A couple of reminders for everyone as this group helped me a lot during my early prep

Hey!

I took my exam recently and wanted to post here a couple of reminders for everyone as this group helped me a lot during my early prep.

I scored 251.

My totall prep time was around 7 months. I never did Kaplan except Kaplan pharma (that French guy is amazing). I went over FA 5 times. I think this is the most crucial point I have to tell everybody. You HAVE TO know FA like the back of your hand, even the info they provide in brackets.My exam was 90% FA. Not pure factual questions but rather things that you will have to connect to each other. While you are going through FA for the 2nd time, take your time, don’t read it like a book, stop, think and prepare questions on how to integrate different chapters. If there is an image of a disease, google different presentations. Don’t skip this, you will be sorry later.

I did Uworld random timed everyday, one block and I took notes in a seperate notebook. I re-read that notebook 2 times. I did not do a complete 2nd round on UW because I knew what were my weak points so I rather focused on those. This is I think is the biggest mistake people do. Doing UW a lot of times. Memorisation of UW questions will get you nowhere in Step 1, be careful and don’t fall into that trap.

I did Pathoma once. It was okay.

I have to tell you one thing tho, I was one of the best students in my year and had pretty good basics. I was an anatomy TA for 3 years which helped me tons because 30% was anatomy in my exam.

I never studied more than 5 hours a day. But when I did study, I did not zone out, cry, write here posts that I am depressed. If my plan was to do the genetics parts of biochem that day, I made sure I smashed it. I understood that not the hours you study but the quality of what you do matters in the end.

Get a study partner once you feel comfortable with the material and question each other, this was one of the best ways to reinforce knowledge for me.

My NBME scores were as low as 225 when I began studying, as I studied, it went up to 245-255. The most predictive NBME was 18 in which I scored 250.

Good luck studying! And please do not send me friend requests