USMLE Step 1 Experience – 268 – Dr.Sara Khan
technically I started studying by mid may 2013, got the books organized and asked around about
how to go about scheduling myself. my aim was to give the exam by January or February 2014. the
1st couple of weeks I was very lazy, didn’t actually get serious till beginning of June. started off
with physio because it was a weak subject for me having lived through the prof akram era. took
me about two weeks to do it with lectures. then I did something easy to give myself a break. did
anatomy without lectures, and finished it in about a week. don’t concentrate on histo in kaplan, all
you will need is in fa. embryology is mixed out throughout kaplan which I didn’t like so I would flip
through the pages and find where embryo was given and did all of it together instead of in
patches. I also read though high yield embryo to keep me oriented saath saath. don’t worry, the
pathologies given in hy embryo like placenta accreta etc will be discussed in patho so don’t
concentrate too much on hy embryo material, just make sure you get what’s given in kaplan. then
I did gross, pretty straightforward after the drilling of anatomy we got in ke. neuroanatomy is a
little more complicated, I did the lectures just for the brainstem lesions and the review lecture
where they discuss cts and mris etc. once anatomy was done decided to go for something more
challenging, biochem… having been taught close to nothing at ke, this was going to be the worst
subject for me apart from behavioral I knew. so what I did was make sure I did the lectures
alongside and I also let myself take as much time as was required to really understand everything.
took me about 3 weeks I guess. then I did immuno, a very dry subject but surprisingly heavily
tested in my opinion. then micro. a week for each of those, without lectures, from kaplan. then I
took a week for pharma, a good subject for me as I had studied this well in 3rd year. did it with the
lectures. last subject was patho… the big one lol. having just given my exam yesterday, my opinion
is not to concentrate on what is the “big one” in people’s opinion, but concentrate on your own
weak spots, mine were behavioral, biochem and immuno. patho we have done well in ke with
robbins so it’s not a prob. I should also mention that I had read goljan in the summer of my 4th
year with lectures which helped a lot… so my strategy was a little strange. with just 3 weeks to do
patho to meet my mark for my 1st read I knew doing all of goljan wasn’t an option, but I had just
loved his lectures when I did them in 4th year. so what I did for each chap was to go through the
chap listening to goljans lectures, with the main goljan book and goljan 125(the transcripts of the
lectures available online) open in front of me. I underlined anything he said that was in the main
book, if not there I underlined it from the transcripts. also would keep an eye on the goljan slides
pdf saath saath…having finished the chap I quickly went through that chap in pathoma and
anything new I found there I would underline in goljan in a different color… like lecture material
was in red and pathoma material was in green in my main goljan… it sounds a little manic I know the 3 weeks I had allocated. the extra time I had I used to read fa once, just to get a feel of the
book.
2nd read
I had planned on it being 3 months but I fell into a bit of a depression at this time and also family
obligations so I took 4 months, but I believe 3 months is easily doable. for each subject I would
read the kaplan and keep my fa open for that topic. any material I felt was lacking in fa I would
copy into it. there are several topics in physio, biochem, behavioral that are too long to be copied
so I would mark the page no. somewhere in my fa along with the name of the topic. also I felt
micro was given very haphazardly in fa so I did studied it from kaplan mostly, didn’t come to fa for
that till near the end of my prep. after having done the subject, I would do the related qs in uworld
offline. I would try and stick to the usmle requirements, like do a block of qs within an hour, but
don’t worry about the timing problems too much at this point, and don’t use the no. of qs you get
right and wrong to assess yourself… I used uworld solely as a learning tool, not for assessment.
there is so much new info here you shouldn’t get down on yourself for getting things wrong on
your 1st go… read all the explanations, even for the qs you get right. try and annotate your fa with
as much of this extra info as you can. for the qs you feel are totally original and whose whole
explanation is important go ahead and rip that page out of the book and stick it in your fa… but
it’s better to write stuff with your own hand, I only ripped out pages for about 20 or 30 qs total. do
uworld well!!
3rd read
so when I finished up my 2nd read of all the material I read through my packed fa once, took me 3
weeks with all the info I had written down, also referencing the topics in kaplan that weren’t in fa
and who I had marked earlier. I even did micro and behavioral whole from kaplan again during
this time.
online uworld
then I got a 2 month subscription to uworld online. people had told me to do just 2 blocks a day
with fa alongside. but I felt I had done my uworld well enough before in my 2nd read and didn’t assess yourself, this time you will get so many qs right because you have done them before… I had
a 95 percent in fact 
nbme assessments and taking a date
then I gave nbme 1- 4 offline, one every other day, doing fa saath saath. this is where you assess
yourself…. time your blocks and don’t take too long between blocks for breaks. my nbme 1 was
the worst I gave as I understandable as I was a bit nervous :P… but then my score just kept going
up. I did nbme 5 and 6 back to back with like 7 or 8 min breaks between blocks… this was a stress
test for myself to put myself in the worst possible state to see how well I did. no lunch even lol. so
once I did this and my scores came out fine I knew I could handle anything the actual exam threw
at me… did nbme 7 offline and then nbme 13 online the next day… got 259 in the online one. this
was a score I was very happy with but at this point I had only read fa a total of 3 and half time (one
in each of my 1st 2 reads and then after that one and half times.) I felt uneasy with the material,
didn’t feel I was doing the best I could do because I was forgetting things I should have known
from fa. so I took a date for a month away. gave me time to do a couple more reads of fa easily