 All right, so we are live on YouTube for those individuals. Let me welcome you guys. OK, so welcome, you guys. I'm so happy that you can join us today. I have with me Dr. Adam Rush, great, smart, intelligent man who has a wealth of knowledge for you all. I'm really happy to. Agree to be a part of this. So if you all can just mute yourself so that when we're talking, it doesn't go on. Actually, I can just meet you all. So then that way you will need to unmute yourself. If you want to talk, there will be an opportunity for you to ask us both questions at the end of the live session or towards the end of the session. But I just want to let everybody that is watching just kind of come on into the room, those that are going to be coming directly from Zoom and then those that are also watching on YouTube. OK, I'm really excited. We do have a lot to offer. I get that. So University, if you guys have not already checked us out there, there is some things catered specifically for our PA students. So if you're a student, there's an opportunity for you to just get some extra testing done. We're talking about high stake test and, you know, that the pants is one of our high stake exams that we have to take at the end of this. And so the more practice you're able to get, the better for you. So please go to get this university and see what we have to offer there. And for my pre-PA students, we have a lot for you guys in terms of virtual shadowing and then just getting to know the PA profession in and of itself. So get that so university dot com. OK. All right, I mean, we can get started so that I want to be respectful of everybody's time and then I'll allow people to come in as they enter in the chat room. But again, if you don't know who I am, hopefully you should know because you're on this live. But I am Adana Hackett, also known as Adana the PA. I guess you can say. So I started this YouTube channel and get that to university to help PA students and pre-PA students get into and through PA school. Originally, it was just to, you know, kind of see what my journey was like, but then it kind of morphed into something else after seeing that there was a need. With that being said, I had like a little bump in the road when I finished PA school where I did not pass my boards on the first go round. And I feel like there was a lot that went into that, meaning like there was like some anxiety and other things that I was dealing with. And so I wanted to talk to Dr. Rosh today about some tips that he might have for all of us that will have, you know, to take a high stick exam in our life that we can actually see and utilize because, you know, you want to pass and you want to ensure that you're able to succeed and move forward. You don't want to come and then be stumped by this one exam. So he is the creator of Rosh Review. He created it in 2011. If you have not used Rosh Review for your studying for anatomy or PA school or for your research or for med school, I suggest that you go look into it. It's really great. Has really good content and allows you to just continue to test yourself. So he knows what he's talking about. He also has another project that he's working on called Peak Performance, which helps you specifically with high stick exams. So I'm really excited for him to just kind of talk to you a little bit more about some of the things that he has seen. The mistakes that students have made when taking exams and some of the things that he's seen that will allow you to really succeed while taking these exams. OK, so I've done enough talking. The next voice you're going to hear is that of Dr. Adam Rosh from Rosh Review and so much more. He's an emergency medicine physician, among other things. OK. All right, Dr. Rosh. All right. Thank you. And just want to do a quick audio check. You could hear me OK. No problem. Sorry. All right. One second. Let me just. Yeah, go ahead and I'll wait for Donna. I saw a thumbs up there. Sweet. Well, all right, let me turn that off. So thank you, Donna. And I really appreciate you bringing me on because I love I love sharing some of my story and I love being able to help people because as you'll see, I think we'll probably have many things in common. And I could just say from the start that all of you have already done something, two things without even knowing you. I know you've done two things right so far. Number one is you're here on a Donna's show. All right. That you're following a Donna the PA. You're and because as you know her a Donna story, she's a persevere and you want to, you know, advice is, is, you know, when someone gives advice, you have to know where it's coming from. And I could tell you that what a Donna has been able to provide to this community is exceptional and highly valuable. So you've done you're on the right track there. The other thing, the second part is you're here. You're here tonight. And what that tells me and everyone else and it should tell yourself is that you've made a decision to invest in yourself. And it's that investment. It's not an investment in, you know, maybe some review book out there or review course. Those are important, certainly. But it's showing up. It's putting in the time to want to learn more, to want to get better, to find out what other options are out there. And everyone is doing that here. I would love if you feel like it, if you, if you are open to it, I would love to see some faces out there because all I look at is as old is this board, a tic-tac-toe board with names. But I totally understand if you don't want to put on your video. No big deal. But if you do, feel free. I think tonight what I'm looking for is as much interaction as possible. As far as understanding kind of what are people's fears out there? What are the things that you may struggle with or that you feel very comfortable with? What are the things that you want to improve on in test taking? Because whatever career it is in health professions, you're going to be taking lots and lots of tests. And oftentimes what happens is you may be and it happens more often than you think, you may be, you may have the intelligence, you may have the knowledge, but you struggle with test taking and you may end up not getting as far as you should simply because of this one hurdle, which some could argue, you know, what is it really testing? OK, what is it really showing us when you take a standardized exam? So whether you're going to, you know, I think we're going to have time for a specific Q&A. I think if you want to post some comments or questions as I'm speaking, if something comes to mind, jot it down, because the greatest utility of this time is going to be hearing about what what you struggle with and what you want to get better at. And I could say, and this is really important, if you're thinking it, I guarantee you, everyone else is thinking the same thing. No question is too easy, too simple. Don't be embarrassed by anything you have in mind that you want to get answered. If it's on your mind, get it answered tonight. Because what I could tell you is what's what's my credibility here? What am I bringing to this conversation? I could tell you the most important thing that I that I'm bringing is that I failed exams. I failed more than one exam in my life. In fact, I took the MCAT three times. I took the MCAT three times. And the irony of all that is I went from taking the MCAT three times to scoring in the 99th percentile on the medical board exam. Right. So what happened between that time? And that's where the metamorphosis happened. That's where the change happened. The realization, the learning, how to learn, the understanding, the difference between just general knowledge and application of that knowledge in an exam. And the credibility comes from doubt, self-doubt, comes from fear, fear of failure. But it also comes from dealing with that. It comes from overcoming those doubts and those fears to arrive at a point in my life where now I'm able to give a presentation like this or I'm able to speak to a group of ambitious and motivated students who want to do better, who want to reach their goals and achieve their dreams, whatever that may be, whether it's to be a PA, a nurse, doctor. Whatever it is. So I'm going to step back for a minute and let you digest some of that. Think about that. I want you to get some questions down. Keep thinking about what you want to dive into and we'll do that in a moment. I want to give you a little, little more perspective. I approach test-taking like someone would approach an athletic event, like someone would approach, maybe you're an actor or actress, and you have the premiere. And I think about it in ways of not just the studying that occurs in the books, that's actually a small part of everything. It's what's the mental, what's your mindset as you're approaching the exam? What's your mindset as you're studying for the exam? How much exercise are you getting before and during? What's your diet look like? A lot of times, we don't realize that there's a connection between how we perform in any way that we can. How we perform in anything, and in this case, high-stakes test-taking, to how we treat our mind and our body. And that is, I'm not saying it's the only thing, right? Obviously, you've got to know the knowledge. But it's so critical that when you're planning for these high-stakes exams that you take all of that into consideration. The other big idea that's really important to put out there is, most of the time, if you've struggled with test-taking or exams, as you go through, get higher and higher in your education, it's rarely that it's a knowledge problem. It's rarely a knowledge problem, right? I know a lot of there's going to be a handful of people here who are still in undergrad. But as you get into PA school, as you start graduating PA school, you've already proven that you belong. A lot of times, our confidence level isn't where it needs to be. And we have imposter syndrome oftentimes. But when you make it through school, you belong there, OK? And what happens to people often when they're not passing their exams or are not performing well in their exams is they have what's called an illusion of knowing. And that's about how they study. And it's about translating what they're studying to answering questions on their exam. Think about this for a minute. On a multiple-choice exam, every answer is staring you in the face. It's right there on the piece, on the page. You're looking at the correct answer. And your job is to be able to pick out the one out of the four or five answer choices. And gosh, right? If you just throw darts at that, you should get 25%, 20% of those right just by random guessing. Your job, when you're taking these high-stakes exams, is to be able to translate all the knowledge you have that you've prepared for and be able to translate that into picking that right answer choice that's right in front of you. It seems like it's so easy. And obviously, it's not. But often what happens is when people are studying, we could dig into this a little, when people are studying, they're studying in ways that the minute they leave that environment, whether it's the way you look at a review book, the way you just look at your notes, it's what I would characterize as passive learning. You read it. You understand it. But then when you put that content in a question that's in a different context, you can't answer it anymore. You lose the ability to translate what you learned to getting that right answer. Hopefully, that's kind of making sense a little. And part of studying then is knowing that that happens. It's called the illusion of knowing. It's thinking you know a topic. But then taking an exam, taking a question in a different setting, and you get it wrong. You have no idea what the answer is. And so one of the most important parts of preparing for high stakes exams is to move from a passive learning strategy to a more active learning strategy, engagement with the content. And you guys know ways of doing this just off the bat, flashcards. Flashcards are, there's lots of different things we could do. And what I'm happy to talk about, what I can certainly talk about is what are some of the best things you could do and how you could merge them all together to come out with a plan. And there's no way we're gonna do this in one sitting here. So what we wanna do is really talk about the highlights. What are the most important points here, the takeaways that will give you a starting point? You could, you know, do the right, you'll be able to figure out the rest on your own. So let me, I'm gonna pause for a minute and a doubt. I'm just gonna ask, are there any questions that we could kind of guide what I'm gonna, what I could focus on here? I could do, but. Yeah, there's two questions that I see or at least one from Nicole. She says, let me just read it for you. I see here, yeah. So she personally struggles with tests. Did you, did you read it? Do you wanna read it for everybody? Or do you want me to read it? Yeah, I'll read it, it's no problem. I got it here. So this is from person, thank you. Thank you for posting this. Feel free guys, if in the comment section in Zoom at least in the Zoom, post something in the chat box and we'll be able to guide the discussion a little. We have, first question is, I personally struggle with test anxiety. And when I take an exam, especially like a standardized exam, she can narrow it down to two answers, but I always then guess the wrong answers or second guess myself, any advice or tips? Absolutely. So this is the classic, classic scenario, right? Where you get something down to two answer choices and you end up second guessing yourself. So this is where practice becomes so important as you're preparing for your exams. You wanna learn about yourself, okay? You wanna kind of what's called in like the marketing world, it's called A-B testing in a sense. You wanna analyze yourself, all right? And let me give, all right, this will be two parts. This will be how do you avoid this problem? Cause it's a problem that a lot of people have. How do you avoid it? But then how do you identify and learn enough about yourself so that this doesn't really become an issue anymore? So number one, when you're taking a practice test and this happens, you get it down to two and you end up marking letter choice B and it turns out being C. You need to make a note in the margins when you're taking that test, this practice test, you just make a note and start it or whatever you wanna do. To tell yourself that, all right, this is one of those questions that I've narrowed it down. I don't know which one to choose, I'm gonna go with B and just document why you went with B, right? Was it your first gut instinct, like I know it's B or was it you went with B first and then you're like, well, I don't know. I kind of feel like it was, it's C and you end up changing it to C. So document while you're practicing whether you went with your gut, your first instinct or whether you talked yourself out of it, okay? It's a very simple first step. When you're done with your test, all the ones, you go back and you look at the ones that you started and you see 80% of the time when I went with my gut, when I went with my first instinct, I got it right. Well, now you know that when you're taking the real exam, just keep going with your gut. Never second guess yourself or make it very rare that you're gonna second guess yourself, okay? And believe it or not, there are scenarios where that's flipped, where people are able to think through a question a little more and end up changing it to the right answer. And when you see that being more common, then you couldn't be confident when you're on an exam and you're studying, you're thinking through it, you could be confident that it's okay to change your answer. Right, because you've tested this out and you know what the more common scenarios are. Now, here's the other caveat to that. There are sometimes the more intelligent you are, the more knowledge you have, the more analytical you are as a person, you answer questions more often incorrectly. Think about this. Sometimes questions are so straightforward that subconsciously you overthink the question because you're analyzing something. Let me give you some, an example, especially in clinical medicine. So if you're out there seeing patients, you get a question and there's the answer. It's the correct answer. And then there's other ones. You don't know which one's correct yet, but you start thinking to yourself, you're like, well, maybe there is this scenario that I could come up with. There is this kind of rare event that I could see that happening as well in the clinical world, dealing with patients, okay? And then you end up talking yourself out of the simple straightforward answer. You have to always remember that the test writers, don't call them test writers, they're just volunteers. They're just faculty members, teachers, grad students. Call them Myra, call them John, right? Call them Jose. That's all they are. And they're writing questions and they're thinking about what's right and wrong. They're putting those answer choices down. And they're just normal people. They're not tricking anyone. They are not trying to trick you. You know who's tricking us, yourselves, right? We trick ourselves out of those questions. There's really no tricks. Dr. Raj, like really, can you be completely honest with us? They're not trying to trick us because everybody says this. I remember hearing this all the time in PA school and I swear on every exam, they were trying to trick me at least five times. So I don't know if I believe that statement, but I will go ahead and bow to you on that one since you are absolutely the professional on this topic. I would say this. There may be complexity and subtleties in a question, but when it's straightforward and that answer comes to you right away, usually that's gonna be the right one. Don't think yourself out of the answer. But before you make that, like actually taking the exam, what you do is you analyze yourself, right? Like doing that exercise we spoke about in the beginning here. Seeing, so a real world example of that is an emergency medicine physician. If I'm seeing, for example, appendicitis, when I used to see patients, when I see patients with appendicitis, I used to do this, I don't do it now as much. I would write, you'd examine them. You didn't know they had appendicitis, but I'd examine them and I'd make a mental note and then write it down in a little notebook. I'd say, if I were to, if I had to bet right now, do they have appendicitis or not based on my history and physical exam, yes or no? And then you get a CT, a CAT scan done and you know for sure, right? Definitively whether they have appendicitis or not. And then you go back at the end of your shift and you look, hey, how was my gestalt? How was my reasoning? Did it match up with what I'm actually seeing when the real diagnosis comes? It's learning about how you make decisions. See, we all think we're making the right decisions all the time, but we're so impacted by biases, right? That we're influenced in ways we have no idea we're being influenced. And so this also applies to test taking. And if you could measure yourself and get objective information, it will help you then when you take the actual exam. It's all worth that investment in time is all worth it as you're leading up to your exam. That's why I feel like when you have a high stakes exam one year in advance, you should start thinking about it. Six months, you're actually actively engaging in preparing for this thing, right? This isn't like one month, boom, I'm gonna get ready for this high stakes exam. It's like, right? You're training for the Olympics. You're training for a month, you're training over a long period of time. All right. So feel free to leave any comments or questions I could expand on that. I, yeah. I know for me when I was taking the boards that the anxiety, like I knew that I was like golden, right? I took all of these various different test taking review courses, review courses. I did a lot of questions, there was a lot. I did a lot and we did this for obviously the course of our clinical year and then the last month or so of, well, three months really of PA school we did a review course and we did several of them. And so I was like, yes, I'm prepared. But the day of the test, actually like the night before, if I'm being really honest, probably the week before the exam, I was already like building myself up for this, what if? What if I don't pass? What is everybody gonna say? What are my parents gonna say? I owe all these people depending on me. And then the night before I knew like the anxiety hit really hard and I was never one to actually suffer from like test anxiety. So for somebody like myself or for somebody who actually does suffer from test anxiety, what are some things that we can do like practically in this time because it's not just about academic knowledge, right? I mean, for the most part we have the knowledge. We've been in school, so we know the material. And if we've graduated, we should know the material. So what can we do to help kick ourselves out of that that anxiety phase that we're facing like prior to taking these exams? Yeah, I think there's a very common scenario. Great question. And I can tell you this, if I had the perfect answer for that, we'd put Pfizer out of business. They'd have no more anxiety drugs out there, right? So stage fright, anxiety, all of that stuff, right? I mean, I was a little anxious before this call, right? It never goes away, right? The fear, the anxiety never goes away. So it's about how do you manage that? And it's not just in test taking, it's in anything. You're giving a talk, a speech, whatever it is. I mean, the only person here who I don't think is anxious is Adana when she's doing her videos and stuff like that. I mean, that's amazing. You should talk about how do you prepare yourself for that because whatever you're doing there seems like it works. But I think it's the same thing what you do for any situation in life, right? And I could tell you, I could give you some insights for test taking that I think could be valuable. It's what I call situational inoculation, okay? Situational inoculation. So to inoculate is like a vaccine, right? Like the first inoculation was smallpox. You take the actual smallpox virus, this isn't done anymore, and you inoculate people and then they become immune to smallpox. So let's translate that in a test taking. How do you take situations that cause anxiety? You expose yourself to that before the exam so that when you're in the exam, you feel more comfortable. It's less scary. So there are some things that I could talk about. Like for example, some of this sounds a little crazy. I mean, you may think some of this is crazy, but this is what I did and this is what I suggest. Before I would take a practice test, right? Let's say I'm leading up to my exam, I take a practice test, I'll down like six cups of coffee, get my heart rate going real fast, right? You ever drink too much coffee? You feel anxious, you feel like, you know, you get anxious, right? The caffeine causes anxiety. So I'm inoculating myself by giving myself anxiety. So I pound caffeine and then maybe do some jumping jacks, you get your heart rate up and then boom, you start doing questions. And you have to focus now for the next hour with your heart rate beating, you may be jittery, tremulous from all that caffeine and you're doing and you're taking your exam. So that's one situation. I think it's also valuable. I think having breathing techniques is so valuable before an exam. And there's this other part I wanna talk about in a minute too. Breathing before an exam, relaxing yourself, slow deep breathing has such a great impact on your clarity, your mental clarity, just try it. I mean, you have nothing to lose, right? It's just breathing. So try that out, okay? And here's another thing that seems like why would this work? But it does and there's actually studies. Before your exam, either speak it, either write it down or think to yourself, I'm gonna crush this thing. I'm gonna do this. And I put in the time, I put in the effort, I'm here today, I'm gonna do it, I deserve this positive speak, right? It's shown over and over again. And there's a lot of different data on this, but just doing positive speak has a huge impact, all right? That's on exam day, even throughout. Fear is gonna seep in all the time. It's looking for you, all right? It's gonna find you, but what you do with it is up to you. There are some things where you could say, look, now we're just gonna, let's talk about fear a little. How do you manage your fear? You could ask yourself, you could do things like fear setting, right? What is the worst case scenario in this situation? What's the worst case scenario? You know, you're taking a high six exam, a standardized exam and you don't do well and it sucks, right? You put in all this time, but most of the time you have a second chance and even a third chance and fourth chance. So you answer yourself, like what's the worst case scenario? I have to do this again, right? So you do fear setting, exercises kind of lead it up to this as well. And no one wants to be in that position, but it's not real, right? Actually, the fear itself, it's just yourself creating that fear. It's yourself doing it because you could flip that fear upside down and just, it could be exude confidence too, right? So I think when we talk about anxiety, test anxiety, the big takeaways are preparing yourself. It's rare that when you're prepared, you're anxious, very rare, prepare yourself, make sure you've given yourself enough time to study. You've given yourself enough time to take your practice exams. In fact, there's a method I call the rolling stop. So you know when you're driving in a car, there's a stop sign, not a lot of people around. You come, you know, and then you see that stop sign, you slow down, you kind of look, you never stop, and then you accelerate through it. Think about that when you're test taking, right? When you're preparing, when you're studying, you're working super hard, long hours, studying, studying, studying, your exams coming up, slow down a little at the end, take a breather, relax, get sleep, make sure you're prepared for your exam, lay everything out, right? You don't need to be studying up to the last minute. You're not gonna remember anything new. So the day before the exam, at least, you slow down and then you're mentally focused and you wake up the next morning, boom, you accelerate right into that exam. You show up ready, you show up ready to knock it down and take that exam, all right? It's the rolling stop. Go right through it. So managing the anxiety is the same way you'd manage it for anything, in a sense. But the number one thing is you gotta be prepared. Number two, expose yourself to different situations. Other situational inoculation where things like, if you're studying, go to a loud cafe, right? Mentally block out the noise and totally focus. I mean, how annoying is it when people, you hear conversations sometimes when you're trying to study, but if you could force yourself to be able to take this practice exam while someone's speaking next door to you, you're just building strength and confidence for the actual exam. Do it in environments that are hot or cold. That's another one, because you never know when you're in the exam room, whether it's gonna be too cold or too hot for you. Do it on an empty stomach and a full stomach, things like that, right? So there's all different scenarios that you could subject yourself to. And I don't know if this sounds crazy to you or not, but I think this stuff works really well. Yeah, so we have one person who says it works for them and it helps with anxiety in the end. Another thing you could do is if you have access to the test location, go to it, go sit down at a desk, go study for 20 minutes at that desk that you may take your exam in. Look around, feel the room, be familiar with your settings. That helps too for in the test anxiety as well. And then when you show up, breathe. Eight deep breaths, slow, deep breaths. And then you hit the exam. What do you think? I think that's great. I'm not a caffeine drinker, so I don't know about the caffeine for me, but definitely I do pretty well with noise anyway. So I think for me, it would have been the opposite in learning how to study in the dead quiet. Because when you're in the test center, you have these headphones on, it's super quiet. So it's just you, your thoughts and the questions on the screen. So it's easier for me to psych myself out, which is something that I realized after I had to retake it again. So I think those are all great points. We do have a couple of questions in here. Mary G said, I take my GRE in two days, congratulations. I hope you're doing that rolling stop that Dr. Rosch just talked about and kind of relaxing a little bit. She says, I feel confident and prepared, but when I get to the test environment, I suddenly feel like I forget everything. Any tips or any tips on taking the GRE in general? Well, look, you're two days away. Right now, it should all be about confidence, talking to yourself, good self-talk about performing well on the exam. Two days away, I don't wanna, there's really no, you've done your studying, now it's time to show up and do it. I think showing up and feeling confident is the most important thing, saying that to yourself. There are things what happen when people take exams that they think they're prepared for and then they go to answer a question and they're like, I studied this, but I have no idea how to answer this question. And that's when we go back to the illusion of knowing. It's because they probably read the chapter on this chemistry chapter, acid-base equations, and they probably were only looking at it within that one little note section of that chapter. They were probably only doing questions when they were doing acid-base questions and the environment never changed. You didn't get to study that material outside of that one page. Ways to avoid, to circumnavigate or to get around that is by doing things like retrieval practice, space repetition, and what is that? Retrieval practice, like you can imagine, like a flash card is retrieval practice, but it's studying something, testing yourself, putting it down, forgetting it, actually. You retain knowledge by retrieving it. So you forget it, retrieve it. You forget a little less, you retrieve it. You forget a little less, you retrieve it. Those cycles is what allows you to build knowledge. So when you only look at something once and you say to yourself, oh, I know this, if you never test yourself on that over the next couple of weeks, what do you really know it, you know? You have to do things like retrieval practice by doing question banks or flash cards or having someone ask you questions about it and then you have to explain it, right? Ask yourself more questions on it. And when you do that over time, two days, every two days or every three days, that's called space repetition, going back to the material. That's how you avoid the illusion of knowing. That's how you avoid that. So one second here, let me just, okay. And there's a handful of other basic techniques that you could do, but I think for the sake of this conversation, some of the simplest things that we could do that you guys could do, for exam prep is you read your material, you're studying your material, you have to test yourself on it. You know, you could do it the old school way, cover it up, right? And ask you to test yourself. That's so important to do. Make flash cards and then elaboration is one of the other learning techniques. It's explaining it either to yourself or to someone else. If you could explain something and it makes sense to you and it makes sense to someone else, that means you're starting to truly understand that material and you could take that material and put it in a different context and you should still be able to recognize it. Anki, yep, that's another great one, Jaylin. That's a software you could use. There's lots of them online. Retrieval practice, space repetition, elaboration, those are the classic things that you could do. And what those do is that takes your passive learning, your passive studying, just looking at notes and rewriting them, that's passive, right? You're not really forming neural connections. You're not, you know, it's not imprinting in your mind. You gotta think about it as like dough, like you gotta shape it, carve it, throw it, do stuff with it. That's how you start remembering things. That's the act of learning, the act of process. These words need to come alive. The concepts need to come alive. And that just means, you know, questions, talking about it, coming back and forth to it. Hopefully that was helpful. So Jaylin, I think it was, so let me just add that. Jaylin says, would the CASPER exam be considered high stakes? If not for the GRE, do you have recommendations for how to go through questions expeditiously with accuracy? So I mean, I can get my opinion on the CASPER. I think that, I think any exam could be considered high stakes, right? It's really how you deem it in terms of its importance for you. So yes, although the CASPER doesn't necessarily test knowledge based in terms of like academic stuff, like sciences and maps, it's still a test that you have to take for some schools to get into PA school. So some might consider it high stakes. It's not something that you can necessarily prepare for in terms of I am going to study how to be a better practitioner, I guess you can say, or how I should answer these questions. But you really should talk to people, look at the exam, maybe look at some of their test questions that they have. So you can see what they do, how they ask the questions and then some of the answers and then you can choose your question based on that. As far as questions expeditiously with accuracy, I guess Dr. Rosch can take that one away. She asked, how can she go through questions expeditiously? Yeah, absolutely. So Jaylin, I think this is a great question. The Q bank or going through questions, there's a really critical technique here in that if you just go through your, you read, you know, you do a question, if you're just doing questions, so there's different ways you could do a question, see if you got a right or wrong and be done with it. That's the worst, all right? You could do the question, you could see if you got a right or wrong and then you could read the explanation and then be done with it. That's the middle. And then you could do the question, see if you got a right or wrong, read the explanation and then really understand why you got it wrong and document that. That's the best. You document it in your notebook, your Q bank notebook. What you do is you do that enough. Every time you get a question wrong, you document it down in your notebook and you say, and you write, just why you got it wrong? And every day or every other day or however your schedule permits, that's your, that notebook, it becomes your key. This is such an important notebook. You review every day why you got these wrong and it could be just one or two lines, why you got it wrong and you go through it. You mark it up, you highlight, you circle and day one, obviously it's just gonna be like a page but if you're studying for a couple of weeks, you're gonna end up having a full notebook and think about what's in this notebook. This notebook is what I call your unknown unknowns. They're the things you didn't know you didn't know and now you're documenting them all and you're studying them. And in a sense, if you could learn the things that you were getting wrong, compare it with just reading notes. Imagine I'm reading notes on some stoichiometry I don't even know if that's a real thing. I think it is, it's been a long time. So you're reading a chapter in chemistry verse, you don't know what you don't know. Things may look complicated, you read it, you say to yourself, oh, I get it now. Verse, doing a question, getting it wrong, documenting why you got it wrong. Next time you do that question, you say, hey, did I get it right or wrong? If you get it wrong again, document it again. And eventually, eventually you have documented the majority of the things that you can get wrong in a subject. Think about that. If you do this for two, three months, if you're studying for something, there's only so many types of questions people could ask. And you've just documented all the things you're getting wrong. So like I said, to answer your question, Jay Lin, there's this technique where you just answer it, yes or no. And then there's all the way this technique where you keep a notebook and you use that notebook as this living, engaging resource. And that's my favorite. I think that it becomes so useful in studying for something. And you'll see the longer you engage with it, the less and less you end up writing down because you start getting all the questions right because you've already practiced, you've already found out what you didn't know. Now you're starting to get everything right. So I think that's a good technique for that. Okay. I was just seeing if there's any more questions, specific questions in the comments either in Slack, I'm sorry, either in Zoom or in YouTube at all. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I do have a question. First off, thank you both for being here and spending time with us and sharing your thoughts. Dr. Raj, so one of the things that I come across with our EURs in PA school is that sometimes when you're taking your exams, you have multiple resources that have different answers when it comes to second line treatment or even sometimes even third line treatment. Any suggestions or advice on how to determine what you should go with in terms of when you have two textbooks who have different treatments. And then as you were mentioning in clinical, you may see something completely different than your textbooks. So when trying to determine the correct answer, any advice on that? Great, great question and thank you for that. The first question is, how do you manage when resources differ in the knowledge and information they're giving you? And hopefully that's just limited, not a common occurrence. I would ask though, on the test, are you really gonna be asked the second and third line? And maybe the answer is yes. Hopefully you're not being asked the second and third line because I don't think there is. Sometimes there's no consensus on that, right? And so that's probably why resources have different second and third lines. I think if you get a different first line, that should raise a flag. And you should look at which one, dig into that a little, see who's right when you have two resources. Make a note of that, be like, oh, it's interesting. And maybe they haven't updated this one yet. There's no system though to say, what do you do if you get two resources and then how do you answer it on an exam? How do you apply that to an exam? Hopefully there's some type of relationship or hopefully, I would say this. And this is, I suspect this is more commonly the case. You may have two first line treatments, but on the exam, both of those aren't gonna be an answer choice. It will be one or the other. Hopefully. So I think if that would be a flawed question, if there could be two answers, two right answers to it. So that's a tough one. I mean, I don't think there's a, that's a tough one, but I would just say, the takeaway on that is if there's two different answers and two different, people are given two different answers, just dig into it, find other resources, get a tiebreaker resource and see where they're at. Okay, thank you. That makes sense. All right. There's a question here I'm gonna read. I'm a junior in high school and you are ambitious. That is, that is amazing, really amazing. I love, I love hearing that. Anytime I hear about these high schoolers who are like interested in the PA profession, I'm like, man, where was I in high school? And what was I thinking about? Because PA was not even on my radar. So kudos to you, favor. All right. I'm taking my SAT April 13th. So this live Zoom couldn't have happened at a better time. My question is a little unrelated. However, I'd like to ask you both, how you were able to choose your specific career without the fear of later regretting it. Donna, you wanna, you wanna, I mean, I know how I was. Sure. Go ahead, Donna. I mean, so I've talked about this a lot, like on my channel and just in general, but I had mentors, right, in my life that kind of helped me just kind of determine the type of person that I am. And so if anybody knows me, you know, I'm like super family oriented. I wanna be at home with my kids and my husband. And that's where, and my just general family and that's where I wanna spend the majority of my time, although I still wanna practice medicine. And so although I was initially going for to be an OB-GYN, after some situations happen with some of my mentors, I realized like, there were things that I was not willing to give up. And that was really time. So I looked for other professions that would allow me to be in the medical field, but yet still have time and the flexibility of time with my family. I looked at being a nurse midwife, because again, I wanted to be in women's health, but I didn't wanna do nursing. I would have to go to nursing school all over again and then go to NP school. And so that didn't seem practical to me. And then I saw the PA profession and in my initial study of the PA profession, I didn't even realize like how great a profession we have, how much lateral mobility and just areas that I can dive into without being pigeonholed in one, sorry, Dr. Adam Rush, the emergency medicine physician. But I like that aspect. I like that I'm able to kind of go in various different areas because right now I'm in trauma, but in the future I wanna be in women's health and maybe I might wanna be in peace because I like babies and kids and women. So that's why I did a lot of research on this and I was able to say, okay, this is what will work well for my family. I don't have to take a lot of time in school to get to this profession. And then at the end of this, I still get to practice and be at home. So for me, I looked at all of the various different components of what I wanted my life to look like in the future. And this profession is what fit it best. So that's why I have no fear whatsoever that I'm regretting it or that I wanna be a physician or a nurse or an OT or a PT. I'm exactly where I wanna be. And if I get bored in the specialty that I'm in, I have the opportunity to go ahead and slide into something else. So that's why I chose it. Thank you, Donna. That was, I think that's a really wonderful way to think about it. I favor, you're in high school. And what I could tell you is that it's amazing that you're thinking this way. That's a mature level to think about. But I could also say that we're often, society has kind of created this environment where we're kind of pressured to make these decisions so early on also. And yeah, there's real economic and financial needs out there. There's debt, there's whatever it is, you gotta go out and get a job. But I would say this, that whatever first career you decide, whether it's a PA or an ER doc or whatever, you could change, right? Nothing says that you have to do just one thing. If you don't like it, yeah, there's some sacrifices that you end up having to make and, but just you could do something else. I have two kids. What I would tell my kids is, you know, go out there and see what you like. There are very ambitious people who are in high school who say, I wanna be a PA. I wanna be this, I wanna be that. And that's that's a, like that motivation and ambition is amazing. But you ask the second part of that is what happens if I'm wrong? Nothing, you just go change, do something else that you wanna do. What's the story? I think Colonel Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65, something like that, right? He had all these other careers. I don't know if that's a real story, but that's what I've heard. So, and then the other thing is make sure you're watching it down on the PA. I mean, she'll lead you in the right direction and help you out that way. You're so good at this. Guys, go ahead and subscribe to down on the PA right now and check out Get Back to University and Rosh Review if you haven't already done so. Oh, here's a good one. Yasmin, Yasmin, do you mind if I take this one and then have you follow up on it Adana? Because- Yes, take it away. Yasmin, I tell you my GPA after my second year, I got a 1.9, my second year of college. It was a 1.9. My cumulative GPA was a 2.1. Got a letter from the dean and we don't know if you're fit for college and that was impactful in my life, right? I was lost, you know, it was the darkest time for me, I would say. And I just, I made a decision. I said, I'm gonna commit to education. I'm gonna commit to learning how to learn. And I went to undergrad five years because my first two were, I don't even remember my first two, right? And I spent that time building up my GPA. I finally graduated with a 3.0. So you can imagine what that was like. And then I went to grad school. I did, I went to grad school for microbiology. They paid me, right, to go to school and to I.T.A., right? I had to work, but I took classes again, brought up my GPA even more overall. And then I applied to medical school. There was no way I was getting in medical school after undergrad, there was no way. And, you know, those extra three years allowed me to get involved in more volunteer activities, allowed me to do some lab or research, allowed me to mature as a person. So that when I showed up to do an interview, I had a story to tell. I had purpose, right? It wasn't just like, I don't know, maybe I wanna be a doctor. It was look what I just put myself through. This is meaningful to me. And even if you don't accept me this time, I'm gonna be back here next year, right? This is where I'm going. So, Yasme, I would say it's emotionally, I'm sure, hard to know where you're at right now. If you did struggle or you did do poorly in some of these classes, but there's lots of proof out there that you could get past that. But you gotta put in the work, you know? You gotta put in the work in the future. But the future, it's clean, right? It's fresh. It's a new start. Every day, every opportunity, every minute, you could start, you could start new. Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with everything that he said. I do wanna just make the point that it is hard, right? And I don't want us to be disillusioned to the fact that sometimes things can just come really easily. You may see your peers and things are just kind of flowing so easily for them. And for you, it's taking you a little bit of work, but that's fine if you're willing to put the work in. And so, although it may be hard, it's possible. I mean, so many people have done it before you and so many people will do it after you. So it's possible to absolutely bring up your GPA. You just kind of really have to have a plan, look and see the courses that you may wanna take that may weigh a little bit higher that will actually bring the GPA up in a timely fashion if you're on a deadline. If you're not on a deadline, then just go ahead and take your time and bring it up and then apply when you're ready. I think that's really exceptional advice. And when I just told, said my story, it wasn't like that was an overnight thing. That was years, years putting into it in a struggle. It was a rough time for sure. But I think what I just wanna stress is that there's never a dead end, right? Like there's always opportunities to make improvements over time. And I do wanna say one other thing because I know this is something like as a believer, there was something that I struggled with when I didn't get into like PA school the first time or when I didn't do things really well the first time because I was always used to like being the top at something, right? And when you're like type A personality or you're in, you wanna be in medicine, like that's your thing, like you're the best. And I would always think like, oh God, like is this your call for me? Like am I really listening to you or am I doing my own thing? And I think it's easy for us to psych ourselves out of these things that could really be beneficial to us because we're doubting ourselves because of this little mishap. So when Dr. Roth says like, yes, it takes time, this wasn't just overnight, stick with it. I think that that is if one thing you guys can take from tonight is absolutely take that away with you. Like do this, take the time, push through, there is light. You know, it's clean, the future is there for you. So just keep persevering. All right, you're welcome Yasmin, she thanks us. I don't know if anybody else has any other questions. We're at 804, these typically last an hour. So the time kind of flew by but if you have any other questions please leave them in the comment in the chat box right now or in the comment section on YouTube so that we can get to some of those questions and then we'll wrap everything up. Again, if you have not checked out, get that cuniversity.com, go check it out right now. We're actually going to be transitioning to give you guys more virtual shadowing and one-on-one time and experience with a PA. So if you're interested in that, then you should sign up for, get that cuniversity. There are a couple more questions that were posted. I don't, what is, okay, Tyasia says, how many hours per day should I be studying for the GRE if I plan to take it in July? So for me, when I was studying for the GRE, I studied like it was my job. I didn't have a job at the time, so I guess it was my job, but I studied eight hours a day. I definitely gave myself breaks in between that time, but I figured I could be doing something productive rather than just watching TV or doing passive stuff. So I definitely gave myself a schedule and I studied essentially like I was in school. So that was an eight hour day for me and I did this for a month just to really ensure that I was prepared. So for you, I think you can kind of, you have a good amount of time. There's about what, three months or so left. So you can make yourself a schedule on how you wanna do that. Maybe you kind of titrate it down or titrate it up based on how you feel your, just went out, but you can do maybe like eight, then five, then six, then four and however you wanna do it with respect to the time as it gets closer to the test or titrate it up. I don't know if you have something different, Dr. Rosh, but it's all dependent. Yeah, I think you nailed it. I mean, look, I don't wanna, I'm not here to promote a product. I just wanna make that clear, but I've created, if you look up Roche or OSH, RochePeakPerformance.com, it lays out kind of a, you know, everything that you would do to prepare for a high-states exam, including how many hours to spend, how to select your review books, where to study, things like that. There's some free lectures that are baked into that that you could pull out of that. But I think studying for a GRE, it's ideally, it's ideally you carve out every, you know, most things out, you carve out your life and you're able to focus on that, on your study. You know, four hours a day, six hours a day, you know, that's probably a sweet spot. When I studied for the USMLE step one, it's the exam between a second and third year of medical school. I could tell you a negative story here. I was studying 12 hours a day, 12 to 14 hours a day. It's not uncommon. And it was rough. It was like 28 straight days of studying like that. And when it was over, I became depressed, right? So there's consequences to that. So you want to make sure that you have, you know, you want to do it in a modest amount, but something that's going to work. So I would say anything between four and eight hours is a sweet spot. I think that is it. Everything else was kind of like thank yous. So thank you guys so much for joining us. Let me just check YouTube really quickly to see if there were any questions in here specifically about like taking tests and high stakes exams. So somebody asked, not necessarily about exams, but the application process, should you or is it smart to bring up that you're a second time applicant? And I mean, for me, I don't know if it's necessarily smart or not smart. I think that most people are, for the most part, they will know if you're a second time applicant, if this is the second time you're applying to that program, if it's not the second time they're applying to the program, there are some really unique ways that you can bring that up. I know Dr. Rush talked about his time in saying like, when he was finished doing all of the things that he had done, he was able to say, look at everything that I have done to be here. And that's something that I also kind of addressed in my interview when they were like, well, why now? Why do you feel like you should, you're prepared for PA school now? And I was like, well, look, I did all of these things over the course of three months, I took all of these classes and I got straight A's in all of them. I'm so built for this. And so there's a way that you can go about doing that, pretty, like very smoothly. But I don't think it's definitely obviously like the first thing you should be like, yeah, I'm a second time applicant. So if just kind of look at the ways that you might want to broach that subject, if it's asked, like if it's proposed to you, or if there's a way for you to kind of address that, because it just kind of shows perseverance as well. Okay, all right. I think that was the last question though that I saw on YouTube. So thank you guys so much for joining us. We really, really appreciate you. I hope that this was beneficial for you all. I know even me as a new grad, it's beneficial because I'm already thinking about like recertification, but it's nine years away, so it's good. But I'm still already thinking about it. So I just want you guys to really take some of these tips that we've addressed here, apply it to the various different exams that you are planning on taking. I put in the chat section, Dr. Roche's peak performance, although he says that he's not here to promote anything. I want you guys to go check it out because his Roche review like helped me become a PA. So I'm pretty sure that this peak performance is gonna help with like alleviating some of the anxiety that comes along with taking really high-stake exams. Also go on and check GetThatsTheUniversity.com and thank you guys so much for watching. I will have a new video out for you guys on Sunday. So be sure to check that out. All right, thanks guys. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Adana. You're welcome.