Mess around trying to read First Aid before finding DIT Flail around stressed and do a day of UWorld microbio I ended up finishing only 60% of UWorld before I switched to doing a last quick half-pass through SketchyMedical, Pathoma and First Aid for the last 4 days. Once I knew the material I could actually answer questions without needing to look up every single thing. Once I got to the last two weeks I just did 80-120 UWorld questions per day. I ate all my meals while studying basically and took small 15 minute breaks here and there. I tried to fix that by stopping studying an hour before I went to bed but that and nothing else seemed to fix the issue so I just decided to keep studying every moment till going to bed.

I gave myself 9-10 hours to be in bed every night because most nights I was so amped up from stress I wouldn’t be able to sleep for at least an hour+. Finish UWorld block at 10:30pm (half the time I would have to finish the UWorld block and review the next day). Do one block of UWorld on Untimed Tutor subject mode (I felt like I was wasting my time when I did random and didn’t know most of the material yet) Finish DIT chapter (shorter chapters) around 5-8pm range. Do review of UWorld questions for 1 hour (I kept a fat word documents with new info I had learned from UWorld) Workout, make breakfast, shower immediately or be smelly half the day. So if I wanted to be lazy in bed it would let me still get some studying in. Goljan audios were literally my alarm clock. Once I finally got on an efficient schedule my days would look like this: Then I stopped studying around 8pm the night before the test. With about 4 days left I tried to review all of First Aid once more and got about 2/3 through. In the last week and a half I just did UWorld questions and stopped reviewing the UWorld word document where wrote down concepts I didn’t learn well before that point. I finished DIT/First Aid first pass (+the other material) about 2 weeks before my test date, meaning it took me about 6 weeks to get through DIT, First Aid, Pathoma, 60% of SketchyPharm, maybe 10% of UWorld, 90% of Goljan and about 1000 Anki cards. (See my review of each resource on at the end) At the same time I was mixing in Pathoma, SketchyPharm, Picmonic, Anki cards, Goljan (audio only) and a UWorld block with every subject I covered. Thank god for DIT, I wouldn’t have finished the First Aid material without it. I couldn’t even come close to matching other people’s study pace (both my classmates and people on the medical student forums) and I thought this was going to leave me absolutely screwed.Īfter struggling to read First Aid which was taking quite literally 10x as long as it was supposed to (according to every other students study schedule I saw, and based on the “average student speed” for First Aid listed on Cram Fighter), I started using Doctors in Training. My god I was stressed out during those first 2 weeks. Then afterwards I tried doing my first few UWorld blocks which would take me 6-8 hours each. (If you ever want to feel stressed out go on those forums… though they do offer some good advice sometimes.) I thought it was only going to take 10 hours to get through Sketchy Micro because that’s what someone said they did on one of those med forums. What ACTUALLY happened was that it took me about week and a half to get through Sketchy Micro because I would spend 20-30 minutes per video to write down every last detail they said in the video. My original plan was to get through all of SketchyMicro in like 2-3 days, finish SketchyPham in the same amount of time, get through First Aid in 2 weeks, and then do UWorld in 2 weeks and then do one week of review for a total of 6 weeks. I naturally am slow and intense with my studying… as such when other people could get through first aid in 2 weeks, it took me 6 weeks. I did NOT stay on schedule as I 1) gave myself too many materials to study and 2) I studied about 3x slower than I needed to.

Starting with 180-200 you can probably get 230-250. Still, I’m very proud of having jumped 53 points in a short period.įor those without context, starting with a 230 before your dedicated study period can probably get you to the 240-270 range in the dedicated period. Even though that’s a very solid score I still feel like I wish I had prepared more during the year to break the 250 mark. I figured I should write about it now while it’s still fresh.įor what it’s worth I got 243 and 249 on my last two practice tests (taken 2 weeks and 6 days before respectively), got 243 on the real thing, and I started with a 190 before the dedicated study period. I just took Step 1 yesterday after studying for 8 weeks.

Sketchy pharm videos online