School of Medicine

General Recommendations

** Please preview "Stepping Up to the USMLE" for general information regarding USMLE prior to reading my insert below.

Overall the most important advice I have for studying for the boards is to study "hard consistently" throughout your first two years of medical school. You don't have to honor every single class but you should aim to do well. I'm sure most of you have heard by now that 1st Aid is essential for the boards, but take that advice with a grain of salt. I suggest you study 1st Aid in conjunction with the review books that suit your study style and try do a lot of questions (ie, around 50 a day). In the end, I had annotated my 1st Aid with things I found in review books and question banks so when it came time to review I had a single source: 1st Aid. I read 1st Aid around 4 times from cover to cover.

Books

1st Aid, BRS Path & BRS Physiology, Rapid Review of Pathology (Goljan), High Yield (HY) Neuroscience, HY anatomy, HY behavioral science, HY Histology, HY Cell & Molecular Biology, HY Immunology, Lippencott Biochemistry, & MMRS (medical microbiology made ridiculously simple).
I used Webpath for images.

Question Bank

Q-bank: I purchased the "early bird" special but didn't even use it until I started to study for the boards. I found this question bank to be very helpful. It does test a lot of minutia, but a lot of the concepts emphasized in Q-bank did show up on my exam. I started with random blocks of 50 questions/day. My initial scores were around 40% and I ended around 80%. So, don't get discouraged if you completely bomb the first few Q-bank question sets, it'll be O.K.!
USMLE World: The format is "exactly" like the real deal. I mean the buttons and everything! Kinda eery! I found the questions to be too hard. I did around 500 questions and decided to concentrate on Q-bank. I've heard people liked USMLE World a lot, but I just thought it was so-so.
NBME Tests: By far the most important tool to gauge your actual score. I took three NBME exams, my scores were 200's, 220's, & 240's. You can see when I took these tests by looking at my schedule below. Good predictor of how well you will do and what you need to focus on. Difficulty level of questions rivals the real deal.

Schedule

I've included a link to my schedule. My total study time was right around 6 weeks. I didn't follow the schedule to the tee but I was pretty close. One thing I wanted to emphasize was "keep reviewing 1st Aid throughout the entire time you study for the boards." That is, when you're scheduled to study, lets say, immuno then at the end of the day do your question block and re-read a section of 1st Aid, like cardio or something.
- USMLE Step 1 Schedule (xls)
Overall, I can't say if my method will work for you, but hopefully it will give some insight into this process. Well, good luck in your studying! I wish you all the best of luck!