Hi everybody,
I am Zaroon Haider Khan, student of final year MBBS at CMH
Lahore Medical College. Mostly a below average student, only producing good
when necessary xD. Mostly gulping huge
volumes of knowledge in the last minutes. Someone who when studying always
looks for shortcuts and always thinks about barely passing the exams, since I
have a life and I want to focus on that too. On step 1 Alhumdulillah I was able
to manage a 230s which to me is a quite comfortable place to be in.
I will write shortly about the gold standard method of step
1 as I will be talking more about the bad decisions we make and then bad
results we see.
Standard Step 1 route
Time duration as a
medical student: 12 months to 18 months.
Time duration as a
graduate with lot of free time at hand: 9 months to 12 months
Time duration when it
becomes pass-fails: 6 months
Sources:
1. Medical school curriculum. When in medical
school I would highly recommend studying course books thoroughly. Baseline
knowledge and testing your studying methods in college exams will help navigate
you to right studying strategies. Pick course books that align with usmle path.
For example KLM for anatomy, just an example see what suits you best.
2. Kaplan: mostly bnb has taken over it and it’s
kind of outdated now and to me it’s a waste of time especially when its pass
fail now.
3. BNB: solidifies your baseline knowledge.
Complete the lacking concepts in FA.
4. First aid:
gold standard and bible of step 1 as everybody would say. bnb and
questions banks are keys to unlock and bridge the concepts written in here.
5. Questions banks: essence of step 1, method
to ace an American board exam, points out the highest yield concepts, keep you
intrigued and connected, tool to gauge your day to day and overall performance.
6. Anki: do anatomy shelf-notes (regret not
doing it)
7. Ethics:
100 cases by Conrad, uworld, Rx and amboss.
8. Sketchy: I will kiss the sketchy team when
I meet them. This man tells you that your college microbiology professor is a
villain in the story and you should be having a rave at the time when
microbiology class happens.
First year and second
year
Just do whatever you are doing, wholeheartedly. Go through
as much syllabus as possible. Know as many things as possible. Pick usmle-oriented
books and make a good grip of whatever you are studying. Baseline knowledge do
wonders. Do BNB for physiology and biochemistry. You can enjoy first two years
if you wish.
Third year
This is where you should start inculcating step 1 studies
among your college studies. SET A TARGET SCORE IN YOUR MIND. Do pharmacology
from Kaplan, it was definitely helpful. It’s my bad luck that I didn’t like
sketchy at first and did micro from levinson and came to sketchy in fourth year
when Levinson couldn’t help me there. Do sketchy pharm if you can but it’s a
lot. Do general pathology from Robbins but do Pathoma first 7 chapters here and
if possible finish pathoma as well, you have a lot of time in third and fourth
year.
This way you can pass the proff without even actually
studying and worrying for it. Honestly don’t study for third year, study
subjects of third year from step 1 course instead :D
Fourth year
Don’t study for it again and follow your step1 path. Your
step 1 knowledge will help you pass 4th year pathology proff. I
directly started doing Uworld and I still regret starting it late because I was
6 months into my 4th year when I started it. Start a question bank
somewhere in your 3rd year. Don’t come to me telling me it’s not
doable. xD
Final year
Take step 1.
Took my exam on sept
08, 2021
CONTACT RECENT
EXAMINEES: stay in touch with all
recent examinees. Ask them regardless of your level of friendship with them.
You have no idea who’s technique might help you one day. Make a few your mentors,
learn from their experiences.
MY PURPOSE FOR WRITING THIS WRITE-UP
STARTS HERE
Why am I writing
this?
I am writing this because I see there is a bias on the
internet about step 1 journey. We get to see a lot of write ups about the
people whose first nbme score is a big hit-off and so are the scores and people
who get average or low scores don’t post much about their experience, so when
someone with low nbme score tries to find a way out of bad nbme score loop, he
doesn’t have much to see around. Also it gives you depression and anxiety in a
way when everybody started off with high nbme and you re the one sitting in
absolutely wrecked ship. This makes you believe that step 1 Is something not
for you and you start questioning your own capabilities. You tell yourself what
a blunder you have made opting for this journey and the fear of losing step 1
haunts you. And this all is natural to feel about because you don’t have many experiences
in mind about the people who got out of this loop because of the bias I
mentioned above. I don’t think many people know that average first nbme score
in the US according to stats is 192 or somewhere around that.
After first round of
uworld revise whatever you have in your book for one month.
So what to do about
low nbme loop?
It’s about practice, patience,
perseverance and an attacking mindset. Don’t let it take over you because it
can.
1. There
are two ways to go about this: read FA and uworld annotations, which is pretty
low yield way to do as you can confirm it from the sections of First aid book
which tells you about methods to approach this test and from high yield to low
yield approaches. Keep memorizing and rereading the things in
the book and annotations and I guarantee you that your scores won’t even budge
by a few millimeters.
2. Questions, questions and questions. Can’t
stress about this thing much. You should
be aiming at doing around 7000-10000 questions. I know people who did like Rx,
Uworld and Amboss and then many nbmes and reviewed them all. It’s like a game.
You start off by doing really bad. Initially, it’s a disaster when it comes to
percentages. What matters is that your scores curves should have an upward
trend and you should be able to finish a section somewhere around 70-80 percent
on first pass. For second pass it should
be in 90s and the order should be first Uworld 1st pass then 1400
amboss 234 or 345 hammer questions from amboss and then Uworld 2nd
pass.
3. Questions polish you and offer your
preparation of many months a perfect finishing touch.
4. In
your second round. Do 100 questions with thorough review daily. All timed all
random. 100 100 100 a day would be like
3000 questions in 30 days and that has a huge impact at the end. If possible,
do 120 or 150 each day. Its interactive, touches all corners in your brain
and pretty intriguing. Keep doing it till you see yourself up the racks where
you want your scores to be in. This
helps you go through max syllabus in minimum time. It gives you idea of your progress on day to day basis. Combined with
nbmes every weekend you can actually gauge your performance on weekly basis.
5. Start nbmes 2 months out. Start with uwsa1
and take it seriously since a bad first nbme crushes all your dreams in a blink
of an eye plus uwsa1 plays the role of a mother in this situation.
6. Keep 5 days for the old offline good nbmes.
Do them as a home work too . See why you got them wrong. Do ten if possible.
They are questions too, different angle to look at the same topic and highest
yield topics since nbme is the board that makes your step 1 exam.
7. I know a guy who got really low on uwsa2
but after spending one month on questions he was able to take his score up by
40 points.
I know this post won’t be any helpful
one month from now but what you learn from step 1 helps you in step2ck process
because the same methodology applies there also half of the stems requires
understanding from step 1.
CONCLUSION: PRACTICE QUESTIONS TILL
YOU ARE IN A COMFORTABLE RANGE.
Last few days before the exam
Uwsa 2 and
free120 are your final exams, after them just revise weak topics. See things
that you would forget most. Do pathoma first 3 chapters and relax you got this
exam. Exam is easy or at least doable after all you have gone through.
Please contact all your seniors or
friends who have taken this exam without any hesitation.
Contact me at zaroonhaider968@gmail.com
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