UWSA1: 234 (3.5 m out)
Nbme 16: 213 (3 months out)
Nbme 15: 232 (2 months out)
Nbme 17: 234 (1.5 m out)
Nbme 19: 219 (1 m out)
UWSA2: 251 (3 weeks out)
Nbme 18: 230 (2 weeks out)
Free 120: 78% (10 d out)]
Step 1 score: 242 (7/10/2017)
Total time of preparation without gaps etc 1 year-full dedicated 8 weeks
Study resources:
I will point out only what I found
useful because from time to time I spent some days reviewing the material from different resources in order to understand some concepts better.
Since I am an IMG I started with a quick pass of Kaplan videos and books which help you build foundation knowledge and become familiar with the content. One great mistake I did was that I did not use FA at this time which costed me a lot of time in concepts that are not High Yield. After finishing kaplan videos etc, I did usmle Rx which I did not like at that time because I did not know FA and I did not persuaded myself to really try and learn FA through USMLE Rx which is a good tool only for learning FA and not as an assessment. (Here you can use Board and Beyonds as an alternative which I did not use but is one of the new HY video sources).
After that I started doing Kaplan by subject. This bank has a lot of low yield questions etc BUT it also gives you some secret gems that will help you to think better on some concepts and understand some topics better. After finishing 70% of that bank I started UW timed/ random 40q per day making notes in a word file in every single question that I did not know. It was time consuming at the beginning but also the best thing I did in my whole preparation. Writing up stuff from UW and trying to reproduce diagrams and tables were really great in making connections that were extremely HY in the real thing. I did UW for 2.5 times and also marked and incorrect. Every time I saw a question I did not try to remember the answer but I tried to approach it as a new question
trying different ways/tricks in order to find the best way that works for me. Every one has his own style of approaching questions so you have to invest some time to find what works best for you.
Personally I hated reading FA because I found it to be really passive learning and could not get a lot from reviewing it. Therefore, I found extremely helpful the USMLE RX express videos which "read" you the topic from the FA and add some details and make some connections--> totally recommended for people like me that cannot read FA actively. There are also other videos like DIT etc that can also be used.
Find what make you study more actively and do it.
Dedicated time:
UFAP and videos from osmosis, youtube etc at the end of the day when I could not study anymore (9-10 pm). In the last weeks you should try as hard as you can to understand and make as many connections as you can (especially in the HY topics). The most important thing during the last 2-3 weeks is to persuade yourself that you can do it and pass the exam. I personally had a huge burn out last 2 weeks before the exam that I managed to deal with with the help of family and my girlfriend (ok and alcohol
).
The single most important thing that I realized from the exam day was how important is how you feel the day of your exam. You must suppress everything and forget about the past. It is you and 280 questions. That's it. Unfortunately, nobody cares about how many months, days, hours you spent studying. It is only this exam that counts. Even though I was pretty nervous last day I managed to sleep early and had 7 hours of sleep which was extremely helpful. I had small breaks between every block and I tried to persuade myself that I can pass the exam in every single break. Also, every block you finish, it is over. You should not think about even the easiest mistake that you made in the last block. You just continue and try to stay focused and concentrated. I felt like I was doing 7 hard blocks of UW/UWSA with 15 questions per block being like NBMEs and another 15-20 being 2nd-3rd order. Yes there were 3-5 questions per block that were extremely difficult but I think that you have to relax and try to think what they are trying to test you with these questions and then the question becomes a little bit easier.
Excuse any typos but I am on vacations and I write from cell phone. Best of luck to everyone
