Its been almost a month since my last post; I think that’s the longest I’ve gone without an update since starting this blog. :shock: My life has been a balance between residency interviews and studying for USMLE Step 2 CK as of late. I fell ill two weeks ago and…
With only one rotation left in medical school (my internal medicine sub-internship in January 2013), I have the next few months to attend to my residency interviews and extracurriculars. That being said, I wanted to first knock Step 2 CK out at some point in late October. After perusing the…
Per the USMLE website, Step 2 Clinical Skills (CS) “uses standardized patients to test medical students and graduates on their ability to gather information from patients, perform physical examinations, and communicate their findings to patients and colleagues.” Yeah, and it’s a pass/fail exam which costs over $1,100 and is offered…
The night before the exam, I slept a total of 2-3 hours. After midnight, my mind was racing with everything I learned over the last few weeks. It’s like I was consciously consolidating information; my heart was racing and I had a horrible headache. Why my brain chose to sacrifice…
Tomorrow I’ll be taking the most important exam of my life to date – the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) Step 1. I’ve spent countless hours reading and completed thousands of practice questions, yet there’s an underlying sense of eustress (see what I did there… using my behavioral science)…
Over the last 48 hours, I’ve completed UWorld’s SA #2 and NBME #7, scoring equivalent scores of 265 and 259, respectively. While I’m humbled by these results, the real exam is 75% longer than any of the practices I’ve done, so endurance might become an issue on test day.
At this point, I’ve gone through all 2090 USMLE World questions, UWorld’s Self Assessment #1 (around 200 questions), over 1000 NBME questions, 300 questions from Kaplan’s free Qbank, the 138 questions from the USMLE website, and any random questions I can find on forums across the Internet. With only eight…
Between getting the house ready for my grandmother to visit and the NBA All Star festivities, today was a lax day in terms of studying. I’ve reached the point where I’m now browsing the Internet looking for insightful information regarding USMLE Step 1, but it seems that the consensus is to just…
This evening was a milestone in my studying – I finished the 2090 questions in USMLE World’s Step 1 question bank. Now it’s 4am, and I’m struggling to get through endocrinology in First Aid. Most of my colleagues have already finished Step 1 or will be taking it in the…
The last two days of studying have been very productive but awfully frustrating. Biochemistry and microbiology are two courses which we covered in medical school (four months of microbio, at that), but it’s so much wrought memorization that it’s easy to often mix things up… especially when terms like rubella,…