Medical LoA Year, study strategy

[GABAGoober]

I struggled through and will have to repeat my M1 year, and I've been approved for a leave of absence this coming year. I've talked through with advisors and mentors, and have a pretty good sense of how to study now, but I would like to put together an action plan. My goals are to have a good content coverage, and establish a foundation for the preclinical years as well as transitioning to clerkships.

For anybody who may have some actionable advice, any thoughts on my plan?

1. For preclinicals
   1. Watch standard BnB, Sketchy, and pathoma to establish my knowledge
   2. Try to mature the step 1 anking material as I go along
   3. Q-banks
2. Longer term
   1. Establish a better study schedule - I found that I was winging it a lot of the time and lost motivation during some periods of study. I was also burning both ends of the stick at those times, and ended up losing my daily schedule like gym, proper sleep cycles. I'm hoping to establish this, but maybe with a stricter regimen that can carry me through 3rd year

That's all I really have at the moment. Would appreciate any feedback

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[OMSWeebHours]

Forcing yourself to study isn't that effective, especially after a long stretch due to diminished marginal returns. Like they say, spaced repetition is a much more effective method of study and will often leave you surprised at how much more you can remember.

Med School Bootcamp also seems to be a fairly good resource for studying, and they have many videos and practice questions to help check knowledge. There is a lot of content (it's all of preclinical after all), but if you space out studying and work through at a manageable pace you can probably do a lot.

 

[esob]

What was the particular weak point? If it was just poor performance on NBME exams, the approaches to remediation might be substantially different than if you did poorly in all areas, such as OSCE and PBLs.