You may feel that the first year of medical school is difficult enough without considering how you might be preparing for Step 1 of the USMLE. However, as anyone who has scored well on the exam can tell you, the foundation for their success began long before their dedicated study period.
The most successful ways to prepare, however, are not what you would expect, and are certainly not what you have been told by many of your seniors.
Here, I go through six frequently asked questions by first year medical students about how to best prepare for Step 1 during their first year, during the summer between first and second year of medical school, and in the period leading up to their dedicated study period. While some of these questions pertain specifically to first years, many of them are applicable to both first and second years, including those in their dedicated study period.
1) When should I start studying? I know many second years in my school say not to start too early because we will forget the information we study by the time it gets closer to crunch time, however, from reading your articles several times, something tells me that would NOT be your advice.
This is a very loaded question. The advice that you are hearing from second years is very common, and stems from the belief that anything that you learn now, you’ll forget. As you well know, that is not true, when you have the powers of spaced repetition behind you, along with the Yousmle.com Step 1 Anki cards that you purchased, which will help you to address the most common weakness is that students have in their preparations for the USMLEs.
My advice is that you don’t view studying for Step 1 as separate from studying for your classes. Regardless of the school, I found that there is a lot of overlap between class material and USMLE material than most people are willing to admit. The key is to recognize that most schools are testing you on rote memorization, and facts, while Step 1 will be testing you on the integration and application of information. The best news is that even though your school is presenting most likely disjointed information, you can still learn the pathogenesis to presentation behind the ideas, first by starting with the Yousmle.com Step 1 Anki cards that you have, and by supplementing it with other resources that you have available to you. I found it much more important than the information that is presented to you in medical school is your own approach and attitude towards your learning.
2) Maybe you can tell us how to efficiently balance studying for step using anki while doing our coursework at the same time, in a reasonable way such that we don’t fall behind in our classwork because we are devoting too much time reviewing flashcards that are high yield for step.
This is one of the most difficult questions to answer. Most people that attempt to use spaced repetition of any kind, particularly any service or deck that starts with tens of thousands of cards, typically is quickly overwhelmed during their preclinical years, before they begin studying for Step 1. The reasons are many, but two of the main ones are that they treat their studying for USMLE as separate from their school studying, and they are either making or using too many cards.
First, as mentioned previously, I would treat your studying for school as part and parcel with your USMLE preparation. Second, focus on higher quality cards, like the ones that you have been finding in the Yousmle.com Anki decks, rather than cards that take small amounts of information in each card, but have lots of individual cards. Decks that force you to memorize a lot of discrete facts will be more difficult for long-term attention, but they will also cause you to create an unnecessary number of cards.
Read full article at: https://www.yousmle.com/first-year-medical-school-usmle-step-1-studying/
Related article: USMLE Step 1 Course
The most successful ways to prepare, however, are not what you would expect, and are certainly not what you have been told by many of your seniors.
Here, I go through six frequently asked questions by first year medical students about how to best prepare for Step 1 during their first year, during the summer between first and second year of medical school, and in the period leading up to their dedicated study period. While some of these questions pertain specifically to first years, many of them are applicable to both first and second years, including those in their dedicated study period.
1) When should I start studying? I know many second years in my school say not to start too early because we will forget the information we study by the time it gets closer to crunch time, however, from reading your articles several times, something tells me that would NOT be your advice.
This is a very loaded question. The advice that you are hearing from second years is very common, and stems from the belief that anything that you learn now, you’ll forget. As you well know, that is not true, when you have the powers of spaced repetition behind you, along with the Yousmle.com Step 1 Anki cards that you purchased, which will help you to address the most common weakness is that students have in their preparations for the USMLEs.
My advice is that you don’t view studying for Step 1 as separate from studying for your classes. Regardless of the school, I found that there is a lot of overlap between class material and USMLE material than most people are willing to admit. The key is to recognize that most schools are testing you on rote memorization, and facts, while Step 1 will be testing you on the integration and application of information. The best news is that even though your school is presenting most likely disjointed information, you can still learn the pathogenesis to presentation behind the ideas, first by starting with the Yousmle.com Step 1 Anki cards that you have, and by supplementing it with other resources that you have available to you. I found it much more important than the information that is presented to you in medical school is your own approach and attitude towards your learning.
2) Maybe you can tell us how to efficiently balance studying for step using anki while doing our coursework at the same time, in a reasonable way such that we don’t fall behind in our classwork because we are devoting too much time reviewing flashcards that are high yield for step.
This is one of the most difficult questions to answer. Most people that attempt to use spaced repetition of any kind, particularly any service or deck that starts with tens of thousands of cards, typically is quickly overwhelmed during their preclinical years, before they begin studying for Step 1. The reasons are many, but two of the main ones are that they treat their studying for USMLE as separate from their school studying, and they are either making or using too many cards.
First, as mentioned previously, I would treat your studying for school as part and parcel with your USMLE preparation. Second, focus on higher quality cards, like the ones that you have been finding in the Yousmle.com Anki decks, rather than cards that take small amounts of information in each card, but have lots of individual cards. Decks that force you to memorize a lot of discrete facts will be more difficult for long-term attention, but they will also cause you to create an unnecessary number of cards.
Read full article at: https://www.yousmle.com/first-year-medical-school-usmle-step-1-studying/
Related article: USMLE Step 1 Course
No comments:
Post a Comment