piece of advice

[passlineandodds]

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when you make your study schedule for the boards, give yourself some built in downtime. then when you are studying, protect that time so you can relax or use it as you necessary if something unexpected comes up and needs taking care of. for example, you can't always predict when you might get sick and need time to recuperate. having a few extra days built into your schedule may make the difference between going into the exam riddled with anxiety versus feeling confident in your preparation. if all goes well, use that extra time to do something fun!

 

[puffy1]

That's some good advice. It's very hard to commit 6-10+ hours a day studying, and it's even harder to do it for 20-30 days in a row. A friend of mine couldn't maintain concentration after two days of studying and would be unproductive for a nother day or two...but they never gave themselves that built in one or two-days off from studying. This person, unfortunately, didn't make it and will have to take it again.

If the hardest working entity in the galaxy took Sunday off, you can too. It's good to give the noggin some rest and be refreshed and recharged for another hard-charging week of studying.

 

[rubyness]

I completely agree with this advice!! Save some days for free time or whatever you need to do. It helps to curb any panic that you may have because you know that you have a few extra days built in for emergencies, rest, fun or study make-up days.

 

[florisio]

I know this may seem contrary to most advice on this forum, but my technique for step 1 which proved to be very effective was to NOT MAKE A SCHEDULE. Of course I woke up every day with the intention of studying. Decide what you want to work on with each new day. You can have rough guidelines for when you want to get things done. For example, start path early, but don't devote an entire day to path! I studied one BRS chapter of path a day along with all the other subjects at the same time. Figure ther are 23 chapters in BRS path, so you could FINISH path in 3 weeks. The rest of the exam is all related to path. Some people like schedules for whatever reasons. In my mind, it creates more stress and causes more problems than it supposedly solves.

 

[Renovar]

You should have a rough schedule of how long you spend on each section, however. Like reading the BRS path book over twice and doing first aide path section twice, I scheduled myself 4 complete days of it, and I have 5th day doing bunch of questions and 6th day reviewing what I missed/what I need to brush on. And I take my sunday off. You should study which ever order you want, but should still have a rough schedule.

 

[LoneSEAL]

What one has to realize is that certain review books are just "harder" to get through. An example of this idea would be BRS pathology. It's a great book. However, unless you used the book concurrently with your pathology course, it took a long, long time to get through as a first review. The book has most of the key info, but a lot of times.it only presents the "what" but not the "why" Thus, time will be spent looking stuff up in Robbins trying to understand the "whys" so that one can actually remember the material.

For BRS path, I would recommend going through a chapter a day as one of the above posters recommended. One should also realize that certain chapters will take more than a day just because the material is dense. For me renall, skin, and CNS took more than a day because I had to do extensive reading from Robbin to actually understand what BRS path is talking about.

 

[DOtobe]

I don't think I could have gotten through my board review studying without a schedule. By making a schedule I pushed myself to study, and I would feel guilty if I didn't accomplish everything on my schedule. But don't schedule yourself to do too much...know how much studying your brain can actually handle every day.

And I definitely agree with scheduling some time off and do something that requires no thinking (I took my time off from studying to watch American Idol 😀) Your brain will thank you if you give it a break every once in a while.