Worth it to save class materials for boards?

[Brian Griffin]

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Just curious - For those of you who have taken Step I or who are about to take it soon, is it worthwhile to hang onto class materials from 1st and 2nd year to use as study aids (such as syllabi or class notes)? Or do these materials tend to be a little too overwhelming and people mostly just stick to review books?

 

[azzarah]

I throw out all my class notes as soon as I know i've passed the test. For step 1 I only used First Aid, hope this helps.

 

[Hard24Get]

Just curious - For those of you who have taken Step I or who are about to take it soon, is it worthwhile to hang onto class materials from 1st and 2nd year to use as study aids (such as syllabi or class notes)? Or do these materials tend to be a little too overwhelming and people mostly just stick to review books?

I saved all mine thinking I would use them during boards prep or clinics and then threw them out like azzarah did - only years later! What a waste of space! 😳 I did, however, keep and use my old review books from classes (which were mainly BRS-type stuff anyway).

If your profs are anything like mine, most of their notes consist of what THEY think is most interesting, not necessarily the highest yield stuff for boards and clinics. Toss 'em, just make sure to use a recycle bin...

 

[Blade28]

I threw out all my MSI and MSII notes towards the end of my third year.

 

[cdql]

So what would you recommend using to review for the boards?

I'm guessing BRS series books, First Aid, and then Kaplan's question bank?

 

[mlw03]

i'm studying for the boards right now and i'm definately referring back to my old notes. i realize i'm in the minority, but i prefer to work with diagrams i'm familiar with already, so i'm finding myself referring back to lectures on the topic when i come across something in first aid that i'm not remembering.

if you were to review everything from your first two years again that'd be overwhelming, but as a quick example, when i wanted to review the visual pathway that you need to figure out where a lesion is based on a patient's visual field deficit, i found my old notes to have more detail and it was more familiar to me than was the diagram in first aid.

 

[njbmd]

Hi there,
I kept things like summary sheets and short-cut sheets. You probably will not have the time to go back though a course syllabus as you review for Step I. It was nice to have my Micro summarys and my wonderful Pathology summary sheets. I even used my Path summaries for USMLE Step II as they are great especially for the weeding through endocrine and rheumatological diseases. I still use my cancer sheets.

njbmd 🙂

 

[angel80]

I kept mine, thinking that they would one day come in handy. I didn't use them for Step 1. During third year, if I ever needed to look anything up, it was so much easier to do so in a textbook or online, than to dig out old notes and try to figure out where the information would be. After 3rd year, I tossed them all out.

 

[mdphd2b]

Hi there,
I kept things like summary sheets and short-cut sheets. You probably will not have the time to go back though a course syllabus as you review for Step I. It was nice to have my Micro summarys and my wonderful Pathology summary sheets. I even used my Path summaries for USMLE Step II as they are great especially for the weeding through endocrine and rheumatological diseases. I still use my cancer sheets.

njbmd 🙂

Yeah, me too! I kept all the "study sheets" I had made in a separate binder. These had multi-colored renditions which I made in MS1 and MS2--far better than the basic line drawings in First Aid, for things like the optic lesions, brachial plexus, cardiac cycle, nephron, plus some path/bugs/drugs--I sure didn't want to re-make all that for the boards 😱

Syllabi were good for collecting one thing: DUST

 

[burntcrispy]

So what would you recommend using to review for the boards?

I'm guessing BRS series books, First Aid, and then Kaplan's question bank?

That's pretty much what I used and seems to be the norm. I only used BRS path and phys, FA, Micor Made Rediculously Simple, and Q bank. I would go through FA and read through the same material in BRS and fill in the margins of FA with some of the extra BRS info. After that I just stuck with memorizing the FA and doing Q bank qustions.

The main thing seemed to be to memorize pretty much all of the info in FA. I truely believe that if you memorized FA only you should get >230 on step 1.

Good luck on Step 1 guys.

 

[cdql]

That's pretty much what I used and seems to be the norm. I only used BRS path and phys, FA, Micor Made Rediculously Simple, and Q bank. I would go through FA and read through the same material in BRS and fill in the margins of FA with some of the extra BRS info. After that I just stuck with memorizing the FA and doing Q bank qustions.

The main thing seemed to be to memorize pretty much all of the info in FA. I truely believe that if you memorized FA only you should get >230 on step 1.

Good luck on Step 1 guys.

Awesome! Thanks!

I'm just a 1st year but I have a suitcases worth of materials already! (I stupidly bought many books for anatomy. It was our first class and the school recommended 8 books for it!)

Guess I can chuck the old stuff and see if I can sell those books to a poor unsuspecting soon to be MS1 🙂

 

[Arctic Char]

i guess i am the only one out there who wishes textbooks still came with the boring - yet distinguished looking - canvas covers? i like to collect books, but all these fancy colors give them a sort of elementary school look to them. especially titles like "made ridiculously simple" . . . we'll keep that one out of eye view of the patients in my office.

ahhhh . . . basking in the warmth of pretensiousness

 

[inked_caduceus]

I know I probably won't use them to review, but I know I'm keeping everything until the end of second year, just to see how tall the damn pile can get!

I figure I'm up to a good three feet already. 1200+ pages of physio notes can do that.

 

[Sohalia]

The official class notes, notes I took myself, power points--all of it was worthless. My preclinical year was 01-02 and I took step 1 4/05. I used FA, brs path, brs phys, kaplan step 1 books, qbank, neuroanat made rid simple, and a few other things. I still have all that school cr*p though. I really need to throw it away. Just took step 2 ck and used blueprints, FA, usmleworld, crush, pretest medicine, maybe a few other things.