USMLE I need serious scheduling help, panicking

[zeppelinpage4]

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My test is June 4th, and my study period just started. So I have exactly 28 days of studying starting tomorrow.

Here's the problem.
Resources I hope to get through: FA, Uworld (1 pass), Pathoma, Crush Step 1 (just seven of it's chapters that I feel shakier on)

I know it takes me:
~12 min./page to read FA
~10 min./page to read Crush Step 1
~4 min to read each Uworld question.

Essentially with those parameters.
If I do 2 blocks of Uworld per day (2 hours to do both blocks timed, and 6 hours to review the questions)=8 hours/day on Uworld

If I want to read all of FA in 28 days, at my pace, I need to review 4 hours of FA each day.

If I want to read Crush, at the pace I'm at, it will require 2 hours of Crush each day.

And then there's Pathoma.

That's >14 hours of studying per day to get through everything. That's not realistic.

All in all, I feel ****ed. I took the Uworld practice test 1 as a diagnostic and got a 178. And I know the Uworld scores are inflated...so I prob realistically got a 158 .

So, I could use some help, advice, moral support idk. I can't motivate myself to study, cause it seems impossible to cover everything.
Should I cut out any of the resources above?
Am I reading too slow? Going through Uworld too slow?
Should I just focus on high yield subjects like cardio, and take a hit on other chapters?

I made vacation plans for after my step 1, but I'm seriously considering cancelling everything and tacking on another 2 weeks. I don't know if 28 days is enough time...that's just shy of a month. >.< All my classmates are taking there's in 4-5 weeks too, but I feel they've been prepping better than me throughout the year.

Apologies if this all sounds neurotic. I'm really not an anxious person with school, but this test has me feeling all sorts of crap. I just want to pass the darn thing and not look back.

 

[NEEDTOPASS123]

Take NBME 15 or 16 right now and see what your score is and report it (if you'd like), don't study for it. Just log in and take it.
It'll answer your question

 

[zeppelinpage4]

Take NBME 15 or 16 right now and see what your score is and report it (if you'd like), don't study for it. Just log in and take it.
It'll answer your question

Thanks, that's a good idea. I already lost a day to doing the Uworld simulated exam, and I need to get going on covering material (starting immunology today). But I planned another practice exam after this week, so I'll make sure that's an NBME and hopefully it'll give me some clearer answers as to where I'm really at.

Everyone at my school kept telling me a month would be enough, and no one takes more than 5 weeks at my school. So I assumed it would be fine...but this just seems impossible.

 

[deleted564496]

Hey there Zep, sorry about the diagnostic score... At least one of us had the nuts to take one (I was too scared because I knew I would fail).. I don't have a whole lot of advice other than to make sure you know you're not the only out there feeling like that. I don't think I have nearly enough time to go through everything I want. I had too many resources at first and decided to cut some in favor of getting pathoma done... I'm also listening to pathoma on 1.7x which makes it much faster. If you haven't tired listening to Sattar at 1.7 you might want to try that, it's actually quite doable (and I rarely listened to lectures at anything greater than 1.2x). It sounds like you might want to cut out pathoma or the crush step 1 book. I'm not very familiar with Crush Step 1 or whatever it's called, but if it's a more detailed FA then why not skip the chapters you want to do Crush Step 1 with in FA and just use that book instead. Regardless just want you to know that you're not alone man, we'll get through this! Good luck!

 

[starstarie]

Hey! Not sure this will help cuz I haven't taken the test yet, but you seem like you could use some comradery! I took my school NBME (CBSA or whatever it's called) and got a 210 ish. I wasn't ALL the shocked honestly because I was really tired and sorta gave up halfway through. But it's a little rough. BUT I just took an assessment yesterday and got a 256! So at least there's hope!

Did you reallllly try your hardest? Did you get tired and semi give up? Were there a lot of things that you recognized and thought that you could have gotten right but the info just wasn't within reach?

I think those are a lot of the reasons why sometimes the diagnostics are quite a bit lower than they would have been.

I think that as soon as you start getting used to doing questions and start getting memorizing a lot of the facts that appear over and over, your scores will improve.

Another thing for me was I had been using FA and the Rx question bank for the spring and I kinda got comfortable with the style and wording of things. When I started UWorld, the format and just something about the way they asked questions was SOO different. I got a really low score on my first two blocks, and now am consistently about 10-20% higher than the beginning! So that could definitely be part of why you didn't do so well on the assessment.

I think that's also why it's so important to do some NBMEs before the real thing. There is just something about the first time you see a new style of questions that is just different.

Anyway good luck! I hope some of this helps!

 

[pd1112]

I'd suggest trying to move quicker on FA & UW by integrating them together. If you're reviewing a question set for 3 hours, you should be able to review the relevant FA pages along with each question for reinforcement. That way you can cut down significantly on the time spent reading FA alone. Everyone is different depending on the level of understanding achieved from classes, but I would say that 12 minutes per page of FA is extremely inefficient, especially since it is primarily a word association outline and doesn't contribute much to integration and conceptualization.