USMLE Step 2 CK
Last evening I got the results for the test that I took three weeks before and with some trepidation I found that I had passed.
The sources that I used in preparation for it are:
- UWorld
- Anki cards deck from Brocencepalon
- Master the Boards by Konrad Fischer
- and of course Google pics, Wikipedia, and Youtube (Khan academy, Online Med Ed were particularly helpful).
I bought First Aid USMLE Step 2 CK as well but I’ve found it unhelpful, too short on some subjects and in need of update on others. I would like to mention also that I have used a sort of a bullet journal to track down the progress and have some objective data on what I was actually doing — it is easier to keep than a regular journal, thus you won’t be tempted as much to ditch it but in addition it will alleviate occasional “what the hell I was doing? I had not moved forward at all!” situation. Another thing I found is that if the source that you’ve chosen is hard to work with and there are reasonable alternatives, switch and try out another one, use whatever works best for you. As many people pointed out before me — unlike with Step 1 there is no such a thing as The Book, there are books instead with this one. And using too many of them would require more time and attention spent on jumping between them, which could be downright damaging and wasteful.
As I was progressing through UWorld and MTB I took notes and added a few dozen new cards to downloaded card deck, as well as correcting some of the existing ones (e.g. cervix dilation criteria, placenta previa classification). I think as a mode of long-term information incorporation interval repeat system implemented in Anki works wonders. Although I still prefer the writing-down-by-hand vs. typing-it-on-any-gadget as a go to way of taking notes, it is much harder to use them when the amount of information is big and I have to push myself to take extra steps to look into the notes and try to repeat them without just idly looking through.
Initially I planned to spend three to six months in prep, however it turned out to be unrealistic plan: it took me a year to feel reasonably ready. In retrospect I could have done it better and faster too, but with longer stretches of time a lot of unplanned things tend to happen.
First, I must mention that I have a peculiar liking to new book smell or any freshly printed paper actually. So when I unpacked MTB I instantly knew that it will be hard to work with the book: it smelled weird and wrong, it’s scent annoyed me and made me sneeze a lot. Eventually, I got used to it or it had enough aeration to loose the scent but it impeded my progress.
Second point is of course people: I had a very good friend of mine visiting with family for three weeks which required me to abandon everything but my tentative attempts to learn French with Duolingo while their kid (and all the other “adults”) had daytime nap. Two months later my parents unexpectedly agreed to visit us for a week too.
And combined with parents visiting was the plan to leave the smoking inferno of otherwise best city in the world for a few months stay by the sea (where I got a four days introduction into kite-surfing). Reasoning here being that at least seaside always has some wind and ventilation unlike the soup bowl of mountains around our beloved gem of civilization in March, April and May. So this is more or less how my “at maximum half-a-year” idea turned into a year.
Last but not least in prep, if you can afford to spend most of your time dedicated to it, do not forget to establish at least relative deadlines and borders otherwise you could plod on basically forever.
The exam itself was 8 hours plus 1 hour for you to take a break in between blocks. On the one hand, I think it was easier than Step 1 because of familiarity of the test center setting and staff (I think one of the proctors remembered my leggings from previous year) and the test itself — once you took it you knew how and what it was like to take this kind of tests. But on the other hand the questions were long, complex and grueling. I had hard time with first two blocks especially when I’ve almost ran out of time and had to guess four or five last questions in each of them.
As a funny aside, I abstained from caffeine for almost a month prior to test for health related reasons and with the last of eight question blocks I think I got a bit over a reasonable threshold of coffee consumption since I had a flask of ~800 ml of it: as I was closing my mouth after yawning and my teeth came into contact they started to chatter rather distinctly and would not stop for an about an hour later when I was on my way to hotel.
