Anyone used Firecracker in a school that has letter grades? Were you able to manage FC? Using FC cost you significantly in grades? Any thoughts on how to make it work from day one is appreciated!! thx
Unfortunately, we're one of 23 allo schools left on a pre-clin curriculum with an actual ABCF letter system (also with the usual numerical rank). Our course exams vary between seemingly low relevance to highly relevant and spot-on (praise be unto one particular prof, omg, so spot-on w/so many step diamonds and strategies). Thankfully, we recently instituted a free, optional NBME subject exam to assess our grasps of the organs after each system block, which has helped me narrow my FC focus, albeit much later than our peers here (currently only have one block left after Xmas before dedicated begins in March).
My school is H/HP/P and I am neurotic enough to care about grades 😛, I started FC 1/3 through the second semester. I was taking Biochem, Physio, Neuro, and Immuno. I found it very difficult to keep up with FC and Schoolwork and pretty much only flagged physio and some biochem topics essentially ignoring immuno and biochem because of a lack of time. My physio course was all NBME tests though so it correlated well with FC content and i could ignore lectures. For the average medical student, or even strong medical student, I don't think it is possible to do well in coursework (like Honors/A) and keep up with firecracker flagging and cards for every subject without extreme extreme time commitments. Often time, lecture material has poor correlation with FC/Board exam review material, most of the stuff I had to know for lectures was not in FC/First Aids, and tons of stuff in FC/First Aid was not required for school-based exams. This pretty much increased the total content I needed to learn by an unmanageable amount. If I were in a graded school, I would pick 1-2 HY classes/semester (Physio!) and just focus on flagging those and not missing days. Then just catch up over breaks and summer. Or you can go along with everything in your coursework and tell yourself something like "I'm only going to learn and flag the 50% highest yield topics" or something like that. Try it out for yourself though, maybe your school correlates well in board review material. If not, I think its better to just focus on a few FC subjects and get them down pat/never skip Firecracker cards/day rather than trying to flag everything , running behind on school exams, and skipping weeks of firecracker at a time (like i did)
Consistently legit perspective here.
Yeah... I unfortunately had letter grades and numerical rank.
I did about 1.5hrs of FC every morning during 2nd year, usually 6:30-8AM before classes started. I had the whole day after that. It was a great routine and eventually became and almost addicting way to start the day.
I was slightly more relaxed using it M1. I stayed within the top 5% and a lot of that is thanks to maintained FC use. A lot of topics come back again and again or in different ways such as physio/micro appearing in path, for example.
This is also some legit advice I'd second in retrospect.
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So, to answer the top OP re: FC while in a true letter graded curriculum: (1) First, an important caveat is that my learning style is very unique. It takes me much more time than anyone I know to memorize discrete "easy" content; but I grasp and retain relations in physio and path really well. (2) Since switching from legacy to MD, and marking things as past, current, as well as assessing my grasp of those topics based on my NBME stats, and from reading the various perspectives here, my plan is to actually go through all of the questions from each covered organ system to rate my grasp via "study something specific" with a realistic goal of having everything individually flagged no later than Xmas break and then reassess based on that lovely green, orange, and red visual marker of topic mastery. I'll update scheduling later, as I haven't figured out how to execute this plan yet, currently in a trial and error phase. (3) I'm also trying to find a way to manage my time to begin UWorld ASAP, since I learn best through questions. Doing all the AAMC practice tests literally improved my MCAT when I retook on a scale that I was offered sufficient financial help to actually make it to med school. I learned my lesson.
Another take-home, I'm very nervous and wish I hadn't listened to everyone at my school and the top performers when they said not to start prepping with anything early. Considering my unique learning style, I think it'd have made me so much less stressed and better prepared. But I think for the rest of you normal med student folk, starting that early is more of a psychological reassurance. I see the stats after every test and wonder how the hell I do so comparatively poor to my peers on the exams (mostly discrete memorization), but tend to stay on par when it comes time for NBME, (more relations integrated with the discrete topics among answer choices).
Verbose as it was, I hope this helps someone. Thanks to all for maintaining input. FC was expensive, but I think still very useful, even if it just helps you realize how you need to prepare earlier on.
*written via phone, pls forgive any typos; mostly corrected w/latest edit.
