Hey everyone, when I get a bit of free time I'll make a more comprehensive post/video. But just a few tips

Hey everyone, when I get a bit of free time I’ll make a more comprehensive post/video. But just a few tips.

  1. Keep fighting the good fight. I know how taxing this whole thing can be on your mental health, let alone the shit people also have going on in their personal lives on top of it. Stay strong.

  2. Don’t overinterpret QBank scores, UWSAs and NBMEs. I had good scores on these, but honestly I didn’t give a flying fuck about the scores. I knew from step 1 that it didn’t really matter that much aside from giving a rough guide of my strengths and weaknesses. Keep working. I 100% get the temptation to look at scores and people will say “UWSA is predictive within X points”. Everyone wants to feel like they are progressing. But this is something I learnt from compared to my Step 1 prep, where I overanalysed everything. In that time you’re going through posts, reddit, google, whatever, you can use that instead to knock off some flashcards. The USMLE is a game of fine margins sometimes, you need to be as ruthless with your time as possible where you can (not saying I prepared perfectly by any means, I made mistakes, but I did a better prep compared to my Step 1). There was almost a 30 point difference for me in terms of NBME 7 and 8 for instance, completely fucking useless in that sense. What counts is your recall

  3. Use Anki. It blows my mind that people don’t use this. I get one of the reasons, some of you are overwhelmed because you see flashcards pop up that you don’t recognise because you haven’t covered the content yet. I felt like this and ditched anki for Step 1. It was one of my biggest regrets. I scored 258 on Step 1, but I can feel the difference in my recall and confidence by using Anki this time around. This shit is free, use it.

  4. The test was difficult. Like some unbelievably weird shit came up haha. I didn’t think I’d score this, I was hoping for 270+ but I thought it was just a pipe dream. I was just hoping to better my Step 1 score and I did a lot of work to put myself in the best possible position to do so. It wasn’t a solo journey though, definitely had some help here and there with people clarifying concepts for me, and to those people I say thanks!

  5. Don’t forget to have a laugh every now and then. So important for your psychology and mental wellbeing.