USMLE Made Easy

Materials used : Kaplan notes and videos 2014 except for Neuro and derma did 2010 (helpful). UW 2 times ( very very helpful).  Step up to medicine ( was a regret). MTB2 ( started it but was useless. MTB3 better I did pediatrics from it).  Kaplan Q bank( frustrating and most of explanations is like ( it is right because I said so) Some CMS ( do them all if you have time) Time of preparation a year (on/off). I did Kaplan videos first and it takes long time but really worth it. I did UW random and timed ( very important to practice adjusting your timing early). Overall was 77%. I did nbme 7 after UW first round and it was 243. It is important to do 7 early since it has ridiculous questions and don't be discouraged by it since it is highly unpredictable. I did UW second time system wise and timed UWSA 1 274 2 weeks before exam NBME 6 271 week before exam NBME 8 265. 4 days before exam UWSA. 2 272 2. days before exam Real deal 265 Tips Do step 1 first. There was many questions t...

Just passed me exam ( my mark is not the main topic here) so I have some advices for you all about my experience .. ** Do NOT pay for your exam and set the eligibility period unless you took at least one nbme and the nbme exam shows a mark that close or within 30 marks from your target score, you can get your papers ready and put them on the side till the time for registration comes and don’t have to wait for a month or two from your university for a paper or so, you can get a spot at the prometric exam the same month or the months after the month that you want but at least you wont have go to exam bec you cant postpone it any longer bec the eligibility period expired. ** read MULTIPLE expereiences about pple whertain things they ALL share certain things in common about sources or how they manage their time. ** just because you did FA 2 or 3 times and uw once or twice doesn’t mean you’re ready and go schedule your exam, what decides that you are ready is your nbme scores, go ...

: ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ hi guys , i wanted to present my experience in a video , cuz iam not good in writing , but many guys keep asking me for my experince , more than 100 private messages  :D  so iam gonna write it anyway . i warn you it wont be the best experience you will read , in fact , after all step 1 stuff is over i look back to my preparation and think " damn ! how da hell did i do it with such preparation !  :D  " . Anyway , lets start .. - ( basic info ) : - I am a 6th year medical student , Al-Azhar university , new damietta city . Egypt . - preparation time : 9 months in 2017 and 5 months in 2015 . whith 1 year pause inbetween . - exam date : 13/9/2017 - result : 257 -( resources ) : - in first 5 months in 2015 i used kaplan vedios 2010 , along with kaplan lecture notes2015 . and pathoma vedios and text . - in the 9 months of 201...

Alhamdulillah I finally got my score and This is my Step 1 experience Exam on 27th March 2019 Result on 17th April 2019 Target score 240+ Actual score 250 Total study time 15 months (almost 5 months interrupted no study) average 4 hours per day (very slow and bad time management with 8-4 Job) Dedicated study time 2 months (12-14 hours per day) -------------------------------------------------------------------- All assessment online and in this order NBME 13 (8 weeks out) 221 NBME 15 (6 weeks out) 236 (24 mistakes) NBME 16 (4 weeks out) 240 (22 mistakes) NBME 17 (2 weeks out) 240 (20 mistakes) UWSA 1 (8 days out) 260 (29 mistakes) UWSA 2 (5 days out) 254 (27 mistakes) NBME 18 (2 days out) 252 (18 mistakes) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Study material: -First Aid (4 runs total) -Uworld (started very late so I ran out of time and had 290 unused questions) -Kaplan videos and books for almost all subjects (kaplan was phenomenal in my opinion in...

QUICK PREP TIMELINE Total study time: 10 months Dedicated time: 6 months NBMEs 13= 217 (after 1st round of UW) 16= 230 (after 2nd read of FA) 15= 225 (right one week after NBME 16 *major setback*) UWSA1 = 251 (after 2nd round of UW and 3rd read of FA) NBME 18= 240 (roughly 2 weeks before actual exam) UWSA2= 241 (just 2 days before my scheduled exam day, which was March 20 at that time) Final showdown: 249 (Alhamdulillah!) Since my NBME 18 and UWSA2 both were borderline 240s, I was very nervous and skeptic about the exam as my target was 240+. I therefore took a step back and rescheduled my exam from March 20 to March 27 right after I took UWSA2. This one week was a good decision, as you can tell. MY 2¢ ON THIS JOURNEY: 1. Be honest with yourself and set realistic goals. Pushing yourself is one thing, and burning out is another. 2. UFAP, UFAP, UFAP. Period. 3. A supportive family is a true blessing! Plus, the right study partner is always a godsend. I have to thank mine, alon...

Hi everyone, today I received my score report, I'm really happy. This group help me a lot in so many ways...I'm IMG from Cuba..promotion 2010..living in USA x 3 years now. My experience is not a great experience at all.. Rx Q bank..1 year (75%) Self ass 225 (3 months before the exam) Past test Q bank (useless) Uworld Q bank ...3 months the 2700 questions(71%)..then I repeat the wrong Qs (75%) UWSA 1...239 (2 weeks before the exam) UWSA 2...237 (1 week before the exam) NBME 17..225 (can't remember. .but was like 3 weeks Before the exam I think) NBME 18...232 (3 days before the exam) REL EXAM.....241..... Materials: First aid (1 round ) Rx videos express (2015) Kaplan videos (2014) Pathoma book (2017) and videos Goljian audio (3 rounds in my car) Goljian HY (1 round) worth it Goljian slides (all of them) worth it Goljian book 1 (only consulting some topics) Organ system (1 round ) Basic sciences (1 round) Ethics for the boards (2 rounds with the Qs) ..the best book i read...

I am an old IMG (Graduated 2006) and full time working urologist. Step 1 experience Total study time 6 months (2-3 hrs/day) Dedicated study time 2 weeks. Resources used UWorld single pass (made flash cards for review) FA double pass but skipped reproductive part BnB Pathoma videos DIT (some parts) Paul bolin (basic sciences and medicine) youtube videos UWSA1 247 taken a week before UWSA 2 237 taken 2 days before No NBME or other tests taken. UWorld and FA are indispensable. In my opinion, BnB is the best video resource for step 1 (if you want to use only one video resource) which I found a little late during my study time. I got only last one month to go through them. Biostats is specially very good in BnB. I practiced every biostats and hardy Weinberg questions several time which paid off well. They are very easy points that should not be missed. DIT is good in some parts but not as a whole. Pathoma is good but very lengthy to revise. Again if you must...

Took my Exam on March 27th, just received my Score. Got a 268. I spent a lot of time reading these experiences and obsessing over the score correlations. Here's my CK experience. Background: Step 1 in April 2017 - 265 Prep time: Nearly 5 months (plenty of on and off days) Sources: UWorld once (First pass 88% Subject wise, timed – Also did my marked ~ around 400 and incorrects), Uworld 3 (all online-79% random timed) CMS all forms offline Nbme 6- 6 mistakes offline (1 month prior) Nbme 4- 8 mistakes offline (1 month prior) Nbme 7 – 16 mistakes offline (1 month prior) Nbme 8- 273 (online, 4 days prior) Uwsa 1- 283 (9 days prior) Uwsa 2- 270 (7 days prior), Free 120q -93% Started of prep with Uworld, tried reading MTB but failed miserably. Uworld and Uptodate (read only the summary and recommendations) are all I needed to get through this exam. I would recommend doing Uworld step 3 If you plan on taking step 3 soon, else there’s no need. Uworld Step 2 covers almost ever...



I write this post because I mentioned that I mentor my peers during my interviews and now have to do it. On a serious note, I couldn’t find a lot of Neurology-focused posts in this group last season, so I hope my experience can be of use to next year’s aspirants.

 My credentials aren’t the most important, but to get it outta the way - 2017 graduate, require visa, 247/228/1st attempt pass/no step 3, 3 months university-based observership (1 IM, 2 Neuro), no publications, 1 research and 3 poster presentations while in college, and plenty of volunteer work while in college. I had 13 Neuro interviews, 2 Prelim IM, and ranked them all. 

 I believe 2 things were key to my journey: 
1. Knowing what I want
 2. Knowing who I am 

Since a lot of posts focus on how to get good scores, apply for research/clinical experience etc., I’ll elaborate on these instead:

 1. Knowing what I want: 

- One, I decided I wanted to go into Neurology 2 years back. I made sure every academic act...

Creds: 243/217/not taken step 3 CS 1st attempt pass YOG - recent grad, 2018 USCE - 4 months electives; 4 US lors Require visa 2 years of home-country research 2 poster presentations, 1 case presentation Applied 102 programs; only in Pediatrics Got 8 IVs [ 6 match programs + 2 prematch programs ] - attended all the interviews, didn't get prematch, ranked 6 programs in total Q. Are high scores important? High scores definitely help, but you don't have to kill yourself for 260+ 'Most' of the peds candidates that I interacted with in this match had 230's Q. Is research important? Research really helps if you have - low scores - old grads - to explain gap years I was asked about my research in detail in 1 interview and about my poster presentation in another interview Q. How important is Step 3? I talked with PD about step 3 and she was telling it really helps for those with step "attempts" and old graduates. For H1b visa, you need to give your ...

2. Getting email addresses B. How to get email addresses of PDs and Associate PDs, Chief Residents and even Coordinators First of all, I emailed PDs, APDs as well as the Chief Residents during the interview season to see if they can review my application for an interview. It might not work everytime but atleast from my experience I would say it works more often than not (atleast one of them PD/APD or Chief will review it- will give true examples at the end of this post) One more thing to note is most residency coordinator emails listed on ERAS are the ones that the programs have created specifically for residency and most of them are not even opened and looked at lol. So you will need the coordinator's routine working emails to actually reach them which most of the times is not there on ERAS. I dont know how others used to get them but this is how I found out something which might be the easier way to get around this! - Google 1.'Program Search ACGME-' 2...