Do not delay. It will only make you feel worse. It's like girls who get a massive boob job or guys who do steroids. The insecurity does not go away. Personally, I never ever feel as ready as I want to for exams like these, because there is really no limit to the curriculum. There is always going to be something you do not know or had not thought of so as long as you feel that you have taken a significant step up from your 235 on NBME 7, you will do fine. A suggestion might be to not just go through random Qs on UWorld, but make a very specific prioritized list of weak areas. Since we never get all the way through those kinds of to do lists anyway, just start from the top and know that whatever you do not have time to review does not matter that much because that was not your weakest area anyway. For the exam itself, try not to overthink. I got at least 10 Qs wrong by focusing on one weird detail instead of the rest of the case.
Right, so I've realized that part of my problem is that on some tests I got really bogged down in details and was super suspicious of every question. This leads to me both overthinking a lot of questions and not having time to review at the end. I've done like four blocks today and tried to really keep myself from getting bogged down and have done better than I usually do. I've had more time to review and my scores are better and more consistent than most days (and the difficulty of the tests is about the same. It bumped my overall average up one percent and my scores were one 75, with the other 3 between 80-85%.
I'm wondering, honestly, if this is part of the problem. I just don't know.
My weakest subject is probably gyn (which is annoying because I did really well on that shelf, but it was like 10 months ago so I guess that makes sense). My best are psych and surgery. I honestly haven't even reviewed surgery material at all because I just got off of it (and did really well on the shelf), but I think I will skim pestanas later today.
I think my plan for today is to skim the highlighted paragraphs in Beckman's and maybe skim case files OB, with some pestanas tonight if I have time.
My issue is that my weak areas in medicine don't follow much of a discernible pattern, with the exception of maybe optho and derm, which I'm not sure I have a great resource for. I was weak on ID but I watched the online med ed videos and thoroughly read and annotated the chapters in both mtb and SU2S2 on it, which I think helped a lot.
I'm alright at Peds bread and butter stuff. Had that somewhat recently and did well on the shelf. I think I could use some brush up on the esoteric stuff. I'm wondering if it's worth skimming through my BRS for that, only reading what I highlighted. I'm pretty selective in my highlighting and I think I could do it in like an hour or two, and would probably mostly be the esoteric stuff I'm looking for (D-B anemia, metabolic disorders, etc.)
Also, is there a good resource for neuro? I haven't had neuro yet and am sort of weak on it (though I think I've been improving in uworld on it).
Does this seem like a good plan? I also want to try to get as much uworld done as possible to improve my pacing and get rid of my maladaptive OCD testing behavior before test day.
