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Laura A. Owczarek, Class of 2008
General Recommendations
- Stick to your schedule no matter how much you feel like you are behind!
- Do questions!!
- You will feel like you are missing lots of details, but don’t worry about it.
Books
- I used Kaplan books for all of my book reading and supplemented with other review books such as “Step-Up.”
Question Bank
- Q-bank: LOVED this set of questions for STEP 1…. Went through it in tutorial mode then again in test mode.
- Pros: Questions are similar format to exam; I liked reading the answer explanations to supplement my reading for the day.
- Cons: Questions actually harder then the real exam… although this could be a pro.
- USMLE World: I didn't use it for STEP 1, but I loved it for STEP 2
- NBME Tests: I did one of these before the actual exam just to put my mind at ease… not sure that it really helped besides giving me an estimate score.
Schedule
- I started studying the Monday of the following week after our last exams (~May 15th). I did some sort of studying everyday… I have to admit weekends were hard to focus. I took the exam June 16th, so I studied about 4 weeks. There were a few days that I did take off for weddings and such. I got most of my studying done during the day while my husband was at work. I would study in blocks and take small frequent breaks. Usually I would have a subject for the day, such as Pulmonary, and I would go over the chapters in Kaplan, then review in Step-Up, and at night I would do a few sets of questions in tutorial mode and read the explanations for the answers.
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