So pissed but for a good reason
269 🙂
Here's what I did. Bear in mind that I had about 4 years of PhD microbiology/immunology work before coming to medical school, so I was not your average med student.
My prep materials were no secret. Uworld + FA + Rx + Pathoma + RR Path (Goljan's path book). There's pretty much no secret to studying for Step 1. The key, IMO, is how you approach it. For one, I have two kids, so time is at a premium. I didn't have 8-10 hours a day to devote to studying and my dedicated was interrupted by my wife's new job, so I only had 6 hours a day to myself. However, if you are able to organize the information well enough, you won't need that much more time to do well.
The theme of M2 is basically paired opposites. If you learned it that way, then the vast majority of material is easily digestable. For example, you learn Crohn's alongside with UC. The two diseases are basically the opposite. Once you have that down, you never miss a bread-and-butter question on UC and Crohn's. So that's how I approached stuff. Non-specific symptoms, I basically discounted. Don't even care. If a question is going to ask you about adenovirus, the key points to look for are either conjunctivitis or hemorrhagic cystitis. Everything, I could care less about. Of course you have to know the virology (eg enveloped, dsDNA virus), but if they give that to you, they basically gave you the right answer. This is how I approached the entire year.
I approached Uworld in a different manner. I started it in Jan, did like 25 questions/day, skimmed the explanation and moved on. I was done with Uworld in March with about 75% correct, give or take a few percentage points. If I got it right, I didn't do anything else with that question; just made a mental note of it and moved on. If I missed something because it was a stupid fact (eg CA-125 is a marker for ovarian cancer), I'd jot that factoid down on a flashcard and move on. If I got something right for the wrong reason or completely didn't know what was happening, then I'd spend some time reading the explanation and going to Google for more information. I didn't annotate anything in FA, didn't spend hours reviewing blocks and didn't agonize over every little detail. There's usually a basic principle behind most of Uworld; for example, there was probably 5-10 questions on fungi and neutropenia. Once you look for neutropenia in a fungal patient, **** is all downhill from there. That's how I approached it. I didn't care if the stupid fungus was infecting some random part of the body that it rarely does. The key point was that the patient was neutropenic. So it took me like 30-40 minutes to review Uworld instead of the several hours that my classmates were doing.
I used Rx as well and I really, really like this qbank. For one, I felt the question style was much more similar to the NBMEs in that they are a bit more vague but also more straightforward. I used Rx more during my dedicated prep time, doing a full block of questions a day. I ended up doing all of the medium/hard questions and like 60% of the easy questions. I love the "bottom line" feature of Rx. I feel that you can do very well with just Uworld but you can probably do equally as well with only Rx if you want to live dangerously. In the end, Rx was a valuable part of my prep because I spend much less time learning stupid one-off factoids and Rx has a bunch of these that they pull straight from First Aid, as well as testing conceptual topics.
Pathoma is basically the best single source for Step 1. Even better than FA, even better than Uworld. I went through Pathoma about 3 times. I eschewed our class pathology lectures for Pathoma only, so while class would spend 10 hours on the kidney, Pathoma spends like an hour and a half. You can watch it two times, read the chapter in Goljan and still be ahead in time. I watched Pathoma one additional time at the beginning of dedicated prep and it was invaluable because I was seeing stuff I missed in Uworld pop up verbatim. He is a great teacher and a great time saver. I love Goljan's book because it fills in all the minor details that Pathoma might leave out and it's a fairly quick read. Again, no annotations for me, but I read the tables, blue text, regular text about 3-4 times throughout the year.
FA. I hate this book. I made a total of 0 passes in this book. I'd use it more like a reference book, but I never went through it cover to cover. I'd read the anatomy/embyro parts diligently and read some of the tables/lists, but other than that, I didn't really use this book much. For example, I memorized cold the virology tables because that **** was well-organized and important. But something like the anesthetics, I didn't touch because it was haphazardly organized and the mnemonic just sucked. The only thing I forced myself to do was memorized the 450 inducers and inhibitors because that is important. I had an intuitive grasp of it but I never explicitly memorized it until my dedicated prep. It helped me out because I did get an obscure drug interaction on the real deal. However, at no point during the exam did I say "wow, I really wish I read this section in FA".
Here's how I did in my practice tests.
NBME 6-> 240 (this was done before I covered all the material in Pathoma/class)
NBME subject shelves -> all >800.
NBME 11 -> 250 (start of dedicated prep)
CBSA -> 96 (>265) (given 2 weeks into dedicated prep)
UWSA1 -> 265 (91% correct)
UWSA2 -> 265 (93% correct)
NBME 16 -> 270 (3 days before exam)
Free 150 -> 89% (2 days before exam)
I chilled the last day, reminded myself that I know the answer most of the time and I trick myself out of them and went into the exam relaxed but confident.
Overall, the exam is a beast but fair. Don't go off what other people are doing. If I told anyone else my studying style, they would think I was going to fail this exam. Stick with what works for you. Just because I did well on this schedule doesn't mean it's a magic recipe for success. I knew my strengths, my learning style and my weaknesses and tailored my approach that way. Just like I can't play like Lebron James just because I train like Lebron, there's no guarantee you can study like me and score like me. However, there are many ways to skin this cat and this website is amazing for tailoring your studying schedule to fit your needs. Just look at all the high scores in this thread. Not everyone studied the same, but we all scored similarly because of the multiple paths to get to where you want to be.
