So I took Step I on June 15, 2009 and I must admit that it was a cute little quiz; hopefully Step II will be more of a challenge. LOL, it would be nice to talk like that, but in reality Step I was by far the “test of the year.” It certainly lived up to its reputation of being the hardest test that you will ever take in your medical training. I had heard of Step I’s reputation before I started my first year of medical school, so I knew that I needed to have a plan of attack before I started my second year of medical school. I started researching every aspect of what the test would be like by visiting popular sites like firstaidteam.com, Student Doctor Forums, etc. The most important thing I learned from my research was that I needed to formulate a plan that fit MY learning style. All because someone scored a 255 on Step 1 with their plan, it didn’t mean that their plan would even help me break a 185. So I read the study plans of other medical students and formulated my own plan.

My plan was to choose a couple of solid resources and know them cold; the resources I chose were a commercial question bank, First Aid, BRS Pathology, and Medical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple. I also learned from my research that nothing takes the place of learning the material well when you are actually in school, so I decided to utilize my core resources throughout the school year as I learned my school material. My school taught us everything through systems, so after we were completely done with the cardiovascular system, I would read through the cardiovascular section in First Aid. After I read through that First Aid section, then I created tests in qbank based on cardiovascular system only; I did these questions untimed and on tutor mode so that I could read the explanation for every question whether I got it right or wrong. If there was an explanation that I didn’t know or that was explained better in qbank then I typed it up in a Word document (having 2 monitors or running qbank inside VMWare Fusion on a Mac makes it easier to do this). Now of course it wouldn’t make much sense to type up facts that I didn’t know unless I planned to incorporate it into First Aid. So actually as soon as I bought my copy of First Aid I took it to Fedex Kinkos and got the book unbound and 3-hole punched for like $40 as you can see below:

This modification to my First Aid book allowed me to organize my typed qbank notes according to the corresponding First Aid section or add helpful pictures and diagrams that I found on the web. Like I said before, this may not work for everyone but it really worked for me and aided me in learning the info in First Aid.

So throughout the school year I had been reading the sections in First Aid and doing the qbank questions as the material was covered in class. My overall goal was to read First Aid at least three times before I took the beast; I reached my goal for all but five sections in First Aid. A lot of my classmates couldn’t believe that I wasn’t reading Rapid Review Pathology by Goljan, but the style of the book just didn’t work with my learning style; also I felt that by reading all the explanations in qbank that I would more than cover the pathology that I needed to know for the test in addition to what I was learning in BRS Pathology.

When the big test day came I actually was able to get a good night of rest, which I think is really important because all the practice tests you take from qbank or from NBME are 4 hours, which is hard enough, but the real 8-hour test can really test your endurance. I arrived at the Prometric center at about 7:30 a.m. and the directors there gave me my locker where I put all my belongings. I walked in to the computer room and started my test, wondering how well my studying prepared me for the real thing. While I was taking the test, all I could think was that this test had questions that were overall much harder than what I had seen in the 2,035 qbank questions. Of course there were really easy questions but most of them required me to really think through what was being presented and chose the correct answer out of the 2 choices that I always seemed to be left with after crossing out the other choices. At times I got flustered because I felt like I was doing horribly and at other times I smiled because I knew I nailed a string of questions. When I walked out of the test I honestly had no idea how I did and until my scores come back on July 15 I’ll be keeping myself busy trying not to think about it. Overall I believe I did my best and whatever score that gets me I’ll work with it.