Best way to study biochem in 3 days?

[osumc2014]

What is the best way to review for biochem in 2-3 days? Lipincott's seem way too big, even the kaplan lecture notes everyone raves about seems way too much, what to do?

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[ijn]

I did all of Kaplan's biochem videos in 3 days.

 

[shan564]

What is the best way to review for biochem in 2-3 days? Lipincott's seem way too big, even the kaplan lecture notes everyone raves about seems way too much, what to do?

Use one of the First Aid review courses if it's within your budget. I think they're all worthwhile anyway. Most of them cover all of FA biochem in about 6-12 hours, and they do a good job of highlighting the high-yield stuff and explaining the stuff that you might not understand.

The cheapest option is FA Express, the best option is probably DIT, and the Kaplan HY program is somewhere in between.

 

[johndoe3344]

I did all of Kaplan's biochem videos in 3 days.

Same. I took the first day and a half to read through FA thoroughly. I memorized that information (referring to class notes when all FA had was a giant diagram) and then I spent the next day and a half listening to Kaplan videos on 2x speed. You can definitely do it -- our school has biochem as the first class during first year, so I don't think it was possible for me to forget any more biochem than I already had

 

[osumc2014]

Is that the one that costs 200 dollars? What are some good books to use that I can cover in 3 days? Is understanding everything (including charts with nothing else) in FA enough?

thanks!

 

[MrBeauregard]

I personally think you could cover Lippincott's in 3 days. I did it in 2.5 days, but I skipped some sections that I didn't feel were necessary. I opened FA, flipped to the pertinent section in Lippincott's, made sure I understood both, annotated into FA if necessary, and then went to the next section in FA. So, I basically used Lippincott's to help me cover only the biochem present in FA. I'll use question banks to cover any other biochem that may come up.

 

[mdeast]

I'd definitely take a look at DIT or Kaplan High Yield. I've been through the HY videos about three times and feel pretty comfortable with it now. This is coming from someone who nearly failed his first year Metabolism course.

A lot of biochem is just drawing out the pathways yourself and making sure you understand how they interact. I'd try and do this before watching any videos. You DO NOT need to know every enzyme and intermediate. This is a waste of time to memorize. You do need to know the major rate-limiting enzymes, the regulators, and important points in each pathway (i.e. a lot of things feed into pyruvate...know all of them, how they got there, what things regulate them, where it goes after that, etc. In other words, don't feel the need to memorize each step of the ETC and how many electrons each step is shuffling.

Overall though, Biochem tends to focus on diseases. So, make sure you know those, the typical presentations, lab values that might relate, enzyme deficiencies and potential treatments. If you know the overall pathway and important steps well this should be pretty easy.

It's funny, but Biochem/Micro were my worst areas starting off and now are probably my best. It's usually just simple recall questions once you figure out what's going on. One of the more High Yield ways to improve your Step 1 score.

 

[johndoe3344]

Is that the one that costs 200 dollars? What are some good books to use that I can cover in 3 days? Is understanding everything (including charts with nothing else) in FA enough?

thanks!

I think understanding EVERYTHING in FA will put you about 80% of the way there. After I used class notes to supplement bits and pieces of FA, I was able to listen to Kaplan videos at 2x and come out of the whole thing with only maybe 5-6 additional pages of notes (for reference, a block of UW will give me about 2 pages of notes).

I did 2 focused UW blocks of biochem, and I was able to score ~80% on them. I feel like that means if you were to just read and reread FA thoroughly and understand it, you could probably achieve the same level of knowledge/understanding if you additionally did several UW blocks (instead of Kaplan videos) and learned from all of your mistakes and annotated into FA.