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It’s been a journey Student Doctor. These past 2 months…heck this past 8 months, student doctor has been my most frequented website. The amount of information you can gleam from the experiences of others is boundless! I must have read hundreds of breakdowns while preparing to study so I wanted to take a quick minute to make my own small contribution in the hopes that someone can take something from my experience.
Let me begin by saying that if I can do it, so can you! When you’re reading these breakdowns, always keep this in mind. If this guy can do it, so can I! repeat it until you believe it because it’s true. I don’t want to be repetitive as there are already plenty of breakdowns that essentially say the same thing so I’ll try to include things that I had questions about while studying. I’ll mostly be giving general advice on ways to stay focused and efficient. At the end I’ll give a quick summery of my schedule.
Time spent studying was 2 months and in all honesty, I think this is the magic number. Any more, I would have gone crazy, and any less I would have scored less. Efficiency and organization are the biggest things that will help you attain the scores you’re looking for. Let me tell you, it is super easy to go off track, fall behind and fall into the pattern of saying I’ll finish this later. Have a firm schedule and adhere to it. Make adjustments as necessary but if you think backtracking to review something will set you back, make it fit in your schedule by adding extra hours to your day. It’s important to stay on track. Set an exam date before you start studying. There’s nothing like the urgency of an upcoming behemoth of an exam to keep you in line. Do not consider rescheduling until necessary. I believe going into studying with the mindset that I will only take this exam ONCE will also give you that drive to keep going.
Biology – 25: This section is conquerable if you’re willing to put in the time! This section also requires patience as you can’t put it off till the end and expect to do well. The key to this section is having a solid review phase. I started off reading Cliffs thoroughly taking notes on every chapter. It’s important to take your OWN notes as this helps you locate information quickly later in the review phase. There were times I was taking tedious notes that I just wanted to quit and simply passively read the article as taking your own notes is time consuming, but it’s worth it! Don’t rely on simply reading the notes of others.
You might not memorize everything when you’re first reviewing but don’t worry by the end of your study regime, you’ll have seen every subject and topic asked in one way or another by all the different resources you’ll be using which will help cement the information in. You’ll also realize after a while that a topic you found daunting at first, a few weeks down the line will be so basic and easy you’ll be wondering why you had such a hard time the first time through. Just keep pushing through the pain and don’t run away from anything! For example when I first started studying hormones, I was thinking to myself there is no way I can be expected to memorize all of these so I quickly glanced at them and moved on. When doing practice questions, you’ll see them continuously pop up and eventually your brain will start soaking it in. Brains are amazing things haha, things you found impossible at first will become second nature after you’ve repeated them several times. To summarize, I used Cliffs to review, Destroyer biology to practice while paying attention to all the answer choices and reading the explanation for every question. I did bio destroyer twice. Finally, I used bootcamp in my last two weeks to soak in as much information as possible reading the explanation for every question and looking up videos for things I was unsure about. Never get comfortable, even if you know the question well and got it right, read the explanation carefully anyways. Information presented to you in different ways will really help it stick to you and during the DAT, you’ll glance at the question and know the answer without even thinking too hard. Trust me, with the pressure of a timed exam, you’ll want to know everything like the back of your hand so nothing will throw you off. I mentioned at the beginning that this section is conquerable. What I mean is, after reviewing, doing destroyer twice, and finally going through countless bootcamp questions, you’ll begin to see a pattern and this vast amount of information little by little won’t feel so vast anymore. Chip at it a little at a time and keep reviewing. I cant stress this enough, you must always review your notes, there is no shortcut. The secret to memorizing the intricate relationships of positive and negative feedback of the ovarian cycle is to go over it a gazzilion times.
General Chemistry- 26: This section was my weakest while studying and ended up being my highest score. Funny how that works right. I learned nothing in my gen chem class, and it didn’t help that I took it as dual credit during high school so essentially, I relearned everything while studying from the ground up. I used chads to review and imo HE IS THE MAN. He presents information in a way that just sticks to your brain like glue. Watch his videos and if you’re stilling having a hard time REWATCH them. Don’t lie to yourself and think you understand something just because you finished watching his videos. Its super easy to forget things unless you have a firm grasp. For me I watched his videos, thought I understood everything. Took a bootcamp exam, got a 15. Woops. What happened, I watched his videos…it made sense…what went wrong? Well it’s one thing to understand while watching a video and another thing being able to efficiently apply the information even when not asked in such a straight forward way. Okay, so I thought to myself it’s no biggie, it’s because I haven’t gone through destroyer yet. So when I got to the part of my schedule to start doing destroyer problems, I got destroyed. This is when I realized I needed to review again, I didn’t have as firm of a grasp as I originally thought. So I took One day to only do gen chem. In this time I re-watched all of his videos on 1.6x-1.8x speed while taking notes on the HANDOUT that is provided by coursesaver for his videos. Having the handout as a guide really helps put a structure to your notes and makes reviewing later quick and efficient. So once I watched his videos again I definitely felt better and started going through destroyer again and this time felt much more confident in my understanding. The point here is, don’t just go through the motions expecting everything to work out. You’ll fail, and feel like you’ll never understand something but just keep pushing and put in the effort and it will click I promise. I mentioned earlier that staying on schedule is important so what I did because I had to backtrack to review gen chem again was I added extra hours to my studying time in the days to come to keep on track. You have to continually practice to keep everything fresh. This isn’t like a normal exam where you focus on 2-3 chapters so be sure to continually review your notes, (the handout I mentioned) and continue to work problems. I’ll put a link to this website I used started by chad that I ran through a couple days before my exam which helped me quickly review everything.
Organic Chemistry – 23: Most of the advice given on the gen chem section can be applied here. Again please do yourself a favor and use chads. This was my strongest subject coming in so I felt confident however I didn’t want to fall into the trap of neglecting a section so I put in just as much time while studying. The key here is, again, never get comfortable. Keep reviewing, keep practicing. A test this vast, it’s easy for things to get fuzzy after a few days of not reviewing While I was comfortable with the material, I learned something new every day so you never know what you don’t know until you practice. I want to also add that don’t use the materials passively. Chad is great but more importantly, its HOW you study that makes the difference rather than the resource. He just makes it easier. So to summarize review with chads, take notes on the HANDOUT provided by the videos. This will add structure to your notes and make reviewing quick and efficient. Practice with destroyer which is hard, but my DAT was also hard! And finally in your last phase of studying HIT as many practice problems with bootcamp.
Quick tip for Destroyer: I forgot to mention this for gen chem but my method for utilizing the destroyer books was as follows. I did ONE question, worked it out on a separate sheet of paper and immediately flipped to the answer section to see if I was right and would read the solution. I used little sticky notes to mark the answer section so flipping back and forth from questions to solutions was quick. In this way you remember what your thought process was while going through the problem so when you read the explanation you can immediately make adjustments. This is just me but I found this was the most effective way to use destroyer as a LEARNING TOOL rather than cranking out 20-30 questions at a time. I utilized destroyer in this fashion for all sections including BIO, GC, OC, and math.
PAT – 19: Kinda disappointed about this as I was hoping for a 20 but I’ll take it. I was scoring consistent 19’s on bootcamp so this was spot on. I’ve read several times that PAT is easier on the real exam and this was not the case for me. It was on par with bootcamp in every section. This section comes with practice so train your brain by doing generator problems every day. Seriously, don’t miss a day. Some days you might feel exhausted from studying the other subjects and might be tempted to blow this off but It’s easy to loose your momentum so always make time for this. A quick tip, start your morning with PAT, about 45mins for all the sections together. This way you get PAT out of the way and you’ll wake yourself up. I had a hard time with pattern folding but in my last 2 weeks surprisingly this **** finally clicked. I started seeing the folds and was able to mentally connect sections together. On the real dat, the shapes were wacky, the pictures weren’t clear. The sizing was different. It just threw me off. The answer choices in the Angle section were on the left-hand side of the screen so this was weird as well. About 10 questions into doing the angles, MY HEART STOPPED. I thought for a moment that I was choosing answers in the wrong order. If that makes sense. Like biggest on the right and smallest on the left. I thought I was doing it the opposite so this freaked me out. It had to do with the fact that the answer choice were on a different side. Safe to say I quickly went back to the tutorial to verify and I was okay.
Reading Comprehension- 22: Forget what people tell you. This section also requires practice. Without the 10 bootcamp exams I went through, I wouldn’t have done well. Even though My average was 19 for bootcamp with 21 being my highest and 17 being my lowest. It’s all about the practice and what you get out of it. It’s important to have a plan of action and a method for tackling the questions. I would read the first question and read until I got to the answer. If it took too long, I chose the best answer and moved on. Sometimes while trying to answer another question, you’ll find the answer to that previous question you had a hard time locating. So in summary, read the first question quickly and begin reading with the intention of answering the question but also to understand the passage so you’ll recall information for the upcoming questions you haven’t seen. Since you could be unlucky and the answer to the first question isn’t until the end. I never read any science articles often suggested as I believe this section is all about practicing in testing conditions so you get your timing right. You’ll get good at scanning through information after going through several practice exams. The real exam is easier.
QR – 17: I’m happy with this 1*! This could have easily been a 15. That’s how much I struggled with it during my exam. If felt HARDER than bootcamp and I didn’t think that was possible…. I would be getting around 27/40, 28/40 raw score on bootcamp which averaged to 17 with a 19 on test 10 so… it was accurate but on the real exam I know I probably got 20/40 raw so it is more forgiving in the scoring. Going through the destroyer , I felt confident but this was a different beast. They hardly gave gimmie questions. Everything was pretty rough and without the practice I did on bootcamp exams I probably would have done even worse. Now with that said, I could have scored a 18~19 on this section if I wasn’t so sluggish. I was tired by this point and I noticed it took me longer to comprehend what the questions were asking. And UGHHH there were so many long word problems. The time pressure and fatigue got to me and I missed questions I knew how to do. So while I’m not in a position to give sound advice for this section, learn from my mistakes. Start QR early! And this might hurt but you either got a thing for math or you don't and obviously I don't lol. You probably won’t be scoring 25 coming from the ground up but you can certainly minimize the damage to get as many of the easier questions as possible so a 18, 19 or 20 is more attainable. Just my opinion as I’m sure some people will disagree. So to conclude for QR, it’s mehhh, not the most important score so while you should be putting in practice, don’t let it interfere with your sciences where a 30 is more realistically attainable.
----------------------
I’m going to end with a quick outline of my schedule.
Week: 1 - 3
- Content Review - Watch chads for the sciences and QR, read cliffs. Try to absorb as much information as possible so reviewing later will be easier. Took the first exam of every subject on bootcamp at this time after finishing my content review to get a baseline. Saved the rest of the exams, 3-10 for the end of my schedule.
Week 3-5 -
- Finish destroyer for every subject while taking your time to really understand everything. This took about 10-12 days. I used the last two days to review my notes thoroughly and really tried to commit everything to memory. At the end of this phase I also took exam 2 for every subject on bootcamp to get a gist of where I was at and if destroyer improved anything.
Week 5-6 –
- Redid destroyer for every subject, except math. This time it took 1 week because I could crank out 50 question a day for OC/GC and about 90 questions a day on bio. You’ll be faster the second time and the information will start making more sense. It’s important to do it a second time so you really internalize the information. During this time, also read and reread your notes from chads and any additional notes you might have made. You’ll realize that you’re starting to memorize a lot of the info. It’s important not to write in the destroyer books as going through them again will not be helpful if you do.
Week 6-8 –
- This is the final sprint of the marathon so it’s important not to slow down. I was putting in about 11 hours a day. I would wake up, and take a full length bootcamp exam which took about 5 hours. The Next 6 hours consisted of carefully going through every question regardless of if I got it right or wrong. Use this book as a learning tool. All these different materials are giving you the same information just presented in a different way which helps you learn and retain the info!
- Last 3 or so days I took the 2009 exam (just the science portion) and reviewed my mistakes. I also began heavily reviewing EVERYTHING. I finished reviewing g-chem by doing all the problems from chads separate website. It has tons of questions and even video explanations for most of the problems! This guy is superman. The link is: DEFEAT the DAT. The reason that I did all these problems for G-gem was because I felt the most iffy with this section. Shows you how weird the dat can be.
- The day before my exam I reviewed all my notes for bio and went through the oc reactions as well as my handout notes.
----------------
If you’ve gotten this far, I sincerely hope this helped. Many of the things I’ve said have probably been said before but hopefully the reiteration will help someone looking through these forums. I want to thank the Bootcamp team for their excellent service. @Ari Rezaei for extending my bootcamp, the @orgoman22 team for their destroyer books and the countless sdn users I bothered with my frantic questions. If I can do it, you can do it. Repeat it, believe it!
______
Let me begin by saying that if I can do it, so can you! When you’re reading these breakdowns, always keep this in mind. If this guy can do it, so can I! repeat it until you believe it because it’s true. I don’t want to be repetitive as there are already plenty of breakdowns that essentially say the same thing so I’ll try to include things that I had questions about while studying. I’ll mostly be giving general advice on ways to stay focused and efficient. At the end I’ll give a quick summery of my schedule.
Time spent studying was 2 months and in all honesty, I think this is the magic number. Any more, I would have gone crazy, and any less I would have scored less. Efficiency and organization are the biggest things that will help you attain the scores you’re looking for. Let me tell you, it is super easy to go off track, fall behind and fall into the pattern of saying I’ll finish this later. Have a firm schedule and adhere to it. Make adjustments as necessary but if you think backtracking to review something will set you back, make it fit in your schedule by adding extra hours to your day. It’s important to stay on track. Set an exam date before you start studying. There’s nothing like the urgency of an upcoming behemoth of an exam to keep you in line. Do not consider rescheduling until necessary. I believe going into studying with the mindset that I will only take this exam ONCE will also give you that drive to keep going.
Biology – 25: This section is conquerable if you’re willing to put in the time! This section also requires patience as you can’t put it off till the end and expect to do well. The key to this section is having a solid review phase. I started off reading Cliffs thoroughly taking notes on every chapter. It’s important to take your OWN notes as this helps you locate information quickly later in the review phase. There were times I was taking tedious notes that I just wanted to quit and simply passively read the article as taking your own notes is time consuming, but it’s worth it! Don’t rely on simply reading the notes of others.
You might not memorize everything when you’re first reviewing but don’t worry by the end of your study regime, you’ll have seen every subject and topic asked in one way or another by all the different resources you’ll be using which will help cement the information in. You’ll also realize after a while that a topic you found daunting at first, a few weeks down the line will be so basic and easy you’ll be wondering why you had such a hard time the first time through. Just keep pushing through the pain and don’t run away from anything! For example when I first started studying hormones, I was thinking to myself there is no way I can be expected to memorize all of these so I quickly glanced at them and moved on. When doing practice questions, you’ll see them continuously pop up and eventually your brain will start soaking it in. Brains are amazing things haha, things you found impossible at first will become second nature after you’ve repeated them several times. To summarize, I used Cliffs to review, Destroyer biology to practice while paying attention to all the answer choices and reading the explanation for every question. I did bio destroyer twice. Finally, I used bootcamp in my last two weeks to soak in as much information as possible reading the explanation for every question and looking up videos for things I was unsure about. Never get comfortable, even if you know the question well and got it right, read the explanation carefully anyways. Information presented to you in different ways will really help it stick to you and during the DAT, you’ll glance at the question and know the answer without even thinking too hard. Trust me, with the pressure of a timed exam, you’ll want to know everything like the back of your hand so nothing will throw you off. I mentioned at the beginning that this section is conquerable. What I mean is, after reviewing, doing destroyer twice, and finally going through countless bootcamp questions, you’ll begin to see a pattern and this vast amount of information little by little won’t feel so vast anymore. Chip at it a little at a time and keep reviewing. I cant stress this enough, you must always review your notes, there is no shortcut. The secret to memorizing the intricate relationships of positive and negative feedback of the ovarian cycle is to go over it a gazzilion times.
General Chemistry- 26: This section was my weakest while studying and ended up being my highest score. Funny how that works right. I learned nothing in my gen chem class, and it didn’t help that I took it as dual credit during high school so essentially, I relearned everything while studying from the ground up. I used chads to review and imo HE IS THE MAN. He presents information in a way that just sticks to your brain like glue. Watch his videos and if you’re stilling having a hard time REWATCH them. Don’t lie to yourself and think you understand something just because you finished watching his videos. Its super easy to forget things unless you have a firm grasp. For me I watched his videos, thought I understood everything. Took a bootcamp exam, got a 15. Woops. What happened, I watched his videos…it made sense…what went wrong? Well it’s one thing to understand while watching a video and another thing being able to efficiently apply the information even when not asked in such a straight forward way. Okay, so I thought to myself it’s no biggie, it’s because I haven’t gone through destroyer yet. So when I got to the part of my schedule to start doing destroyer problems, I got destroyed. This is when I realized I needed to review again, I didn’t have as firm of a grasp as I originally thought. So I took One day to only do gen chem. In this time I re-watched all of his videos on 1.6x-1.8x speed while taking notes on the HANDOUT that is provided by coursesaver for his videos. Having the handout as a guide really helps put a structure to your notes and makes reviewing later quick and efficient. So once I watched his videos again I definitely felt better and started going through destroyer again and this time felt much more confident in my understanding. The point here is, don’t just go through the motions expecting everything to work out. You’ll fail, and feel like you’ll never understand something but just keep pushing and put in the effort and it will click I promise. I mentioned earlier that staying on schedule is important so what I did because I had to backtrack to review gen chem again was I added extra hours to my studying time in the days to come to keep on track. You have to continually practice to keep everything fresh. This isn’t like a normal exam where you focus on 2-3 chapters so be sure to continually review your notes, (the handout I mentioned) and continue to work problems. I’ll put a link to this website I used started by chad that I ran through a couple days before my exam which helped me quickly review everything.
Organic Chemistry – 23: Most of the advice given on the gen chem section can be applied here. Again please do yourself a favor and use chads. This was my strongest subject coming in so I felt confident however I didn’t want to fall into the trap of neglecting a section so I put in just as much time while studying. The key here is, again, never get comfortable. Keep reviewing, keep practicing. A test this vast, it’s easy for things to get fuzzy after a few days of not reviewing While I was comfortable with the material, I learned something new every day so you never know what you don’t know until you practice. I want to also add that don’t use the materials passively. Chad is great but more importantly, its HOW you study that makes the difference rather than the resource. He just makes it easier. So to summarize review with chads, take notes on the HANDOUT provided by the videos. This will add structure to your notes and make reviewing quick and efficient. Practice with destroyer which is hard, but my DAT was also hard! And finally in your last phase of studying HIT as many practice problems with bootcamp.
Quick tip for Destroyer: I forgot to mention this for gen chem but my method for utilizing the destroyer books was as follows. I did ONE question, worked it out on a separate sheet of paper and immediately flipped to the answer section to see if I was right and would read the solution. I used little sticky notes to mark the answer section so flipping back and forth from questions to solutions was quick. In this way you remember what your thought process was while going through the problem so when you read the explanation you can immediately make adjustments. This is just me but I found this was the most effective way to use destroyer as a LEARNING TOOL rather than cranking out 20-30 questions at a time. I utilized destroyer in this fashion for all sections including BIO, GC, OC, and math.
PAT – 19: Kinda disappointed about this as I was hoping for a 20 but I’ll take it. I was scoring consistent 19’s on bootcamp so this was spot on. I’ve read several times that PAT is easier on the real exam and this was not the case for me. It was on par with bootcamp in every section. This section comes with practice so train your brain by doing generator problems every day. Seriously, don’t miss a day. Some days you might feel exhausted from studying the other subjects and might be tempted to blow this off but It’s easy to loose your momentum so always make time for this. A quick tip, start your morning with PAT, about 45mins for all the sections together. This way you get PAT out of the way and you’ll wake yourself up. I had a hard time with pattern folding but in my last 2 weeks surprisingly this **** finally clicked. I started seeing the folds and was able to mentally connect sections together. On the real dat, the shapes were wacky, the pictures weren’t clear. The sizing was different. It just threw me off. The answer choices in the Angle section were on the left-hand side of the screen so this was weird as well. About 10 questions into doing the angles, MY HEART STOPPED. I thought for a moment that I was choosing answers in the wrong order. If that makes sense. Like biggest on the right and smallest on the left. I thought I was doing it the opposite so this freaked me out. It had to do with the fact that the answer choice were on a different side. Safe to say I quickly went back to the tutorial to verify and I was okay.
Reading Comprehension- 22: Forget what people tell you. This section also requires practice. Without the 10 bootcamp exams I went through, I wouldn’t have done well. Even though My average was 19 for bootcamp with 21 being my highest and 17 being my lowest. It’s all about the practice and what you get out of it. It’s important to have a plan of action and a method for tackling the questions. I would read the first question and read until I got to the answer. If it took too long, I chose the best answer and moved on. Sometimes while trying to answer another question, you’ll find the answer to that previous question you had a hard time locating. So in summary, read the first question quickly and begin reading with the intention of answering the question but also to understand the passage so you’ll recall information for the upcoming questions you haven’t seen. Since you could be unlucky and the answer to the first question isn’t until the end. I never read any science articles often suggested as I believe this section is all about practicing in testing conditions so you get your timing right. You’ll get good at scanning through information after going through several practice exams. The real exam is easier.
QR – 17: I’m happy with this 1*! This could have easily been a 15. That’s how much I struggled with it during my exam. If felt HARDER than bootcamp and I didn’t think that was possible…. I would be getting around 27/40, 28/40 raw score on bootcamp which averaged to 17 with a 19 on test 10 so… it was accurate but on the real exam I know I probably got 20/40 raw so it is more forgiving in the scoring. Going through the destroyer , I felt confident but this was a different beast. They hardly gave gimmie questions. Everything was pretty rough and without the practice I did on bootcamp exams I probably would have done even worse. Now with that said, I could have scored a 18~19 on this section if I wasn’t so sluggish. I was tired by this point and I noticed it took me longer to comprehend what the questions were asking. And UGHHH there were so many long word problems. The time pressure and fatigue got to me and I missed questions I knew how to do. So while I’m not in a position to give sound advice for this section, learn from my mistakes. Start QR early! And this might hurt but you either got a thing for math or you don't and obviously I don't lol. You probably won’t be scoring 25 coming from the ground up but you can certainly minimize the damage to get as many of the easier questions as possible so a 18, 19 or 20 is more attainable. Just my opinion as I’m sure some people will disagree. So to conclude for QR, it’s mehhh, not the most important score so while you should be putting in practice, don’t let it interfere with your sciences where a 30 is more realistically attainable.
----------------------
I’m going to end with a quick outline of my schedule.
Week: 1 - 3
- Content Review - Watch chads for the sciences and QR, read cliffs. Try to absorb as much information as possible so reviewing later will be easier. Took the first exam of every subject on bootcamp at this time after finishing my content review to get a baseline. Saved the rest of the exams, 3-10 for the end of my schedule.
Week 3-5 -
- Finish destroyer for every subject while taking your time to really understand everything. This took about 10-12 days. I used the last two days to review my notes thoroughly and really tried to commit everything to memory. At the end of this phase I also took exam 2 for every subject on bootcamp to get a gist of where I was at and if destroyer improved anything.
Week 5-6 –
- Redid destroyer for every subject, except math. This time it took 1 week because I could crank out 50 question a day for OC/GC and about 90 questions a day on bio. You’ll be faster the second time and the information will start making more sense. It’s important to do it a second time so you really internalize the information. During this time, also read and reread your notes from chads and any additional notes you might have made. You’ll realize that you’re starting to memorize a lot of the info. It’s important not to write in the destroyer books as going through them again will not be helpful if you do.
Week 6-8 –
- This is the final sprint of the marathon so it’s important not to slow down. I was putting in about 11 hours a day. I would wake up, and take a full length bootcamp exam which took about 5 hours. The Next 6 hours consisted of carefully going through every question regardless of if I got it right or wrong. Use this book as a learning tool. All these different materials are giving you the same information just presented in a different way which helps you learn and retain the info!
- Last 3 or so days I took the 2009 exam (just the science portion) and reviewed my mistakes. I also began heavily reviewing EVERYTHING. I finished reviewing g-chem by doing all the problems from chads separate website. It has tons of questions and even video explanations for most of the problems! This guy is superman. The link is: DEFEAT the DAT. The reason that I did all these problems for G-gem was because I felt the most iffy with this section. Shows you how weird the dat can be.
- The day before my exam I reviewed all my notes for bio and went through the oc reactions as well as my handout notes.
----------------
If you’ve gotten this far, I sincerely hope this helped. Many of the things I’ve said have probably been said before but hopefully the reiteration will help someone looking through these forums. I want to thank the Bootcamp team for their excellent service. @Ari Rezaei for extending my bootcamp, the @orgoman22 team for their destroyer books and the countless sdn users I bothered with my frantic questions. If I can do it, you can do it. Repeat it, believe it!
______
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