Am I doing First Aid wrong?

[watchergub]

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I'm in the midst of my first pass through FA and am taking step 1 this summer. I've been going through each FA chapter, memorizing/understanding as much as I can, and then reinforcing with Uworld. The problem is it's been taking me forever to get through each chapter (like 3 days to do 1 chapter) and I'm wondering if I'm looking stuff up excessively. Right now, when I read a line in FA, a lot of the time I'm like "well I used to know what this was, but it doesn't really make sense to me right now." Then I go to wikipedia, notes, etc and look up background info. I feel happy when I understand things again, but I'm a little concerned about how long this process takes. Part of the problem is also that I sometimes feel that FA leaves a LOT out. Like there is a ton of detail learned from classes that's not in there, so then I get worried I need to know it, look it up, annotate it in, etc...

Tl;dr - Am I spending too much time looking stuff up to "augment" FA? Should I just be more trusting that FA is a pretty comprehensive resource and stick to knowing what's in there?

 

[operaman]

Disclaimer: there are hundreds of valid ways to study for the beast and use the various resources. I don't know any two people who did the exact same thing, so I'm not preaching what follows as gospel, just my n=1 opinion.

Thoughts about your method:

1) Studying followed by UWorld -- big red flag for me. You risk only testing short term retention. If your NBME scores are lagging what your UWorld percentage would predict, then this may be the culprit. I would try doing UWorld first -- by subject if that works for you, though I prefer all random timed -- and then do targeted FA study/annotation afterward. As you know, there is a lot of good material in World that may help clarify some of the highly testable concepts.

2) FA does leave a lot out. That's how it was designed. There's a persistent myth that FA covers all the stuff you need to know, but that doesn't tell the whole story as you're finding in your study. USMLE absolutely loves to go after mechanisms and deeper understanding of concepts and they write questions that require more than simple rote memorization of FA. I think most people who use FA probably do some form of annotating or supplement in some way to flesh out the concepts. 3 days/chapter for your first pass is maybe a tad slow, but not by much. Your baseline level of understanding may vary from others who need more or less time. I think as long as you're learning, you're probably okay.

3) As soon as possible, get a baseline NBME score to work with. An important part of any study strategy is measuring your progress, so make sure you know where you're starting and reassess often. If your baseline is 205 and you do your 1 chapter q3 days approach and score 235 two weeks later, then it's clearly working. If you score 212 two weeks later, you might want to change course. It can also alert you to severe weaknesses early in the process.

4) Back in the day, DIT used to base their course on FA but McGraw hill's lawyers eventually put an end to that. They would bounce around, but cover FA in ~2 weeks or so; might be worth seeing if any of their old courses are available and getting an old FA copy to work through with them. I never used their product but I had friends who did. As with anything, some loved it and some thought it wasn't that helpful.