Hey all,
I'm done with the beast, and I am soooooooo tired. I'm posting mainly for catharsis so I won't go into all the sources I used etc. I think we all know what books to focus on BRS phys/path Qbank, FA etc...
Started studying in January-- just light reading listening to Goljan and Kaplan lectures and doing Robbins questions. But I only spent 2.5 weeks studying hard core after classes ended. I'm talking 18+ hours a day, no phone no tv, eat in front of Qbank type studying. This may not work for everyone, in fact we'll see how it worked for me in a few weeks. But I have to obessive type tendencies, so I new that if I gave myself too much time I would drive myself crazy and be burnt out for rotations. Also, I was solid the first two years especially in genetics, physiology and pathology and our school is pretty good a teaching Biostats so there wasn't a lot of time wasted on remediating that stuff. I really only needed to work on Immunology and Biochem and Pharm which are highly crammable.
Ok, well first of all like others have said it will be draining and this is coming from someone who's spent the last two weeks studying and hitting questions for hours at a time-- for some reason the real thing is just so much more tiring.
Although it was long it went by kind of fast-- I did 3 sections, took a pee break, 3 more sections, ate an apple, went to the bathroom and finished up the last section. I started at 9 and finished a 4 on the dot.
Started getting chest pain sometime during the 3rd section, convinced myself that I had a PE from being totally sedentary the last 3 weeks--- calmed down and realized that I was probably just reacting to adrenaline and caffeine.
As for content-- really the bottom line is that it's all fair game. In general it's true that the "what would you say next" questions were a lot less ambiguous, for the most part only one answer was remotely ethical. Whoever wrote my version of the exam must have had a nasty bout of lumpy jaw or a relative with Fragile X because I got two questions on Actinomyces Isrelii
and 3 cases of "kid with macroorchidism and an IQ of 60 blah blah" -- I started to get annoyed at the repetition but then thanked the USMLE gods for the easy genetics questions. Maybe one question about Staph. What superantigen is etc--
all in all a very random assortment of micro.
Path was unfortunately not well represented on my test-- which is a shame because I love it and it the most recent thing I'd studied so it was fresh. As for physiology, that too was not really well represented. I'm sure there was some there but I can't really recall a straight phys question. A lot of it was tied up with CNS pharm. I had a lot Xrays and MRIs and angiograms on my exam-- nothing too tough if you've looked at a few. According to Qbank you'd think that parathyroid and paget's were the only 2 things that existed but I think I maybe got one question on Paget, and very little endocrinology-- not one arrow up down calcium PO4 question-- I was ticked
My exam had a lot of renal phys though
I had a lot of genetics-- stuff like what codon sequence would generate this peptide and then they would give you the table to read-- very simple.
Somebody said to blow off cell bio-- I would agree with this! I don't know what the NBME expects or where they get these questions but they asked about things I'd never seen before. Things that aren't in any of the sources I used. I thought I knew what a 3-->5' exonuclease did, but apparently it has some function that I'm not aware of, I also got a tRNA question that required a PhD
Most of the pharm you could do in your sleep if you've seen Qbank-- but they threw in a couple of tricky things about the EXACT area of the nephron that gentamicin attacks or what the contraindications of oseltamavir are. If anyone can find this let me know
It really is true that the best prep for step 1 is to do well the first 2 years, some things will just pop into your head because you remember them from some undergrad lecture
--by definition review books just can't cover everything and they'll find a way to throw in something you don't know.
No one can tell you what to expect that's what makes it so hard. You won't have to know it all for your test-- but you won't know until test day what they'll focus on. Your test may have path up the wazoo, or tons of hematology, or lots of crazy graphs--
or not, so study hard and just hope for the best.
Took the practice test at prometric and it just didn't seem to be the same difficulty as qbank, it seemed easier. Did anyone else have the same experience? Any last minute pointers from previous takers would be appreciated.
