are the receptors? Carotid sinus and aortic arch, and they’re stretch receptors — they sense pressure because they sense wall tension. Pressure goes up, the fibres fire more: from the sinus along the glossopharyngeal, from the arch along the vagus, up to the nucleus tractus solitarius in the medulla. From there, vagal tone up and sympathetic tone down, so rate and contractility fall and pressure comes back down to where it was. Negative feedback — and note this is a fast reflex, seconds…
Baroreflex — short-term control of arterial pressure
Receptors: carotid sinus and aortic arch, stretch receptors in the vessel wall.
Afferents: glossopharyngeal nerve from the sinus, vagus nerve from the aortic arch.
Centre: nucleus tractus solitarius, in the medulla.
If pressure rises: vagal tone up, sympathetic tone down → rate and contractility fall.
Glossary for this lecture
Carotid sinus — the dilatation at the carotid bifurcation, where the stretch receptors mentioned in the lecture sit.
Negative feedback — a response that returns a value to where it started: here, pressure back to baseline.
Names stay spelled as they are. That is the part you lose first, by ear.
A worked demonstration: we wrote the explanation ourselves, from textbook material. No lecture recording and no words from a real lecturer appear anywhere on this page.
Questions from medical students
Can I share my written-up lectures with my cohort?
Not from the app: there is no function for sending documents to anyone else, and there is no download. The only way out is publishing your notes to your own Notion. Alessandria gives each person their own lecture; it does not replace shared material.
Is there any point in the shared deck, then?
Yes, if your cohort wants one — and it has things no app provides, like someone in the year above who has already sat the paper. What changes is the obligation: whoever missed their week still has their lecture written up.
How is this different from downloading a big Anki deck?
A downloaded card can’t be checked against anything: the lecture it came from isn’t attached to it, and it was usually built on a different curriculum. Here the cards come from your own lectures, and the written-up lecture stays next to them, so a card that looks wrong can be traced back to what was actually said.
How does it cope with medical terminology?
Terms spoken in the lecture go into the glossary, defined from the way the lecturer used them. Nothing is added that wasn’t said in the lecture.
Can I upload a recording someone else made?
Yes: it is an audio file like any other (mp3, m4a, wav, ogg, opus, flac, aac, iPhone voice memos included). A text file works too. Slides, PDFs, images and video do not.
Is it only useful per lecture, or for exams too?
For exams too: eight tools work across a whole module, including the practice exam, the multiple-choice quiz and the super-summary. Every lecture is genuinely read — none is left out.
Try it on this morning’s lecture
Upload the recording and read that same lecture written up in full, without waiting for anyone’s turn.
The first two lectures are free. No card details.