What would you do differently?

[underdoggg]

HI, if you guys had to retake the exam for any reason, what would you do differently? Is there any way you would change your approach to step 1?

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[JustBreathe]

I would worry less about what everyone else is doing and focus on what I know works for me.

 

[UditNarayan]

i wouldnt do much differently. if anything, i would try to make more time to do the Robbins review of path book, which I never got around to doing at all. during school, i solely studied from scribe notes (my school has a scribe service that you can subscribe to). i did not use any textbooks (thats right, did not even look at Robbins) or ancillary sources, but focused my efforts on understanding the things presented in lectures. if i could do anything differently, it would just be to add robbins review of path questions bc that way, it would give me a slightly better grounding in path and making the diagnosis. overall tho, i chose resources that i knew would work for me after going thru many of the SDN posts before figuring out my schedule...

 

[McMD]

I'd copy some of the relevant stuff from FA (pharm, biochem and micro) and burn the rest of the book. Oh, and I wouldn't skip perineal anatomy this time around...in fact, I'd probably spend TWO DAYS on just perineal anatomy!!!! (I had up to 20 anatomy questions and most were perineal anatomy).

 

[DragonWell]

I wish I would have spent more time on biostats/epi. I don't think the questions were particularly hard, but we literally had an hour of class on this , and undergrad stats was many years ago. I tried to memorize all the formulas, but I just didn't spend enough time doing practice questions to feel comfortable applying the info during the test. UWorld was good, but seemed to be testing some subtler points, which didn't help that much since I lacked a good foundation in the basics. Even though I got a "*" in behavioral science, these were the questions I felt least prepared for.

 

[oreosandsake]

I started studying too early (january, for early june exam)

studied way too in depth (don't forget you're prepping for step 1, not step 2)

ex: focused too much on specific pathology i.e. all the different types of breast cancer, characteristics, etc in Rapid review (phyllodes vs DCIS, etc) when all they really seemed to care about were basic concepts regarding cancer.

read too much SDN and thought about the 20 book long lists that SDNer's use as their "recommended book list"