Earlier this year
I passed step 1 with only three weeks of dedicated studying.
So here’s how I did it. At first
I tried to be very detailed and very thorough with everything
that I was learning. So
I was reading through first aid
and using a couple of different other resources
but I quickly realized that that was not gonna work
because it was simply just taking way too much time.
What I ended up doing, which I feel like worked really well
was using pathoma as my main study resource.
The book was a great review of pathology and physiology
and I really like the fact that he highlighted
all the key points that you needed to know.
I used Dirty Medicine’s USMLE Biochem Playlist,
Sketchy Micro for microbiology and antibiotics and then farm,
I sort of just like picked and chose different resources
for high yield systems.
Reddit was like my best friend during this period.
Whenever I didn’t know if something was high yield
and if it was worth my time studying,
I would basically just look it up to see what other people thought.
So for pharmacology,
high yield systems that I think would include like diabetes,
cardiovascular, renal,
autonomic
mechanisms of action of different antibiotics and psych medications.
Throughout this time
where I was going through the various pathoma chapters,
I also was doing uworld pretty much every day.
I would just add on the new pathoma system that I did to the uworld
Question blocks and then do between 40 to 80 questions per day.
If you’re trying to be efficient,
definitely start doing your practice problems right,
right away.
And don’t wait until you’re finished all your content review
because by the time you get to the end,
you’ll already have forgot what you Learned earlier.
And uworld is a great way to keep refreshing your mind
on the different systems that you’ve already went through.
If you’re starting to study earlier on,
king is definitely a great resource.
You can find his decks linked on Reddit.
I did some of his things here and there,
but I wasn’t really consistent with anything
just because I didn’t have enough time
except for I did do pathoma chapters 1 to 3,
like I mentioned, as well as all the sketchy micro cards.
I would highly, highly recommend doing that
because it’s so worth it to get those easy marks on the exam.
I also did the free 1:20 as well as NMB Form 31,
which is the most recent assessment that they’ve released.
I found that the real thing felt
very similar to that style of question
except for my question stems during my exam I thought were longer.
if you guys are someone who always struggles with running out of time,
I would definitely recommend practicing different question answering
strategies.
What I found worked really well for me was reading the question,
reading the answers and then going through the question A stem
and sometimes
you don’t even need to read the whole stem to answer the question
and that saved me a lot of time on my exam for my NMB e.
I scored in the mid 60s.
I know they say you should wait until you’re in the 70s
until you write but honestly
I was just out of time. I wanted to get it over with
and I wrote it the day before click trip started.
Happy to answer any questions.
Just comment them and I’ll get back to you.