 So I am now just two weeks away from taking my internal medicine boards. Let's talk about how it's going. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. Today is going to be episode number two of essentially board prep for me studying for my internal medicine boards. If you guys want to check out the first episode, I'll link down below. This again is an entire series to show how I prefer any exam. It doesn't have to necessarily be for you studying for the internal medicine boards, but I'm going to go over my strategy, share with you my cell sheets and everything. All of the bookmarks will be linked down below, including in this video, we're going to talk about essentially what the test day will look like, how I'm doing on my actual prep, which is awful. And then essentially with my strategy, my resources are going to be and then we'll go into the next episode. Let's get into it. So the first thing that we didn't talk about in the first episode of board prep is essentially what board prep for an internal medicine board looks like, how many questions, how long is a test and the answer is it's a very long exam anywhere from nine to 10 hours. There are four sections with each section having a maximum of 60 questions split up by 100 minutes of total breaks and throughout the duration of the exam. Now these questions can span anywhere from anything in internal medicine, but also fields outside of internal medicine. So you'll have things like cardiology, pulmonary, nephrology, everything you can imagine on a hospital doctor taking care of, but also things that you take care of on a clinic basis. So things like musculoskeletal injuries, opioid emergencies, psych, neurology, and other things I'm probably forgetting. Oh, and of course, dermatology because I am terrible with skin rashes. Now, obviously that's a lot of information to master. And to do those last episode, I talked about the main resources I was going to use, including Mixapp and New World, which I'll touch on again in today's episode. But I showed you an excel sheet, which I'm going to share in a second of how many questions are in each resource, as well as how many questions I had done and breakdown average of how many I'd be doing on a daily and a week basis. So with that being said, let's actually get into the excel sheet and understand how far behind I actually am. All right, so now we're in my excel sheet. This is going to be something that I share at the very end of this series. So again, if you have to ask me in the comment section, can I share this when I'm asked to kind of perfect it and clean it up? I will. So make sure you subscribe if you haven't done so already. And if you're watching this video in the future, find the last video in the series, and ideally you should find a link to how to access this for free. But for anyone who didn't watch the first episode of the series, essentially this document tells me how many questions I have to do in each resource and Mixapp versus New World, how many questions each resource also has and how many of them I've completed. And then I essentially broke down how many questions I needed to do on a daily basis, as well as kind of split them on during my entire study prep is because, as I'll talk about in a second, there are things that happened during my study prep, including going on a two week vacation, my birthday that I had to adjust for, as well as starting my new job next week. So the main thing is that my test day is 13 days away. So about two weeks from making up today's video, and the schedule had to change. Now that gets perfectly into kind of what needed to be done compared to what actually got done. So when I initially started, I had approximately about a little less than a month to prep, which in my biggest piece of advice, as I mentioned in my first video, is start much earlier than I did. Mistake I made, but it's not a big deal because I think I'll catch up just fine. But I essentially started right before I went on a two week vacation with my wife to Italy and Paris, which is absolutely amazing. But I thought that I could possibly pull out 20 questions a day during the vacation, during some downtime while she was napping or sleeping or at the very end of her evenings. But we were just being tired throughout the entire trip because of how much we were doing, how much fun we were having. And pretty much, as you guys can see on the second calendar, I essentially wrote down what I did on each and every single day to essentially get an idea of whether I was behind or ahead. And as you can see, this is the duration of my vacation. There was just one day where I found some time to actually study and I did 10 questions and set 20 per day. So I initially had planned on doing about 160 questions during the duration of my vacation. I did 10. So that's not good. And obviously, you're going to have jet lag and et cetera when you come back. And so I had to completely change my strategy. So this is what my initial strategy was about 20 questions to start with and about three blocks of 40 or two blocks of 60, which you rolled allows for board preps and getting through it. And then this week, which is about to be this upcoming week for me, I'm going to start my first week as my full-time attending hospitals physician. And I wanted to do less questions during this time, but that's going to have to change because I'm further behind. So now let's get into what I'm actually going to do and where I am on the schedule. So essentially what I did is I completely rehauled the calendar to essentially show where I am versus what I need to do. So while the left side was what I wanted to do here is a calendar more or less of what I hope to be achieving. And to be completely honest, I'm not even on schedule with this thing, but it is okay. We will get there. So I marked essentially not doing any questions for those two weeks and essentially increased doing instead of 120. I wanted to do 160 for that first week. Spoiler alert, that didn't happen, but we can get into that in a second. And then similar to before, I wanted to do less questions while during my full time as a physician, nothing on my birthday, which I didn't do. And then kind of ease down. Unfortunately, as I mark down what I did on a daily basis, there are days where I did amazingly well, close to 120, but nowhere close to the 160 mark. It takes a lot of energy and I'll talk about the strategies that I'm now using. But ultimately, I was able to finish the mix up by the very end of July. Today's the fourth as the making of this video to prep for the exam. So 16 days. And to finish the world, which I've now started when I first did the world. And I'll get into this when I talk about the resources that I'm able to do the 120 just fine. Yesterday was my first day of not doing two blocks because it was relatively busy days that today I'm going to play a little bit of catch up and maybe do 120 plus 30 and then do another 30 tomorrow to make up for not doing it successfully. But this is essentially how I'm keeping myself in check. Now the reality isn't as I talked about in my first video is that I purposely expected myself to procrastinate and get behind. So when you guys get access to the sheet or if you watch the first video, again, you can use these strategies for any board prep you do. You see that I've had these buffers. And essentially what I'm doing myself is I'm saying there's 20% of time you're not going to meet your mark and 25% of the time you're going to do less questions than you actually wanted. So I purposely designed it to where while it says I should only be doing 78 questions, your goal is 98 to count for days, you're going to be lazy, procrastinate, have things happen, have life happen. And so because of that, as you can see from what my initial calendar was telling me to do, it said I was going to do 2300 questions total. But in reality, you rolled and mix up only have about 2400 and I had already done several of them by myself. And so it was already planning on me doing more questions than what was actually available to me at the time. And so the plan overall is still going to be just fine, but we'll go ahead and transition to essentially what I'll be doing these last few weeks. So now let's talk about what I'm going to actually be doing between the fourth and all the way up to the 16 to prep. So the main goal is to finish with the U-World. And because I started U-World essentially three days ago and not doing anything on my birthday, I've only finished about 180. Let me just go ahead and show you what my actual U-World dashboard looks like and why I overall feel okay going through this exam. So this is my ABIM U-World dashboard. And essentially, as you guys can see, I've done only 180 questions. There's about a little more than 1200 for prep. And I've done 60 yesterday, 122 days ago when I bought this. Overall, at the moment, I'm doing okay compared to other people. And this is all comparison, maybe in future exams, I started doing worse and the score starts in the middle. But I'm overall confident that I'm actually at least doing on average. And while I says I'm spending 56 seconds per questions, a lot of times I'm usually doing something else or my second part of my strategy, which is making wonky cards that are counting into the seconds. So most of my questions as we can kind of go and see. So for example, you can see some questions here, whether I get them right or wrong, my strategy is mainly figure out what I don't understand and learn it quickly. So I'm answering questions within 38, 27, 18 seconds. Some of them I can just look at the pictures, 17 seconds. This one I got wrong, but it's 35. I'm just quickly trying to understand, you know, where it goes. I spent a little bit more time here, but probably also to just read a really long question. So again, 12 seconds just because I was trying to make a guess of what those pictures were. It's clearly a streak where I didn't do so well, but 44 seconds. So my timing is not going to be an issue. And overall, I think I'm doing just fine for where I am. And so given that, I feel a little bit confident that I'm going to be okay, even if all the questions don't get done, but the goal is to still complete them all. So today, the goal is to do 120 questions, same thing for tomorrow. And this kind of gets into my strategy and help for anyone who's struggling of getting a lot of questions done in a day. For me, I realize I can do 40 to 60 questions at a time, but after that, I just need a big break. And so usually my strategies obviously try to get the questions done early in the days. When I wake up, grab a cup of coffee, come here and do them. Today, obviously I'm recording this video for you guys, but normally I would come drink my coffee and do my 60 questions at least half of my success for the day is completed. Then I would take a break, do something else, and then later in the day when I have some downtime, my wife is taking a nap, kind of doing the 60 questions again. Then I'm done with my 120. On days that I need to play catch up, like today, I may have another half session put into my Google Calendar, and those will be for like 30 questions. My plan is between the fourth and the 16th, essentially do all the UOLT questions. Now I have about, as you guys can see, if I log in, 10, 69 questions left to do. So if I put that here, and then we divide 10, 69 by different numbers, approximately 13 days as I mentioned, but essentially I have to do 80 questions all the way from here to the 16th. So about a block and a half, because for the board exam, each block is 60 questions maximum. So I want to practice towards that. Now I don't want to be doing questions until the very last day. I want to give myself a little bit of a buffer, one to catch up on a week topics, ideally doing those questions again or as many as possible. So I'm going to say let's, instead of 13 days, let's do about a four buffer day. So let's do the questions within nine days. Now approximately comes out right about 120 questions. So the goal is today is to do between 120 questions from today all the way up to the 11th or the 12th, whatever that may be, and then using those last few days to just do missed questions and then sit for this dreaded exam. That doesn't mean that my week that I will be starting, my new job, that I will have to do 120 questions. So I'm ideally going to be trying to do a little bit more throughout the duration of this week, my last week before I start. That way, in case there are as a busy day or I'm in the hospital later, I'm not going to fall behind on this schedule. Now the last part about this episode that I want to talk about is the difference between Mixapp and Uworld and whether you need both or whether you need one. Now, this is very specific. I've been studying for an internal lesson board exam. So if you watched this video or watched this episode to this point, just to get tips on how to study for a prep, I'm glad you made it. Make sure you hit that like and subscribe. Well, let's go ahead and talk about Mixapp or Uworld versus both, which one should you use. Now, usually my initial approach was going to just be using Mixapp before studying for the boards, like I have been doing during the series. And as I found through reading, and there's some experience, Mixapp questions can either be very easy or very specific, but not usually in the middle. So for example, very specific. A lot of times I struggled on things like hematology, oncology, because they're asking questions specifically about chemotherapy treatments and the regimens that would give a patient because I'm just an internal medicine doc, I'm not an OB guy, and I'm not a chemo doctor. I'm not going to be making a decision, something as specific as like some, what chemo therapy somebody's going to be on. But Mixapp still asks tons and tons of questions on what regimens somebody should get for their breast cancer or for their prostate cancer. Honestly, don't care. And it's not going to be something that I will be doing realistically on a daily basis. So those questions didn't feel as practical. Other times the answer was too easy where I can just read the last line is kind of move to it. There was a big degree of whether the information was useful, versus it was just like a one-off piece of information they wanted me to know. Number two is I realized that Uworld is going to be something that I wanted to do because Mixapp doesn't have the best combinations of kind of ambulatory medicines. So things like orthopedic injuries, some rheumatology, they just don't have enough of those. And those do show up and then usually tend to trip up people very much on the actual day of their exam. Uworld, on the other hand, I found to be very fun. I keep in mind I've only done 180 questions, but that's more than 10 to 15% of the actual QBank. And I found that the questions to be very entertaining and that's weird to say, but they just flowed nicely. I feel like the knowledge is much more practical. It was like, oh yeah, I didn't know this. I do know that. And I find the questions are very quick to answer as I talked about and show it in my samples, or very practical if I am taking a lot of time to be kind of a highlight of that you don't actually know this as well as you thought you did. And so my recommendation, just based off of the questions that I've done so far, is I would incorporate Uworld into your test prep, particularly of kind of what I've heard from past experiences. If I had to pick one just between the two, I'd probably pick Uworld, because in addition to having much more high yield questions in my opinion, they do a better job with like charts and figures, which Mixapp doesn't do essentially a job at all about where you can learn a big topic even after answering an individual question. Mixapp does have a very nice forward review book that comes with it, which is kind of supposed to be its resource to use. So again, still a great resource often institutions, residency programs will give you access to Mixapp as part of their program. So they do do use it. But if you don't have access, I either recommend definitely starting with Uworld if you had a choice between the two, and then you can use Mixapp to kind of round it up. Now the last part of my strategy that I didn't talk about is essentially using anarchy cards. Now my initial plan was to do questions, make flash cards from the things that I missed, things that I wanted to remind myself of, and then incorporate that on a daily basis. That's not going to happen. It hasn't been happening. And so my main approach now is going to be getting as many of the questions done, making the cards as I go, ending down those last four to five days of buffer to go through those cards, because most of them are going to be very quick pieces of information that I missed. They're not long paragraphs or sentences and charts that have to memorize or just topics that I want to make sure that remind myself going into test day. So I'm going to be using my anarchy cards as kind of a last minute review of all the things that I was weak on, just to make sure that, hey, remember this piece of fact before going into test day. But that is my plan 13 days away from my internal medicine board exams. Hopefully you guys enjoyed today's episode and my breakdown. You guys can again use the same strategy for whatever exam you take. And if you are setting for your internal medicine boards and you want access to that Excel sheet, just keep in mind, follow the series, subscribe to the channel or the podcast, and you'll be informed when the last episode goes out with that link in below after I refine a little bit more. But as always, my friends, hopefully you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you want any help on your medical journey, whether it's residency, whether it's studying, et cetera, make sure you check out all the free resources linked down below. We've worked really hard on them to make sure you get help, but absolutely for free. And if you did enjoy today's episode, if you found it helpful, and you probably enjoyed this entire playlist about everything on how to do well in residency, as well as right here on all the study strategies that I use to do well in medical school and ultimately get a 3.9 GPA or break them down one by one. So go ahead and check out these two. And as always, my friends, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I was a little helped to you guys on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.