Hey friends, thought I'd pop in and give some CK advice to my 2021ers starting up rotations. It's easy when 3rd year starts to have grand plans about your study habits (I was the same), because you're just coming off Step 1 and accustomed to conquering huge volumes of work every day. You'll quickly find this is unrealistic, but I'm happy to report that I accomplished only a very small fraction of my original plan and still managed to score a 273. Here's some of the things I wish people told me when I started 3rd year:
1. Anki - An amazingly powerful tool that should be utilized for Step 2 (and beyond), but those that used it for Step 1 likely matured 15k+ cards and assume they'll do the same for Step 2. This is a mistake in many ways. Step 2 doesn't test information like Step 1 does, period. I think the ideal number of cards for Step 2 is somewhere around 5-6k. Personally I ended up maturing Zanki but was pretty liberal about suspending/combining poor cards or repeat concepts. I also made 1000 of my own cards throughout the year based on missed Qbank questions and random clinical pearls -- these 1000 cards got me easily twice as many questions correct on Step 2 than Zanki did. I initially intended to do over 12k cards based on various decks I found and I am so grateful that I didn't as I strongly believe I would have scored much lower. Be efficient and realistic about your Anki goals.
2. When to study - There's usually plenty of downtime in 3rd year, it's just typically scattered throughout the day. This is where Anki shines. Don't feel bad about taking your phone/tablet out and knocking out cards when there's downtime. Don't worry about offending your preceptors or looking unprofessional. At worst you'll have a particularly anal retentive attending that frowns on this and drops your evaluation without ever saying anything (this never happened to me). What do you think matters more on your residency application though, getting a HP over an H in a specialty you're not going into, or getting 260+ on Step 2 over a 240? Play the long game.
3. How much to study - Force yourself to study 1 hour every day when you get home. If you knocked out all your Anki cards at work, great!, still go home and study for an hour. Just worked 18 hours on surgery? Get your ass home and study for an hour. You're going to be much more tired when you get home this year so it's important to study a little every day, and you'll quickly find that 1 hour a day is more than enough to keep your knowledge ahead of your peers. If you try to do more than that you'll quickly notice fatigue sets in a lot quicker than it did during second year and there's serious diminishing returns the longer you study.
4. What to study (other than Anki) - UWorld+Anki is truly all you need to get an above average Step 2 score. Where you really start to separate yourself is what you study outside of those things. You could do another Qbank (AMBOSS is fantastic, although I only did a small percentage of it). What I did is listened to medically related podcasts while I was getting ready in the mornings, read a lot of UpToDate (random topics related to cases I saw), watched a little OME (I didn't find the videos particularly helpful), and occasionally read some IM related books (most of Step 2 is medicine). I truly don't think it matters what you choose to study outside of UWorld, as long as you're making an effort to learn new things every day and brush up on weak topics.
5. Common things people do that I would absolutely not recommend and you will very likely regret - Re-watching Sketchy, doing multiple Anki decks (such as Zanki and WiWa), studying 5 hours a day (you will burnout, you will become depressed, and your clinical performance will suffer), sacrificing sleep/exercise/healthy eating (probably the most important point), finding extra work to do on rotations (very rarely translates into a better evaluation), staying when your preceptor tells you to go home (this is for auditions, not 3rd year), answering pimp questions that were asked to another person or not giving other students a chance to answer (preceptors find this annoying more than impressive, and you will lose friends), and most importantly comparing yourself to your classmates (you all have different schedules, your knowledge gaps/strengths will be different throughout the year!).
That's all I got. Important to note this is one man's opinion but I think you'll find most students that scored well on Step 2 and got generally good clinical feedback will agree with the majority of the above. 3rd year is much better than 2nd. Enjoy the extra free time (and REAL days off!), and embrace feeling like a ***** (this won't stop for a while, so better get used to it). Good luck!
