Tips for microbio/immuno? Class seems impossible

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ldiot

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I'm really hating this class. My first test is this week. I've been putting in solid 8 hours days and still feel like I don't know a damn thing.

The lecturer literally spouts off a dozen bugs per lecture hour, and it seems like he lists EVERY possible disease state, every anatomic site, etc for every bacteria. So when it's all said and done none of them seem very distinguishable. In other words I can't tell what is high yeild and what is irrelevant because they don't make it evident. Meningitis may be listed under 10 different bugs, even if they cause meningitis 0.1% of the time and I'll never see it in a case study/in the real world. I'm spending more time organizing/sorting through the info than studying it.

Any tips? Kind of just wanted to vent.

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We just finished our micro/immuno block last week so I definitely feel your pain. Unfortunately micro is pretty much all memorization so option number 1 is definitely sketchy micro. These videos are pure gold since they cover the most important identifying features of pretty much all the relevant bugs. If you watch the videos twice you should be able to remember everything in them. After you have that framework you could read Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple because it is very clear and concise and has a bit more info than sketchy. The way professors ask micro questions is usually pretty straightforward - they give a long clinical vignette with multiple identifying features of the bug, and then they either ask what the bug is, what toxin is causing the disease state, what another virulence factor associated with the bug, or what drug would you use to treat this disease. With sketchy and CMMRS you should be covered to answer pretty much any question. Maybe run through your lecture ppt's once to see if there's anything in them that you didn't learn from the other sources. If it's not in sketchy or simple, it's probably not important and you can definitely answer questions not knowing it.

As for immuno, definitely read How the Immune System Works. You could probably read it in a day or two and you will actually understand immunology and it will make it much easier to go through jumbled lecture slides.

Good luck, you can do this!


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My students all seem to love Sketchy Micro.

Our Library also refuses to buy the Med Micro made Ridiculously Simple books because they all disappear. That sound like a vote of confidence for the students.

If you go into Peds, you'll be seeing lots of meningitis.


Sketchy micro

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I would recommend supplementing Sketchy Micro with something else. I had some obscure Micro stuff on Step I that was NOT in Sketchy. So even tho I knew Sketchy real well, I had to guess on a few. In effect Sketchy wasn't really helpful for Step. Oh, it might help with classes, but the more important question is what is helpful for boards.
 
I would recommend supplementing Sketchy Micro with something else. I had some obscure Micro stuff on Step I that was NOT in Sketchy. So even tho I knew Sketchy real well, I had to guess on a few. In effect Sketchy wasn't really helpful for Step. Oh, it might help with classes, but the more important question is what is helpful for boards.

It's probably time you got over your board score. It's pretty sad.

SketchyMicro is amazing for both class and board studying. Of course there will be organisms you've never heard of on the boards, there will be other stuff as well. You can't know everything.

As for immunology, Basic Immunology by Abbas is pretty good. Not that difficult of a read for the pertinent things.
 
I would recommend supplementing Sketchy Micro with something else. I had some obscure Micro stuff on Step I that was NOT in Sketchy. So even tho I knew Sketchy real well, I had to guess on a few. In effect Sketchy wasn't really helpful for Step. Oh, it might help with classes, but the more important question is what is helpful for boards.

Sketchy is purely for memorizing bugs, so yeah, obviously you still need to supplement with something else so you know what the words actually mean.
 
I would recommend supplementing Sketchy Micro with something else. I had some obscure Micro stuff on Step I that was NOT in Sketchy. So even tho I knew Sketchy real well, I had to guess on a few. In effect Sketchy wasn't really helpful for Step. Oh, it might help with classes, but the more important question is what is helpful for boards.

Disagree. Sketchy was HUGE for me for boards. I used it a lot and micro was my best subsection by far. Nobody's saying Sketchy alone is going to get you every boards question-- boards are infamous for having obscure things you've never seen before, in every subject.
 
Yeah so right now I'm using sketchy+powerpoints for micro and just the powerpoints for immuno. I was nervous putting much stock into sketchy but we will see how it goes.
 
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