USMLE STEP1 EXPERIENCE 251
DR FATHY A. HELAL
Step 1 journey
I’m a final year med student from Egypt
got my score a while back n it’s 251 
My goad was “not below 230” 
Resources
1- Kaplan : it took a lot of time
( bio was great - Pharm, biostat & Neuro anatomy were good - the rest were just waste of time for me)
2- Pathoma videos ( amazing)
3- DIT videos w FA first read (dit was very good n brief - didn’t know about BNB until later)
4- UW offline 2016 system by system timed w note taking ( most important phase)
5- UW offline again 2018 (didn’t buy online) w notes from new questions
6- started doing NBMEs ( should’ve started much earlier) - did them offline, searched for explanation n wrote notes in FA
NBME 13 - 40 mistake
Amboss test > 37 mistake /160
NBME 17 - 16 mistake
NBME 16 - 25 mistake
NBME 11 - 24 mistake
NBME 19 - 27 mistake
NBME 12 - 30 mistake
NBME 7 - 24 mistake
NBME 5 - 21 mistake (2 weeks before)
NBME 18 - 23 mistake (1w before)
Free 120 - 84% ( 3 days before)
7- Pathoma videos again as a review
- tips
1- read FA so many times w ur notes ( every word in fa is a potential question)
2- UFAP is the skeleton of step 1, repeat them until you feel u have good grasp of them
3- start NBMEs early, they r great learning materials not just for assement
4- toward the end focus on reviewing what u know rather than learning new things n don’t get caugh on weird questions because chances are u not gonna see it (usmle has a huge pool of questions)
5- learn how to “guess” the best answer ( or at least narrow it down to 2 or 3 choices)
because u r gonna see a lot of new questions in the exam
6- condition urself to be quick ( only 1 min for the q), this really helps
7- organize ur sleep the last month so u can feel fresh in the day of exam
