Hi! I'm on my first rotation and was wondering what are good video resources to do content review and sort of learn all the material for rotations and Step 2? Mangement and diagnoses are difficult for me as well as treatment, so anything would be helpful.
Hi everyone! I just got the P earlier today, and I am elated but wanted to share my journey!
sorry if this is long/drawn out! tl;dr take as much time as you need to feel confident and don't be afraid to stop doing whatever everyone else is doing and take a sec to recalibrate yourself!
Prior to dedicated, I had scored a 59% on my school CBSE and already did a first pass of Pathoma and DirtyMed biochem
I took a longer period of dedicated (around 7 weeks) and pushed my exam back as much as I possibly could. The first month, I was doing UWorld questions as recommended and just putting my incorrects in a spreadsheet or in a notebook and try to do Anki of incorrects, but I found my scores were stagnant (low-mid 60s), and this led to a LOT of anxiety! I wasn't getting my scores to where I needed them to be to feel confident, since I was aiming for a 70+, and I was studying all the time. I didn't really need a ton of breaks because I wasn't feeling burnt out and I didn't set a hard cut-off time every day. I would still make time to watch TV or do other things at home, but other than that, I was truly studying most of the time (which probably let to my plateau). My UWorld scores also hit a plateau, and I was pulling 40-50s on blocks and sometimes 60s.
Around the beginning of week 4 I switched up my routine and spent that entire week doing pure content review using Bootcamp. I did this for heavy topics such as immuno, heme/onc, repro, endo, micro and GI. I felt extremely comfortable with other topics and for MSK I just used that 100-page doc floating around. Instead of doing mixed blocks, I switched to purely focused blocks, and my averages did go up to around 80s. Once I finished the content review, I felt like this was where my dedicated period really started to click and pick up. I did more questions and felt my averages were improving and I simplified my anki to be Duke's Pathoma + Sketchy Pharm/Micro + whatever HY Bootcamp topics I wanted to be more in depth about (leukemias, lymphomas, neurocutaneous disorders, biochem, etc).
I think the biggest thing that changed the game for me was the way I reviewed my NBME's. I made a spreadsheet with columns for each NBME and went through every single question and kind of made one-liners for every answer choice. If I were unfamiliar with something or confused, I highlighted or bolded it. This would help me review what topics I was consistently missing, but also allow me to see side by side what topics are showing up on multiple NBME's, so I could make sure to know those things. A lot of the NBME's had similar flavors of topics so it really helped me pick what was super relevant.
The exam was super long, but felt like it went by super fast. As someone who usually had a decent amount of time left during NBME's, I felt like I was fighting for my life to finish. On my exam, it felt like everything was fair game, and I really couldn't pick out super experimental questions, which made it more terrifying in my opinion. As for breaks, I felt the adrenaline really kept me going, so I ended up doing blocks 1 and 2 back to back and then 3 and 4 back to back vs on NBMEs I took a 5-minute break after each block.