Hello everyone… Hope your preparations are going well

Hello everyone… Hope your preparations are going well… :slight_smile:
Alhamdulillah, by the grace of Allah swt, I cleared my Plab 1 in March '19 exam… A little about my journey so far… (sorry for the long post!)

I made up my mind for foreign medical license back in September 2018… with proper guidance from Dr. Naseer’ s and Road to UK blogs, I appeared in IELTS in December 2018 - and alhamdulillah, got the desired scores in that very attempt - I was immensely relieved as that was the step defined as the ‘main hurdle’ by both the blogs…

Then came PLAB1 - another hurdle for me, as I had lost touch with the basics and even clinical knowledge for the past 1 and a half year, - yes, during my internship as well, as my duties as an intern in my hospital included petty documentation stuff…!

I was VERY nervous and doubtful if i’ll be able to clear plab1 in just 2 months’ worth of preparation… But I gave it a shot anyways…

I downloaded all the stuff from files section of all the plab groups, got plabzilla in hard copy and began my prep…

Unfortunately, I didn’t know during the first three weeks into my preparation that ‘plabable existed’! So initially, I used to study each topic from OHCM/OHCS… That lead me with a miserable pace… And I had to reread many topics over and over again for comparison…

Via Facebook group, I finally got to know about plabable and its pdf form… So I experimented and studied GIT from plabable, followed by Khalid’s GIT… And it worked wonders! From then onwards, my preparation took a leap with warp speed!

Having heard by my seniors, that at least two revisions prior to exam were necessary, I designated 1 day solely for revision after every 5 days… I used to review my notes, which consisted of comparative polygons made out of plabable explanations, and reread the highlighted portion from OHCM… So by this constant revision, I was left with quite less material to look at during the last minute revision…

Ten days prior to the exam, I didn’t study any new material, as my brain was supersaturated with information. I reviewed the stuff, had subscribed to plabable 3 day revision course - which did help with the high yield material, but if one doesn’t wanna attend it, it’s perfectly fine either way…

For this exam, I didn’t have time to give 1st read to plabable’s Paediatrics, palliative care and general surgery.

My plabable mocks’ scores were all above 87% and lasted about 1.5 hours…

Anyways…

My advice would be as follows:

  1. Plabable subscription is THE most important tool for plab 1. Subscribe and summarize its explanations on your notebook. It would also come in handy during the last few days before the exam, as the website usually gets all down at that time.

  2. OHCM has an ethics section in it - wish I had known it before my exam! - so give it a read…

  3. The booklet that we get during the exam contains pictures other than radiographs & ECGs. So it would help if you guys googled the images of the clinical conditions on the go. I didn’t know about the booklet thing, nor about the pictures, so I wasted some time during the exam in figuring them out. Make your picture library…

  4. Try and incorporate ‘mini-revision’ sessions in your target list. Frequent revision is important for volatile topics.

  5. During the exam, don’t waste time in underlining the keywords /labs… I did that for the first few minutes and lagged behind by fifteen minutes (according to one minute per question rule). So practice retaining information and keywords mentally, and not rereading the question more than twice - at the most. This habit of ours leads to wastage of our precious time…!

  6. Practice skimming the info from the question - something that saved my neck during the last hour - I was left with about 80 questions!

  7. For pharma - katzung review summary tables to the rescue…

  8. Don’t waste your time deciding what edibles to take with you into the exam hall - you won’t get time to gobble them down… :stuck_out_tongue:

  9. As far as the samson notes are concerned, I did review them at the end of each unit, and apart from pulmo, no other unit was worth spending the time on.

  10. Be confident, determined, and pray a lottt!

Good luck people! :slight_smile: