I am studying too slowly, advice needed!

[cameraGEEK]

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I am an MSTP student and have a couple of months before I have to take Step 1. I study for the exam for the majority of the day. I have never been a big memorizer, but have really pushed myself to try to be one since starting medical school, and have done fine on all the exams so far in school. However, I am not feeling good about how my boards studying has been going. I have been reading Goljan Rapid Review Pathology and am having trouble keeping myself from looking up multiple concepts or terms per sentence. It takes 2 hours per page, which means I get very little done per day. It has been very frustrating and demoralizing, and I don't even feel that I am retaining a lot of what I learn. I have always studied this way - very thoroughly, detail oriented, and slowly. I keep wondering and looking up why something written in the book is the way it is and thinking of questions related to the listed point on a subject. However, I feel with the massive amount of information I will need to get through it's not possible to continue this way. I was planning on getting through First Aid after Goljan, but I haven't come close to finishing Rapid Review yet.

Does anyone have any experience with this problem and/or suggestions on better ways to study or more appropriate material (for me) to study with?

 

[Elbowstoopointy]

I am an MSTP student and have a couple of months before I have to take Step 1. I study for the exam for the majority of the day. I have never been a big memorizer, but have really pushed myself to try to be one since starting medical school, and have done fine on all the exams so far in school. However, I am not feeling good about how my boards studying has been going. I have been reading Goljan Rapid Review Pathology and am having trouble keeping myself from looking up multiple concepts or terms per sentence. It takes 2 hours per page which means I get very little done per day. It has been very frustrating and demoralizing, and I don't even feel that I am retaining a lot of what I learn. I have always studied this way - very thoroughly, detail oriented, and slowly. I keep wondering and looking up why something written in the book is the way it is and thinking of questions related to the listed point on a subject. However, I feel with the massive amount of information I will need to get through it's not possible to continue this way. I was planning on getting through First Aid after Goljan, but I haven't come close to finishing Rapid Review yet.

Does anyone have any experience with this problem and/or suggestions on better ways to study or more appropriate material (for me) to study with?

2 hours per page? not sure what you are doing that takes this long...care to explain so we can help you?

 

[KSDeacon]

2 hours per page? not sure what you are doing that takes this long...care to explain so we can help you?

I get that you want to be thorough, but that is way too long to be spending on Goljan. Or anything for that matter. It is straight up impossible to memorize everything required for this exam. What worked for me was learning broad concepts and then the details just all came together.
I know that's easier said than done, but you need to find a way not to get stuck in the minutiae.

 

[LiverpoolFC]

I am an MSTP student and have a couple of months before I have to take Step 1. I study for the exam for the majority of the day. I have never been a big memorizer, but have really pushed myself to try to be one since starting medical school, and have done fine on all the exams so far in school. However, I am not feeling good about how my boards studying has been going. I have been reading Goljan Rapid Review Pathology and am having trouble keeping myself from looking up multiple concepts or terms per sentence. It takes 2 hours per page, which means I get very little done per day. It has been very frustrating and demoralizing, and I don't even feel that I am retaining a lot of what I learn. I have always studied this way - very thoroughly, detail oriented, and slowly. I keep wondering and looking up why something written in the book is the way it is and thinking of questions related to the listed point on a subject. However, I feel with the massive amount of information I will need to get through it's not possible to continue this way. I was planning on getting through First Aid after Goljan, but I haven't come close to finishing Rapid Review yet.

Does anyone have any experience with this problem and/or suggestions on better ways to study or more appropriate material (for me) to study with?

I STRONGLY recommend pathoma. Go to the website. www.pathoma.com
IMHO I think that Pathoma guy is the best guy ever to teach Pathology. His book is only ~200 pgs. He has a sample of the videos on his site. I believe the videos for first 5 chapters is free. I am convinced you will not regret it. I wish you the best in your preparation.

 

[KSDeacon]

I STRONGLY recommend pathoma. Go to the website. www.pathoma.com
IMHO I think that Pathoma guy is the best guy ever to teach Pathology. His book is only ~200 pgs. He has a sample of the videos on his site. I believe the videos for first 5 chapters is free. I am convinced you will not regret it. I wish you the best in your preparation.

👍👍👍👍👍

 

[Cyr]

Camerageek, I can relate to the pace and manner in which you study. I also pour over the details, and study at a much slower pace than my classmates.

Unlike you, I only had 5 weeks to study exclusively for step 1. Understanding how long it takes me to read texts, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of reading all of goljan or any other text in x number of days. However, I was comfortable with doing practice questions and annotating first aid. By adopting this strategy, I was able to maintain a focused level of studying over the course of the 5 weeks, and I came out with a great score. I ended up hardly reading goljan at all!

Anyway, to sum up, my advice would be to know yourself and to study hard in the manner in which you are most comfortable. Best of luck!

 

[235009]

IMO that's not the correct way to use RR, especially at this point. It is way too detailed and you'll get bogged down with a bunch of extremely low yield stuff. I found RR to be extremely useful when listening to the goljan audio. The third edition follows pretty closely with the newest audio files. You can follow along as he explains the pics and if he says something that's unclear you can read it over in the book.

My advice would be to start with FA and the Kaplan QBank ...add Kaplan videos for subjects you feel especially weak in. When you get to systems integrate goljan audio and follow along in RR while you're listening. Do this for about a month and then for the following month do UWorld and go over FA again (and again). As others have said you're the only one who knows how you learn but RR is pretty low yield, especially if you are doing it instead of FA or Qbanks.

 

[SpartyfromCali]

start doing practice questions on uworld. shoot for 50 a day and that should take you about 3 hours (an hour to do them and 2 hours to read the responses). you will learn more than you think from just reading why you got an answer right or wrong.

then focus on first aid and start annotating that maybe with gunnertraining. memorizing all of goljan is great if you have all the time in the world but the reality is that most of it won't really show up.

most importantly, start doing questions. it'll be tough in the beginning but it'll get better. i know a lot of my classmates who put off doing questions because they felt like they needed to get through all the material first, but that's not the way to go about it.

good luck!

 

[Gullain Barre]

I was able to read all of FA and RR Path in 4 weeks.

What I did was to read a FA chapter first, make notes, flashcards, etc. and get a good understanding of the material in there. This is the important part of studying for Step 1 because if you know FA extremely well, you're more or less got the foundation for a 240+.

After reading that FA chapter, I would read the associated RR Path chapters. Neuro has only the last chapter of the book, GI had like 3-4, Endocrine 3. I'd basically skim over it, and if I came across a disease or facts that weren't mentioned in FA, AND I deemed important enough to learn- then I focused on that, taking notes and making flashcards from those to supplement my work from FA.

Then rinse and repeat for each chapter of FA. Use FA to guide your studying. I didn't memorize every single thing in Goljan because there's a decent amount of overlap with FA and what I already knew from med school coursework. Add that onto the usual 1-2 UWorld blocks a day and I was able to get through all of FA/RR in 4 weeks, leaving me 2 weeks to flash through everything for another 4-5 passes. I ended up with a score > 240.

 

[cameraGEEK]

Thanks for the great advice everyone. I am going to see how the next week or so goes, and then will modify my routine.