Asking for advice: Creating and using study material

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I have a specific question:
How do you create and use your own study material?
Some classes the teacher prepares all the material you will need.
In other classes you really HAVE to create and use your own study material?
What works for you? How do you do it? How do you spend the right about of time creating the study material and the right amount of time using it to study from? How do you balance that with project work, papers and homework?

What type of classes are you studying for? For classes I need to regurgitate facts I'd use notes, flashcards, etc. If I need to demonstrate a process I just repeat it enough on my own until I have everything familiarized.

biology and chemistry and molecular bio-chemistry - more specifically immunology and cellular biology.

I recommend making your own notes with all the stuff you need to know, but only include the things that you haven't quite gotten yet as a priority. As a biology and chemistry student, that's what I do.

This site gives a two ways to make flash cards but it seems kind of vague on how to find the information

https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Flash-Cards

"Highlight the most important information. Identify salient information in your notes and text book. Distill them down into their key parts so that you can transfer them to your notecards — in a physical or a digital form. You can do this by highlighting your notes or the textbook. If you cannot write in your textbook, write on a separate sheet of paper or create a separate file in a word processor on your computer.
Eventually, you will develop a system of note-taking that will make flash cards easier to make. Some of the easiest ways of doing this are to highlight or underline key sections your teacher stresses. Some people use asterisks, dashes, or other symbols to set off important text from the rest of their notes."

This page seems to have some good advice

https://medshamim.com/med/make-high-yield-anki-cards

Step #1: Do Not Make Cards for Every Detail

One pitfall most new Anki users fall into is making too many cards at the beginning soon to only realize that the burden of reviewing becomes overwhelming. Anki’s spaced-repetition algorithm works best only if you complete all of your scheduled reviews daily. This is why you should only make cards on facts that are high-yield and details that are easy to forget. Now you may be asking, ‘How do I know what’s high yield?” Here’s the mystery and art of figuring that out. This power will come to you naturally day by day as you write cards, but for now you must think like an exam maker. This means doing practice questions relevant to your study material daily. This gives you a good guage on knowing what’s most likely to be tested. At the beginning, only create high-yield cards and later add more cards to fill in the holes in your knowledge by referring back to the source. This ensures that your card numbers stay manageable and you’re using the spaced-repetition system to its fullest potential. Always check to see if there are cards already made for a topic in a pre-made deck so search and unsuspend those cards to avoid redundancy.

Figuring out how to take notes requires several pieces of information: you need to know what kinds of information you need to remember for the class, how the information will be presented, what kinds of information you will have to reproduce on exams, and what your own learning style is.

Biology courses generally involve a lot of memorization. If you have a good memory for details, you may not need to create much study material. If you have lectures, you need to decide how good you are at taking notes while listening. If you are bad at that, focus on listening while you record the lecture, then review the recording later and write notes if necessary. The notes should be information that is most important to remember (to pass tests) and the information you think you will have trouble remembering.

If the course is short (like some summer courses are just a few weeks long), taking huge amounts of notes or using Anki might be a waste of your time. I use Anki, and entering information in it takes a long time. If the professor puts study material online, you could copy and paste some of that into Anki to save time. It's best for remembering large volumes of information, especially over long periods of time. If you have a very good memory, however, Anki might not be worth your time.

Does writing things help you remember them? If yes, take notes. If not, maybe don't. Maybe highlight things in your textbook instead. Or review the lecture notes if there are any.

It all depends on you.