 All right, time to do another step three update. Let's get into it. All right, guys, welcome to the MD journey. A channel completely dedicated to helping you succeed on your medical journey with less stress. My name is Lex, an internal medicine physician and resident in training. In this video, we are gonna talk about kind of an update about step three and how it's going for me. In case you haven't, I'll link down below one of the first kind of videos we put out on the channel about step three, as well as the playlist that's gonna be following me on my step three journey. In this video, I'm basically gonna be breaking down all the things that are working out well as well as not going so hot as I'm prepping for my step three in about two to three weeks while I'm doing a busy ICU rotation. Now, I don't wanna drag this video, so we're just gonna kind of get into it. And first, I'd like to actually start with the things that are not going so well. And number one is I'm definitely getting behind in my questions. I think when I first made my initial plan or study plan, which you guys can check out down below, I hope to do about a 40 kind of question block every single day. But as I mentioned at the start of this video and this episode is currently I'm in a busy ICU rotation. And one of the things that's part of this rotation is every fourth day I'm actually doing an overnight call. So I'm working 28 hours straight. So not only am I sleep deprived and not likely to do questions on those days, but then when I come home, I kind of lose the motivation as well as energy to do the second day. So I'm basically kind of losing two days in a row every four days on my study schedule and I'm getting 80 questions behind. And I'm hoping or I was hoping to help mitigate that by being able to do more questions on my day off like today, but as I've calculated how many questions I have, which I still have about a thousand left and I've done about six to 700. And I have roughly about two to three weeks left until my exam. That still gives me now an average about 50, 60 and almost 70 questions depending on how many days I'd like to finish ahead of my actual test day that I need to do every day. That brings me to the second thing that's not going amazingly well. And that just happens to be that my grades are a little bit lower than I would like them to be. Now I'll talk about in a little bit why my approach really kind of represents my grades, but I'm getting roughly about a little bit more than half correct. And most of those questions happen to be on things that I'm just far removed from. So the OB-GYN, the pediatrics, they just haven't done in a few years because I'm now an internal medicine resident. And with that being said, thankfully with the internal medicine questions I tend to do obviously a little bit better, but even with that, take it with the grain of salt that I tend to miss a few of them. Now problem number three is that I've also now been able to consistently get into some of the clinical questions that take part of day two. Now if you guys don't know what I mean, then definitely check out that first video that I made on step 30, kind of break down the process of how the test day and test process works. Now initially my approach was to be able to do a few case scenarios every few days, every four or five days. But as I mentioned earlier in this video, I'm already getting behind all my multiple choice questions. And so it hasn't really given me the priority or motivation to stick and start actually studying for the clinical scenarios part of the exam. And my other hope was is that using your world, I'd be able to kind of just fill in that gap and quickly learn how that system and the technology of that actual clinical cases would work as well as how to make orders, how to kind of do the process of the clinical cases. And at this point I've happened to do a few of the interactive cases that your world does apply. I think there's about 50 in them. So definitely probably more than I'll be able to do throughout the duration of my studying. But I did find that the way that the interactive cases were set up and the infrastructure in your world were a little bit odd. And I honestly don't know how well that they relate at this point to the real thing. So I think what I may do and adjust in my study schedule is use some of the free resources that the USM League gives on interactive cases. And hopefully I can make sure that the actual infrastructure and technology and how everything looks and how to make orders is truly the way your world presents it, which I'm assuming it is, but it doesn't make me feel a little bit nervous to get into the world studying and then potentially have to learn a new approach on how to take the interactive cases. But with that, one of the positives that definitely comes from the interactive cases is that I've definitely seen my physician brain that I've had now for all of the last two years kick in. So I know what orders to put in, how to interpret vitals and really not have to kind of think a little bit too much, but I do have to kind of make sure that I don't miss some of them common orders that they do want, like smoking cessation, pregnancy and counseling and et cetera. So those have definitely been some of the challenges that I've faced in the first week or two of studying for step three, but I do wanna actually talk about some things that are actually going well. Now one of the first things I'm really pleased about is my ability to answer questions quickly. Now I talked about earlier that my grades were lower than ideally I would want them getting about 50% of them right, a little bit more than that. But the reason for that is I'm actually answering questions as quickly as possible. And then I'll make a separate video on the channel altogether of how to raise your grades by being more efficient. But one of the approaches that I really stand by is in this situation where I have 16 to 1700 questions to do through your world, I simply can't sacrifice that time by trying to answer every single question as if it was a test, a question. I already know for example, that my pediatrics and my OBGYN knowledge is pretty poor at this time. It's been so far removed. So for me to take extra time to actually attend the question and still get it wrong where I'm more likely to do is just a waste of my time. So actually what I like to approach now is I like to answer every question in the first 30 to 40 seconds. My internal medicine questions I can usually do pretty quickly. Even the pediatrics questions and the OBGYN questions that I don't really know pretty well that would probably stump me on actual test day. I'm still answering those quickly because my main goal is to be able to get to the explanation that you all gives. And basically either I have that aha moment to when I realize it's something I did know, it's just been a while. So I need that quick review or something where I just realized that I don't even recognize is that all I can believe I ever learned this but I'm glad that I see it now. So answering the questions quickly definitely gives me some motivation because one, I know I'm quickly picking up my knowledge that I have lost in the last few years. And two, I'm also able to kind of see myself realistically getting to that 50, 60, 70 questions a day and being able to do multiple kind of practice question sets and blocks on my days off like today. Now if my timing was off that would definitely make me nervous but even with two weeks left and a thousand questions I know I can definitely be able to get through all the questions and still get myself some time to review the questions that I miss. And on a similar note, the second thing that's going really well is my question answer STEM method that I've teached a lot of my students on some of my courses and books down below which you guys can check out to be able to kind of answer clinical vignettes really quickly without getting trapped is working really well. I'm basically trying to get all of the clues and evidence based off of what answer choices I see as possibilities. And then I go back to the STEM to be able to find the information that I'm actually looking for versus a typical approach where people start reading the long clinical vignette and then they get upset and then they see the question and the line above the question is pretty much all they needed or they maybe just had to look at a picture and then they could have answered the question. So the question STEM method is definitely helping me be efficient and still I'm able to answer even those difficult questions for me at least and OBGYN, pediatrics and psychiatry. And the final thing that has been working really well is I have been able to effectively use downtime during my rotations and on busy call days such as being able to answer questions on my mobile app for you world or being able to pull up your world on my desktop while I'm waiting for the attending to come around essentially been able to get a question or two here and over the course of the day I may be able to get 20 or 30 questions by the time I come home I really just have to do a full block and then able to stay on schedule. Now those were the challenges and successes I've had so far definitely feels like I've had more challenges but a few things that I plan on doing definitely as you guys know I am a typical morning early morning riser but being on ICU rotation my motivation to get as much sleep as possible is definitely up there but because I know that this test day is about two, two and a half weeks away I definitely do want to make sure that I don't get behind later on in case a rotation does happen to get busier so I do plan on waking up early before my rotations around four AM to five AM to be able to just knock out some questions that way when I come home I could sleep or just relax instead of having to study which I really don't want to do after a long day in ICU and other things I've already kind of talked about I definitely plan on using the NBME practice sample questions for the clinical cases first before I go back to your world and I'm just gonna up my questions that I do on a daily basis hopefully I can do about a question block in the morning before I leave for the hospital that way when I come home counting the questions I may have been able to do during the day I would probably just have about 10, 20 questions left and that would be more than enough to be able to get through all of this on time and speaking of time while I do wish I had a little bit more of it before test day I'm pretty optimistic and motivated that this approach will still work out just fine but if you're interested to see how it works out then definitely check out our step three playlist down below including our first kind of overview video as well as videos just like this where I give you tips and true insight on how everything for step three for me is going to help you when you actually get there but with that being said guys that's gonna end this episode of our step three series definitely hit that subscribe button to get updated when the next video comes out hit that notification bell as well as hit that like button because that one that tells me that you enjoy this kind of content it definitely supports the channel I truly appreciate it and make sure if you have any questions if you'd like me to answer in a future step three video do you add those down below in the comments so after you're done hitting that like and subscribe I just want to say again thank you so much for your support hopefully this video in this episode has been helpful to you thank you as always for being a part of my journey hopefully I've been a little helped to you on yours I'll see you guys in the next one peace