Dear friends and co-warriors,
This group was of great help to me, so I wanted to share with you my experience.
I just finished dermatology residency in my country. The last exam I took was in 2015 to get a residency position in my country and is something similar to USMLE but much less heavy. I graduated from med school in 2013, so I am somewhat an old IMG and med school is far behind me.
I started preparing for this exam in July 2019. I did BnB and pathoma videos along with FA, and after each subject, I did related Uworld questions. First pass was about 80%.
It took me 4 months to do this. Then I did my wrongs on uworld, some Rx questions, along with reading FA and my notes thoroughly. This next step took me 2 months.
After that, I did second pass uworld (90%) and read FA for the 3rd time. It took me 1 month. By beginning of February I did my first NBME 20 and scored 238. So I started thinking of new strategies.
When reading some feedbacks and experiences, I realized I didn’t do uworld as thoroughly as I should. I just focused on the correct answer. So I did a 3rd uworld pass and really read it as a notebook and focused on almost every single word in it.
It took me about 1 month. Then I started taking NBMEs and UWSA
NBME 22: 260
NBME 23: 252
NBME 24: 253
UWSA 1: 262
NBME 21: 256
Last thing I did was NBME 18 and UWSA2 during the same day by mid march (to have the closest experience to real deal) and scored 255 and 264 respectively. I was planning on taking the exam on April 3rd at that time.
Then I had like 6 cancellations. And ended up taking the exam on June 6th.
In the meantime, I did all old NBMEs offline, amboss (I did pretty good 97th percentile), BnB Qbank (not so good, around 70%), I stoped for a while, I prepared step 2ck for a while. It was such a mess but I just kept reading FA and doing as many questions as I could.
On the exam day, I was just so happy that this nightmare will finally be over. I was calm. The time was more than enough. The Q stems were variable, some NBME style, some Uworld style. There were some hard questions but overall it’s very very doable. I left the center confident.
I can tell you that I was so frustrated because of the cancellations, Some of them were 24h and even 8 hours before exam. But thankfully, it turned out well for me.
I wish you all the best. There’s no secret in there. Just keep up the good work!