Hi Guys!! Hope everyone is working hard to achieve their dream score. I got my Step 1 score two days back and though to discuss it with you guys.
So I am an old graduate (2012) and have been working as a CMO at AIIMS jodhpur. I had been trying for PG in India but no success, I was getting pathology/surgery/pharm but couldn’t get Medicine, so I decided to pursue USMLE, and without guidance it was so tough to even figure out how should I start and what should use to excel step 1.
So after talking to many people (Non US IMG IM residents) in the US I narrowed down my resources to following:
- First Aid: You can’t just read FA, It was very frustrating for me in the beginning since I can’t recall most of the small details. It is very condensed and it has everything you need to know for this exam. So before you start first aid use other resources to annotate your FA and add everything you need to understand every single detail on this book. So I literally took 2 years to figure this out (with other responsibilities yes it may take this long). but eventually once my FA was annotated which took 6 months I didn’t refer anything at the end. I gave it 4 rounds and memorized every single word on that book.
- Boards&Beyond: Forget DIT, Kaplan or anything available on USMLE prep market, Dr. Ryan is god!!! So being from India I had no idea about this resource, but when I started using it there was no turning back. FA finally made so much sense. I annotated my entire book using this single resource. Even questions after every video they are step 1 style with beautiful explanations. SO please use this to annotate your FA
- Pathoma: Dr Sattar make pathology so easy and interesting. It will clean your basics and pathology won’t be a problem anymore. I used pathoma once, annotated everything from pathoma to FA so that I have only one book to go through. If anything didn’t make any sense here then go to BnB and you will fall in love with Dr. Ryan all over again.
- Uworld and NBME: Use Uowrld for questions and learning, do them again and again, Annotate your FA again from Uworld explanation, and give at least 2 rounds. Step 1 was exactly like taking Uworld modules. Use NBME for evaluation and work on your weaker areas. At the end just keep doing questions. I basically took all the NBMEs every Monday and I scheduled my exam for Monday o I conditioned my habits accordingly and I was not at all stressed on exam day.
- Social Media Pages: Facebook: This one Instagram: USMLE360 (Run by IMG students who know in and out about IMG prep to application)
At the end I just want to say Please stick to few resources, don’t jump from one resource to other. Thanks everyone on this page who helped me out by answering my stupid questions 
By god’s grace I scored 255