Hey all,
I am a first year medical student and one thing I have been hearing from a lot of people is that the secret to succeeding in boards later on is to start studying for boards from the start of medical school. I dont really understand what that means and how people do that. For example, some people say they keep up with anking cards and I dont understand how they do it while also studying lecture material in school. Does anyone have any recommendations?
In general, time is a huge limiting factor in how much you can absorb. Your brain needs repetition to recognize that something is important and time to bank that information somewhere secure. This is the whole idea behind anki.
Even more important is learning each concept at
least one level deeper than needed to answer a question. The goal is to be able to prompt yourself with just a single sentence and conjure up a much more complex set of ideas. This is the whole idea behind high-yield reviews. Divine might say, "Head strike with a lucid interval, epidural hematoma." He is expecting you to know much, much more than just this. What he's helping you do is reorganize and prioritize information you already know and understand.
An early start is essential for both. Step exams come down to an enormous number of discrete topics (e.g., "caustic ingestion" "ABG interpretation" "HIV drug adverse effects" etc...). Each can be learned at the step 1/2 level in an hour or so, but there are hundreds and hundreds of topics, and each needs to be reviewed many times over. Sufficient time and solid understanding enables this information to solidify in your head and occupy a more permanent space. You might struggle to characterize an ABG despite having just reviewed the information in depth. A month later it'll come up again and you'll struggle even more (so you'll review it again). This will keep happening until you are midway through M3 and realize that you don't even have to
think about ABGs anymore, you just have an intuitive sense of how the numbers relate to the underlying pathophysiology.
The goal is to enter your dedicated study period with as many high-yield topics as possible banked in the "effortless" category. This is achieved through organized studying and frequent review of a finite resource (e.g., UWorld, First Aid) instead of haphazard review of tons of different resources. For M1 really just focus on building a foundation of understanding of physiology, no need for dedicated step studying. By M2 you should be focused on keeping things organized and
accumulating knowledge, so M2 will be one full year of prepping for step 1. By M3, you will work on binning this information into discrete clinical management scenarios, likely by presenting symptom or situation, and shelf studying will serve as step 2 prep.
