Quote:
Originally Posted by Phloston
I went through the Sanjiv Microcards before having read FA (I probably spent ~60 total hours on them, if not more). Then I did the micro from FA.
Out of the 25 subjects in Rx QBank, micro is my strongest. I owe any questions I've gotten right about organism-classification to the Microcards.
FA is necessary for knowing about the various toxins and mechanisms of action, etc., but the Microcards are for memorizing the tree-algorithms so that you know the classifications of all organisms.
Out of any resource I've used for Step1 prep (and I own ~50 [I'm one of those people]), excluding FA and the QBanks, the Microcards rank #1.
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I bought Microcards (different sent than described above), but found them unhelpful. They were basically a textbook written in card form and that's not the way to learn. (Unless of course you have 60 hours....but I assume a lot of us don't at this point).
To be honest, all you need to know is the stuff in First Aid. I try and go through it everyday for 30 minutes just to refresh myself on bugs and then do a random block of 20 microbiology question from UWorld or Qbank.
To be honest, that's the best way to keep up with both micro and pharm (at least from what I've been finding). For instance, review CV pharm. Do a block of CV-only pharm questions. Next day, do Pulm Pharm. Do CV+Pulm random block of pharm questions, etc. Same goes for Microbiology.
It'll depend on how you learn, but I think the QBanks + FA are sufficient learning tools for knowing bugs and associations cold. Drugs too. There's very little on those subjects that you can't look up in First Aid.
Also....remember that Step 1 is a tricky, but straight-forward exam. They always present you with the very typical presentation of a disease and ask you something about it. Most of your questions on this subjects will be gauged on the more high yield facts and exceptions to the rule. I.e. they're more likely to want you to know that parvovirus is the only ssDNA virus than recognizing that Polyomaviruses are dsDNA.