Now that the American Board of Anesthesiology’s Basic Exam is over for CA-1s, I wanted to write about my experiences from the exam on Friday, June 12th.
I woke up around 5 AM, showered, and immediately started watching highlights from the previous night’s NBA Finals game (I fell asleep at halftime). After some programming, I crammed some important equations for the exam and decided to eat my “breakfast”… consisting of cookies and a protein shake. Just… don’t ask. 😀
I arrived 45 minutes early to the test center, and they let me get situated in the exam room a little earlier than the scheduled start time of 12:30 PM. My timing was broken down as follows:
- Tutorial (10 minutes – skipped that)
- 125 multiple choice questions (2 hours 20 minutes permitted, took a little more than an hour)
- Break (20 minutes – skipped that)
- 125 multiple choice questions (2 hours 20 minutes permitted, used half the time)
This was easily the shortest exam I took at Prometric, but nevertheless, it was GREAT to be done!
Overall, the exam was very manageable and really made me realize how much I learned in the last year of clinical anesthesiology. I felt very well prepared with the question banks I used and our didactic curriculum. Hopefully this serves as a rite-of-passage for my upcoming CA-2 year which is definitely going to bring its own challenges.
Unfortunately, now I’m working every day for the rest of the month and starting a stint of q2 call this week. Can’t win ’em all!
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