Step 1 reschedule advice

[CostaAzul]

I'm an M2 (northeast MD school) who has been scoring poorly on recent practice exams and failed my school CBSE with scores all around 170s over the course of about 3 weeks. I fell behind during my 2nd year due to medical issues and leave, managed to pass my classes on time, but clearly have significant content gaps. I'm about halfway through UW at around 65% correct and prior to my leave was a slightly below average student.

I'm now faced with 3 options of when to take step 1: 1) in about 5 weeks as scheduled, 2) take a full year LOA as encouraged by my school (not mandated), and 3) could possibly adjust my 3rd year schedule and delay to 9 weeks from now. I'm leaning toward option 3 if it's possible, but this could likely mean less time to study for Step 2 and/or reduced sub-internship time later down the line.

Any advice on which of these options to choose? I'm not decided on a specialty but at this point I'm interested in going into EM, Rads or Peds in that order.

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[calivianya]

I would probably take the year leave, tbh.

I had a crap ton of problems crop up during the summer before M2 and my dean suggested I take a LOA for a year, and I ignored the offer and pushed through. I’m lucky I’m a good test taker because I just got my step 1 score back and it was fine, but the amount of catching up I had to do was staggering and I’m 1000% sure I only scored well because I got lucky and they mostly tested on the stuff I did know because my head was not in the right space for the entirety of my second year, pretty much. I feel like my knowledge base is much weaker than that of my classmates and I have some regrets about how I’m going to feel going into third year.

If I could do it all over, I would take the LOA. It will also make you more competitive for residencies if you spend the year doing research or something like that.

I’m glad to be finishing on time and all but I had so much unnecessary extra stress during my dedicated that could have been avoided if I’d just taken a year off.

 

[tdod]

Go with Option 2. You lose a year but you greatly increase the likelihood that you will end up in the specialty you like by giving yourself time for aways and time for good Step scores. 100% worth it.