daily preparation for step 1?

[Shpamme]

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so.. everyone keeps saying how step 1 scores are crucially important to where you match. i had a few questions:

1. is the way you study for step 1 different from the way you study for class?
are most med school exam formats different from step 1 questions (which are clinical vignettes from what i understand)? are there a whole different set of practice questions you use?

2. has anyone had experience setting some time each day aside, from the first month of school onwards, to do these questions? if you haven't studied the material in class yet, do you do questions anyway? or are there questions organized by topic, so you can just do the questions for topics you studied in class that day?

3. my boyfriend told me about this first aid for usmle step 1 book. he says he used it during his coursework years, incorporating some of his class notes into the margins of the book. my question is, how do you know WHAT's important from class to notate? how complete is that first aid book? i went out and got it and the volume of information already in it seemed overwhelming enough.

thank you!

 

[njbmd]

Moving to the Step I Forum.

 

[Law2Doc]

1. is the way you study for step 1 different from the way you study for class?
are most med school exam formats different from step 1 questions (which are clinical vignettes from what i understand)? are there a whole different set of practice questions you use?

I can't speak for all med schools, but in general the profs attempt to use similar format to board type questions. However they focus on the details they have stressed in class or their notes, which may be more important to them than the NBME. By contrast, boards focus on what they have deemed most important aka high yield. Thus yes, you will use totally different practice questions for the boards. Most people for the boards subscribe to one of the various question banks (Qbank by Kaplan, and USMLEWorld tend to be the most popular). These have 2000+ high yield board questions. For classes, you are best off getting ahold of old exams if they are made available, or studying your profs notes because that is where the question topics will come form.
As for First Aid, everybody uses that for Step 1. Some people find it of use during classes (particularly second year), but it totally depends on your course focus.

 

[PeepshowJohnny]

1) Personally I studied very differently for step 1. For class I'd get the material down leading up to the exam (the basics) then cram the lecture notes the night before. Which brings me to my next point...

You're going to find a lot of med school lecturers are really good at giving you board style prep. Some of your professors/doctors may even submit questions to the NBME. But you're going to find a lot who are awful and low yield. Maybe they're too focused in one area (They study angiogenesis in their lab, so you get a billion angiogenesis questions) or they ask questions that don't meet the level of the exam (more Step 2, 3 level). So that's why I studied the way I did. I spent that weekend before to brush up on all the "silly" minutea questions.

Step 1 studying was all just big concepts. There's too much material too worry about details like some lecturers teach.

2) The time you should be setting aside for step one should integrate into the class material. When you're taught heart murmurs, learn them COLD the first time. When you're taught about brain vasculature, learn it COLD the first time. When you're taught vitamin deficiences, learn them COLD the first time. Put extra effort into learning material that you know you'll be reviewing for the boards. That way when you go back to review it, it's a joke. Don't be the lamer who's studying GI "for the boards" when everybody else is studying for the pharm test next week.

3) Personally, I think First Aid is useful for knowing what's considered "high yield" for a section the first time you learn it (See above) but I really don't like the "annotate your First Aid" theory. First Aid's genius is that it's this incredibly high yield source. If you go in writing every single little thing you learn from pharmacology, it's gone from "high yield" to overweight and inefficient. But different strokes for different folks.

 

[AggieJohn]

Hi everyone,

I'm starting med school in a week, and getting excited. I've been reading over Step 1 experiences threads, and a common piece of advice is to do well in the first 2 years.

My question is, don't most people try hard in the first 2 years? I'd like to think that studying hard during the pre-clinical years will make Step 1 easier, but if that were the case, I think most people would have no problem. I imagine most people put a lot of effort into medical school.

What specifically do people mean when they say, "The best advice for doing well on Step 1 is doing well in the first 2 years?"

 

[SoCuteMD]

I'm merging this thread with an almost identical thread from yesterday.