Overview
I put myself in the under-prepared category because I didn’t feel like I was anywhere near ready to pass Step 1 at the beginning of dedicated, especially having used almost exclusively in-house materials for pre-clinical (no 3rd party for me except Sketchy Micro). However, I was confident that I had built enough of the skills to be able to pass during dedicated.
I took 6 weeks for dedicated, daily schedule being pretty much: workout -> Anki reviews -> watch Pathoma videos for one chapter/day* -> one block of 40 UWorld questions -> review those -> lunch -> second block of 40Q -> review -> dinner -> evenings for Sketchy or Anki or whatever miscellaneous resources to hammer in certain concepts
In retrospect, I would have scrapped Pathoma videos almost entirely. I think chapters 1-3 are still helpful in the early days of dedicated, but other than that, I don’t think there’s any need to do a head-to-toe review of anything. I heard this advice myself before dedicated, and still ignored it because I felt like my content foundation was weak. Stop that! The benefit of consistently doing UWorld blocks of a random 40Qs is that as you do more, you will begin to see patterns of question-writing and of content–THAT is the ‘HY’ material.
So, since hindsight is 20/20, my ideal schedule would have been:
- Morning Anki
- 1 hr of 40Q block – RANDOM
- 2-3 hr to review it, depending on your pace and depth of review 1 hr lunch
- 1 hr 40Q block – RANDOM 2-3 hr review
- 1 hr dinner
- Still finish the evening with Anki, Sketchy, etc.
Also, when I reviewed my UWorld and NBMEs, yeah there are tags in AnKing to mass unsuspend every single card that relates to those questions–I do not recommend using that. You can start there, but I highly recommend triaging the cards you unsuspend. Unsuspend only cards that target the actual reason you got it wrong. Sometimes I had to search key words in the main AnKing deck to find cards that actually targeted the info my brain was missing.
Get your mindset right:
- Study for Step 1 as if it’s still scored–if you shoot for the stars (100%!), you’ll probably still end up passing if you falter a little bit.
- Trust your NBME scores going into the exam. That data is way better at predicting how you’re going to do than your subjective, stressed out, feelings of it all
- Think of test day as a celebration! This is your time to show off all that you have learned during this time. You think Tom Brady got nervous before his Super Bowls? He probably was excited to go win! That’s you now. This is your Super Bowl
Best of luck, and feel free to reach out if I can help with anything.