USMLE Step 1 Experience – 247
Some general thoughts and beliefs:
First off I want to thank Allah for his generosity and my family for their support.
Stay with Allah, pray, pray and pray. He will give you.
Believe that you will make it, imagine yourself writing down your experience when you
score the number you dream of. Before I got my grade I was counseling myself and saying
that if I got at least an average grade I would be satisfied, but Allah has given me much more
than I expected.
Stay humble and respecting of your parents, for one prayer from them can change your
life.
If you want to achieve something you haven’t before, you need to do something in the
process that you are not used to. Wake up in the early morning, make some time for
revision, write notes, WHICHEVER works for you.
Look at this experience, and others, but tailor them to yourself, you don’t have to follow
anyone very meticulously, we have different backgrounds and knowledge.
Study period: 3.5 months, It was not interrupted at all, I had no off days except maybe a day per
month, it was very exhausting.
Took step 2 CK before this
Resources:
- UWORLD
- FA (except for pathology, I didn’t touch it from FA, I did the first 5 chapters, dermatology, resp
and cardio from pathoma) - Pathoma (only around 7 chapters)
- I did not touch any Kaplan book nor BRS
The amount of hours I would study everyday was unreal, I was killing myself to achieve this,
because it was a short time and I wanted to get over it. I reached the point where I study around
14 hours a day. I don’t want you to do that, unless you are short of time. It is better to stay
comfortable while studying, however don’t take long breaks or else you will forget.
I started by solving uworld offline and system wise, I tackled the my weak topics first like
biochemistry, annotated on pathoma and FA (of course pathoma I didn’t go over the whole book
afterwards, but I still recommend that you do go over it all) it took me maybe 2 months, I was also
reading FA simultaneously. After finishing the first run of uworld I finished what I had left of FA.
Then I did NBME 16 online and got 218. My exam was like a month from this time, so I knew I
wasn’t far from my goal, I postponed two weeks and started the second run of uworld again with
FA simultaneously, but this time I did uworld ONLINE and RANDOM. After around 20 days I did
nbme 17 online and got 230, so I knew that my exam should be a month from that day. I finished
around 90% of uworld and around 70% of FA in this second run and then did nbme 18 online and
got 237, I wasn’t happy here because I expected 240s, and my exam was like 7 days far, so I
postponed a week and I was like this is it, im not postponing anymore. This those two weeks I
finished the second run, did the third run (only the mistakes of my second run) which took one or
two days, I had like 320 Qs. And also I finished FA for second time by the last day before the exam.
I then did nbme 15 offline and got in the 240s, so my confidence went up a bit. I did not have time
for uworld assessments, but I still think they might have been of benefit.
The exam:
I took a sleeping pill the day before to get good sleep (be careful what you take because they can
make you drowsy, I tried it a few times and knew which dose to take and when to take it) , I
recommend Melatonin, it doesn’t bother me the next day.
I got 268 questions, all were 40 Qs except the last block was 28, you have one hour for each block,
including the last one, which was great. In each block I would have around 4 minutes to revise the
marked questions.
The exam is a bit exhausting so I recommend you train yourself for it, make a day or two before
the exam where you simulate it. Take like two nbmes and solve them in 8-9 hours with only an
hour break, because you get to a point in your last two blocks your brain slows down, and you
need to read the questions more than once to understand them.
Exam material:
Biochem was VERY low yield, I was very glad that I didn’t stress much about it, Just tried to have a
general 70% understanding of it without memorizing each and every detail, I barely got 4-5
biochem questions in the whole test which weren’t hard to solve. Genetics, pharma, micro,
immune, biostats were all enough from FA and uworld . I got a few ethics questions that I’ve never
heard of. Some people told me those ethics topics are covered in Conrad fischer 100 ethics cases.
There were a few clinical cases, they asked what is your next step? What is the most likely
diagnosis? To me they were easy
Of course there are some weird questions that I had no idea about, so I just try to think of it,
Answer whatever and move on I got around 4 questions repeated exactly from nbmes, along with 15,16,17,18 I did 11 to
practice by my self.
When wanting to make a decision about postponing or not, make an online one, because
offline is never accurate, even if you and your friend make the same number of mistakes
online you might get a different grade, because different questions are scored differently.
Time yourself and take minimal breaks while you do it
Let it be in the morning, when you’re still comfortable and ready, not in the end of the day
after reading and cramming a lot of information, your brain will get tired.
Before each nbme and the exam day I would revise biostats with everys ingle formula FA,
so that includes biostats, pharma, cardio, renal and resp. To keep them on the top of my
head.
Finally, pray for me. Wish you all the best