Hello. So I recently got my score (18th Sep). It was 253. This is beyond my expectation. And I am so grateful to each and everyone that I meet on my way. So here is my USMLE Step 1 experience. What resources I used, what I learned along the way. This would be most beneficial to IMGs who have almost 0 idea of what this exam demands. First part of this Iliad & Odyssey is few people whom I have to mention.
Dr Mary Ruebush > You & your addiction (YES. you cant help it!) to help student. You really change how I look at immunology. Everytime I went in ur webinars with an attitude of I have done the UW on this topic. I am the boss. But you managed to teach me new thing in everyone of them. I can specifically name few on top my head. For example that syncytial virus vaccine thingy that you made for kaplan helped me answer one nbme ques in 20 sec. Immunological basis of HIV opportunistic infetions timeline. And so many things where u helped me to see the bigger picture.
Kamilo Suclamen (RIP. I killed him) & Anna Sophia > You two crazies. Your cont nagging of WHY WHY WHY changed my POV on how to approach this exam.
Chandan Kumar Dash, Zorb Gon, Diphyllobothrium Latum, Natia Adamia I cant imagine this without you guys. The wisest doggy walked in earth 
. The giant tapeworm with a giant heart / coelom, I would still study for this exam without you. 
Reticular Formation WHO ARE YOU 
Beau Garcon 
Lorenzo Braghieri Liz Baumann Kavita Usmle Mahaim Haque 
Yassine Alami Idrissi Tehmina Sharmeen Janeway Lesion Jon Doe Mhmd Jimmie Jr. Bot Paragominus Westermani & so many other good people I met. You all are MVP in my book.
Now the rest of the experience,
First a disclaimer. By the virtue of being a cat my whole journey is chaotic. I touched almost all resources possible at some point. I decided do almost all books in planet at some point. You don’t have to do this. But here’s first YODA tips : YOU WILL MAKE MISTAKES ON HOW TO STUDY. They will be your own variant. Hardest job is to find the correct way then stick to it. Almost everyone have to go trial & error. So I will describe my journey in chronological order so you can at least have an idea. .
I started with Kaplan notes. First my opinion : This is very time consuming & outdated. But its still good to make a solid foundation. My advice is don’t start with this. Go with Boards & Beyond. If you need it you may come to it later.Here i made my first mistake. As a typical IMG I read a A grade USMLE resource but applied my own lazy ass approach here. I may learn how action potential works because it was never taught in my school. But I was so happy with this one factoid I overlooked many infos that come before and after that because I thought its not necessary. I made same mistake in my UW “first pass” also. Result is It was never my first pass at all because I retained almost 0 info.
Then i decided that what am I doing is wrong. Here come the over-correction phase. I take my SWEET ASS time on uw ques now. I started reading into every word. spending eternity in one question. take notes on every possible word. This lengthens my overall study period but at the end I am still grateful for this. Because I haven’t need to cry after my first NBME. I can only imagine what anyone can feel after spending one year behind this & failing or underperforming their first assess.
Also during this time i started doing BnB. I came into that decision is UW is the best learning tool true. But Its also an assessment tool. Thats the 200$ of 400$ i paid for. So i finish one system from BnB then do UW. Sure it overinflated my % but it did helped me get most out of uw.
After my first pass of UW i did like 800 ques of uw after reset. Mistakes were worth it. rest wasnt. I remembered almost all of them
I also did like 900 question of Amboss
Here’s my NBME scores.
NBME 13 offline May 10 - 16 mistake 248) i guess)
NBME 21 online (27th May) - 255
NBME 24 online (June 17) - 250
Uwsa1 1 (June 25 ) - 258
NBME 20 online (July 8) - 246
NBME 16 offline (July 15) - 14 mistake 255
NBME 19 offline (July 22) - 8 mistakes 260 ish
NBME 23 online (August 1) - 248 (bish is crazy hard)
NBME 
online (August 13) - 259 (OMG)
Uwsa2 (August 18) - 266
Exam August 26 - 253
So in summary the best advice i can give is -
- Dont focus on amount of time u studied. I never could avg more than 6 hours of study. But i got lucky to figure out the correect way. so that 6 hour was well spent.
- Personal opinion : Dont passive read FIrst Aid. I never could do it. I never find the utility of it. I always found doing question is the best way. This one is the only proven positive correlation with scores. Multiple studies have shown it. I have done around 6000 question. it not only helps u learn by an active recall method it has an additional benefit in exam -
During real deal everyone knows how stressful it is. But what happens if u do tons of ques is u build up a reflex. U can guess almost always what would be the ans after reading last and first few line of ques. u can guess what would be option. u can guess what concept they are testing. This lowers huge burden. Can u imagine reading line by line of every question in that congested period of time and maintain ur sanity?
- Be bold. And be relaxed. One bad nbme isnt end of the day. One bad day of study isnt the end. its a marathon
- Dont compare urself with other. listen to everyone but apply only that u see fit.
- Have a cat in house.
I wish everyone of you Best of luck.