 In one month I take my internal medicine boards which is supposed to be one of the hardest exams I'll ever take and this series will break down my strategy and approach to passing this exam with confidence so you can do the same. Hey friends welcome back to channel today will be a fun but also a unique episode because I'm going to be going through my experience of studying for my internal medicine boards but if you're not in internal medicine or if you haven't finished medical school the series may not be the most practical to you so full disclaimer there but feel free to watch it to get an idea of how I approach an important test coming up, how I study what's resources I use and what strategies I use and if internal medicine is something in your future feel free to bookmark the podcast episode or the video that you'll be watching and make sure to come back to it later and make sure to also subscribe to get updates on future episodes that come out but today will be our first episode in the series with the name I haven't decided yet but essentially I'll be going over my experience over the next month and a half studying for my ABMIs which is your internal medicine licensing exam. It's supposed to be one of the hardest exams you take super expensive and nine hours roughly of taking something like this and then in future episodes I intend to show you how the strategy is going if it's working what I've made changes on as well as giving you tips along the way for anyone that's in residency or interested in internal medicine but first let's go ahead and break down the time aspect so at the moment of this episode it is currently the start of July in 2022 I take my exam and essentially the mid on August 17th and 2022 so I have approximately about 40 to 50 days to study for the exam and that is essentially mistake number one which I should have started my full dedicated prep much much earlier and then to add the cherry on top of my lack of preparedness to create a study schedule on time I'm actually going out of town actually out of the country for two weeks on vacation so I'm gonna have to figure out how to create a study schedule that essentially allows for some studying on vacation but not as much as I would be on my days off and so in a second I'm gonna go over this entire excel sheet that I've created and I'll tease you guys with an ounce he has go ahead and watch the rest of the episode but this is essentially going to break down how many questions I need to do how many questions I plan on doing on a day-by-day basis as well as what topics I'll be covering where now in future episodes we'll actually go over the nitty gritty of creating a study schedule much more appropriate than mine most people have said anywhere from three to six months of actual studying maybe two months but definitely not a month before the exam so that's definitely a blooper on my part but next we have to talk about resources now I like to keep things as simple as possible and the most effective as possible with time being a limited factor the thing that I need to make sure that I do as much of is practice questions the two main resources that everyone will recommend is one you willed and two mix up now different people have different preferences on which one they will start with first my institution gave me access to mix up so that's going to be my number one priority of finishing and then I will be doing you world because some people say that the actual board exam looks a little bit more familiar in terms of difficulty and trickiness to you all questions but since I've already had access and paid for the mix up I want to make sure I focus on doing those first because it's still considered to be a great resource and then I'll be moving to you world which I'll show you guys in that calendar in a second so getting into this calendar now in future episode I'll probably give a link and download link to this template for free but because right now I'm still mingling with it myself I don't want to give you guys a subpar calendar but essentially what I did here is I looked over all the questions that are available in mix up as well as you world right now it's about 1200 and each and then calculated how many I've done through my residency so as a making of this episode I've done 575 questions of the 1200 and mix up and I haven't even started you world yet so essentially I've created a formula where if I do more questions as I fill them in day by day it starts to add more to my complete section and then same thing for you all and eventually I know how many questions I have remaining which right now is a staggering 1800 it also calculates what day of the week it is right now as well as how many days I have left until test day so as the making of this episode I have approximately about 39 to 40 days left and then I've tried to create myself buffers knowing that I'm going to go on vacation I want to make sure that I'm not counting on actually studying every single day of that prep it's ideal but to make sure that I'm doing more questions daily I purposely have forced myself to assume that I'm not going to be studying every single day and doing that essentially it says when you actually have 40 days to study you have 32 days if essentially created a buffer of 20 percent again whenever I give you guys this template for free you guys will be able to make these changes if you think you're really disciplined you can make that buffer less if you think you're not as disciplined you can make that buffer more and do more questions to account for productivity later on and then using this spreadsheet I can calculate how many questions I should be doing based off of that buffer date as well as amount of questions I have left in the same way I've also created a buffer for the amount of questions because one of the things we know is if I'm going to say I'm going to do 57 questions a day if I do 20 or 40 on one day it starts to snowball into future days and I don't want to be overwhelmed closer to my test day so in the same way I've created a buffer about 25 percent this is again just kind of by feel knowing that not every single day maybe a fourth of the time I'm going to be able to do those questions and now I've actually increased my daily amount of questions about 71 or closer to 80 questions per day that means on days that I don't actually work really hard I still have accounted for that laziness into my overall schedule now the rest of the calendar is essentially counting for the rest of the weeks before my exam day also counting for those two weeks that I'll be out of the country on vacation with my wife so to do that knowing that I have to do about 70 questions every single day I know that on vacation I'm simply not going to be able to do that and so on those days I've made myself a small goal of doing about 10 to 20 and I've essentially now created a calendar where I can see how many questions I'll be doing each and every single week and so as you guys can see you'll be going on vacation starting Monday as of the making of this episode and so about two weeks I'm going to be doing just 20 questions each single day so a goal about 160 doing so that means that I'm already behind my goal of 70 per day and so when I come back I really have to bump it up a little bit more so I'll be doing three blocks of 40 so about 120 but these are all days off so that actually works out my favor and doing so I actually catch up my total questions so I not only do I calculate how many questions I'm doing per week but also my cumulative questions I can see in my first week I'll be 160 second a week 320 but then jumps up to already getting to 1100 and then eventually 2000 and keep in mind I only have 1800 so essentially this gives me enough of a buffer space for one if I be lazy and then two if I choose to actually do some of the questions that I've already done before or some of my mistakes and essentially I'll be able to go through all the question blanks without really any issues and then finally for this question strategy tab I've essentially looked at how many questions I have to do for cardiology and mix up in the new world keep in mind I haven't done new world yet so haven't added that in but I've essentially said how many questions of each topic I have so for example mix up has about 120 cardiology topics and so when I'm planning my daily I can say well if I start Monday on cardiology it's going to take me six days to do all the cardiology questions again I've done some of the cards questions but overall that's kind of how my planning will work so this way I'm not creating a schedule where I'm saying you'll be done with cardiology in two days but then realistically realizing that there are a lot more questions and mix up for cardiology so this way I can over plan and have tons of buffer every aspect of my schedule from the amount of days I'm going to be studying to amount of questions I'll be doing per day as well as the amount of days required for each individual topic and again if you're still watching this and you are not studying for your boards this is generally the approach I'll recommend for any board exam anything like my MCATs for anyone sitting for step one step two step three or any exam for school at any point finally to end off today's episode we can just talk about my overall approach for each individual day so again I've copied some of the things from the first page just to make it very easy and just have everything in one place when I start doing u-roll I'll go ahead and update this so again ideally this will be included in that free template just just won't be available for this episode but then I'm also including how many questions I'll be doing per day and then finally I've essentially copied that calendar but now it's starting including what topics I'll be doing for that day so for example I know I've already done about 60 cardiology questions in the mix app so it leaves me about 60 left which gives me a nice schedule about three days to do those on my vacation and then I move over to the next topic that's in my list so dermatology endocrine and so forth and then when I get back from vacation I'll be doing a lot more questions even more than mix up has per topic and so then I'll be able to do the rest of one topic and then start moving on to the next block so usually I'll be covering about two topics per day and then looking at this calendar I've made it the goal of starting u-roll about two weeks before the exam which I know is really tight but knowing how many questions I'll be doing per day essentially I think I'll be more than okay and doing zero questions here is simply because August 2nd is my birthday and I plan on not studying that day so and then finally to keep myself accountable and to be able to quickly identify when I'm behind essentially I've created a calendar starting from today as I'm making up today's episode for the topics that I cover as well as the amount of questions that I do per day and then adding those up and trying to see how well those relate to the overall calendar I created now this entire approach is designed for me to again have a study schedule that is more than over planning despite only having a month to study for this again some of you guys may be asking questions such as what about other texts that are recommended I simply just don't have time for them maybe I'll find ways to mingle them in as I start to be more disciplined with the schedule but I'll also be including in future episodes how I'll include those texts as well as things like strategies using on key so again if you want to see how I do those what cards they create how I create them and how I make sure that it helps me as I do my questions make sure you subscribe to this episode as well as subscribing to the podcast if you're listening to this in audio form but that guys is my overall approach for studying for my internal medicine boards I'm really excited to document this journey especially because it's going to be overall stressful so having that calendar really just made things a lot more realistic definitely is going to be very demanding upcoming couple of weeks but realistic nonetheless so hopefully this approach is helpful for any of you guys and if anything learned from me maybe study a little bit sooner even if it's not doing as much crazy amount of questions as I am for this episode and for the series at least you can space it out and saying like okay it's overall doable to do mix up a new world over the span of two to three months while still being in residency the last thing that I want to mention is that I have a huge benefit of taking a month off between finishing residency and starting my first job as I'm attending mainly because of this two-week vacation we're going on but because of that is essentially silver lining where I have an extra couple of weeks before starting my first job in the first week of August not everyone has that so make sure you account for that into your schedule especially if you're going to go straight from residency into fellowship or residency into your first job as an attending it's not going to be as realistic to be able to do a calendar like I've created so that means it's going to be much more important that you go ahead and start playing much earlier than I did but as always my friends hopefully you guys enjoyed today's episode if you did just go ahead and consider hitting that like button to show your support consider hitting that subscribe button if you haven't done so already if you're listening to this on a podcast consider hitting that follow subscribe and as well as leaving a review on your favorite listening platform but as always my friends thanks for being a part of my journey hopefully that was a little help to you guys on yours and I'll see you guys in the next one peace