 What is up guys karma medic here and welcome back to another dose if you're new to the channel hi My name is Nasser and I'm now a fourth-year medical student studying at Kings College London And I very thankfully just finished the US Emily step one exam this last summer in between my third and fourth year of medical school I spent six months studying for that exam and I made a series of videos all about it my studying tips and techniques my Resources and everything like that. I'll leave those linked in the description down below if you're interested So now that I've finished the US on the step one exam and I feel like I've learned a lot from that studying process I'm just from the experience of going through it all I want to share with you guys what I wish I had known when I was studying and what I wish I had done differently Now these are things that I personally would have benefited from if I knew them before I started studying or earlier in my Process of studying for the step one exam, and I hope that they help you as well So the first thing that I want to talk about is making a cheat sheet at the very beginning You've got one hour of break time to use however you want throughout this exam and in the first 15 minutes You have a tutorial I would highly highly recommend using five or ten minutes of that 15 minute tutorial to make yourself a cheat sheet That you can then refer to as you're going through all the different blocks You can literally write down anything that you want during that time on your cheat sheet And it'll save you so much time in the future when you're actually doing the questions And I actually have an example of what my cheat sheet looks like on my iPad Because I practiced for a couple of days what I actually wanted to write down So this is pretty much exactly what I wrote down at the very beginning of my exam And I had this reference to look out while I was doing all of the questions So for example something that I found very very helpful was this table over here for bio stats in order to quickly be able to Calculate the positive predictive value negative predictive value false positive false negative Etc and I even wrote down those equations here on top of that something I found really helpful was the sexual development flowchart You know the one for how the different internal and external genitalia are made in the males and females I also wrote down this general sort of flowchart of viruses and how to categorize them I got this from a video on YouTube I'll try and link that in the description down below and then as you can see all kinds of other Equations and just things that I personally was having difficulty with memorizing or understanding I wrote them down on this cheat sheet so that I wouldn't even have to think about it If I saw a question that required this information and this was especially useful for the pharmacology equations loading dose maintenance dose Volume distribution etc. I already had these equations here So when I saw a question that required those numbers I could just plug them in really quickly Of course, you can write down whatever it is you want on your cheat sheet Whatever you personally are struggling with and I just found this invaluable And I found that not enough students knew about this or thought about doing this And it's something that I think can really help you pick up three marks on test day The next thing that I want to talk about is the dirty USM of the YouTube channel I believe it's run by an American physician and he just goes through all of the most difficult complex and annoying topics to memorize and makes them into an easy video form using Really ridiculous and mnemonics that helps you actually memorize that information and they honestly work a hundred percent of the time So every time I was going through my first aid book and I came across a really big table with just tons of dense information And I was having trouble remembering it for example the glycogen storage diseases lysosomal disorders neuro cutaneous disorders anything like that I would just search up the dirty USM of the video equivalent. Okay, so for example, let's take this page of neuro cutaneous disorders I mean, this is just a super complex super dense topic and the Unfortunate fact of the matter is you need to know that table inside out in order to answer questions on the step one exam So dirty USM of the takes that information and makes it into fun and interesting mnemonics that are actually easy to memorize And I actually have an entire set of notes on my iPad just dedicated to dirty USM of the step one videos So if I go to my USM least step one notes over here I have a dirty USM le folder or note and these are all notes that I made just from his videos They're absolutely fantastic and genuinely help you memorize the information in a very good way If there's anything you're having particular difficulty memorizing check if dirty USM le has made a video on it And it'll honestly help you pick up those marks on test day. All right. The third thing is sketchy medical Now in my opinion sketchy micro is just non-negotiable You have to do sketchy micro before doing sketchy micro anytime a micro question came up I would dread it. I would be annoyed and upset because honestly It's really hard to get those marks if you're just reading paragraphs of texts in FA or anything like that And after I was done with sketchy micro I was actually looking forward to doing questions on micro because I knew I could get the answer right Especially if you're a visual learner sketchy micro is a fantastic resource I also use sketchy medical for the pharmacology section, which honestly helped me a lot I honestly couldn't more highly recommend it and I still remember my sketchy sketches now in my fourth year of medical school And it helps me answer questions and remember things on the wards as well So yeah, sketchy medical is honestly equal to free easy points. All right next on the list is pathoma chapters 1 to 3 I'm going to say this again pathoma chapters 1 to 3 no joke There were probably 10 to 15 questions on test day that came straight out of those three chapters And I read them the night before my exam and they helped me pick up those points without any difficulty at all The first three chapters covered in this book about inflammation neoplasia and then cellular adaptations and growth and things like that Those are topics that underlie the general systems and pathology throughout the entire of medicine And so examiners love to go after that material They know how important that fundamental basic science is and so they love asking questions on it So honestly, you would be doing a great disservice to yourself If you didn't go through those three chapters right before your exam All right, the fifth thing that I want to talk about is having a list somewhere That's called something like must do before my exam now every time I was studying something where I felt like I was a bit weak in that topic or I didn't understand it fully But I didn't necessarily want to interrupt what I was doing at the time For example if I was in the middle of doing a block of practice questions I would write it down on this list and then each one of those things you'll see I've dedicated a little box around and then I write down what I want to do underneath it And this way I could always keep track of the topics that I was having particular difficulty with Things that I knew I needed to review more than once and I could easily come back to them on this page If I needed to we've got glaucoma treatment over here diabetes pathology So anyways, this helped me get out of the trap of just continuing to revise things that I'm good at And forgetting to revise the things that I'm not that good at So I would highly recommend having a list like this as well Make sure you keep it up to date and you actually refer to and review what's on that list as you go through your studying Okay, next, please don't rush studying for this exam This exam is absolutely huge covers like four years of biomedical sciences or pre-med degree And then your first three years of medical school as well the exam covers so much content and so many fine details That just have to be memorized that it honestly doesn't work if you just sit down and do it in one go I personally studied for this exam in six months and I feel like that wasn't the right way to do it I know I would have done better if I did the same amount of studying over a longer period of time I was always in the mindset of having to complete the work that was in front of me very quickly Having to absorb all this information as quickly as I could as opposed to actually going through the material slowly Taking time to digest it and actually consolidating it very very well My biggest advice would be to do practice questions early to supplement your lectures with board style questions Or boards dedicated videos such as boards and beyond and just get used to doing a little bit of studying every day or every week Over a longer period of time this exam is huge and cramming for it or doing everything very quickly Is not the right way to go now I know this is difficult to do especially if you're an img like myself because our medical schools don't assign Specific periods of time for you assembly step one studying step one studying isn't really integrated into our curriculum or anything like that And so it's something we have to do in our own time outside of our own medical school and clinical placements and whatever But honestly my biggest advice would just be start as early as you can start becoming familiar with this exam And the level of detail and complexity that you need to know for all the different topics and pathologies Okay, now more importantly than everything I mentioned before this and everything I'm going to mention after this doing practice questions is the key to success for this exam Even if you don't have time to go through all of first aid or all of pithoma or really consolidate that material You just have to do lots and lots of practice questions Now the reason that I say this is very very simple The actual exam on test day looks very similar to the your world practice question blocks and the nbme practice tests So it makes perfect sense to do as many questions that are similar to the actual test that you're going to write Because you do get topics that come up more frequently than others and you do get questions that are similar to those That you've done before so the more questions you've done that are similar to the actual exam The more prepared you're going to be as you start to do more and more questions on your world You'll recognize and realize the topics that come up more frequently than others And those are the topics that you need to know back to front now Don't get me wrong You can get a question on literally any one of the a billion topics in this book But like I said some topics come up more than others and those are the ones That you want to make sure you know so that you can pick up those easy points on test day Now when you're doing your question banks I know a lot of students tend to start by doing question banks system by system and doing them in tutor mode And I am one of those students That is how I started doing my question banks and I honestly really regret it As soon as I started doing questions on all random all timed my scores immediately improved They immediately jumped up and personally for me I think that happened because when I was under that time pressure I couldn't overthink the question or confuse myself or trip over things I would just look at the question think about what I needed to choose the answer and move on And that resulted in me scoring better than when I was doing the questions on tutor mode It's honestly a no-brainer to do your practice questions on all random all time There's many reasons for this But one of the most important is that you'll get used to the pacing of the exam The exam is actually quite fast-paced when I was doing my your blocks I would almost always use all of the time on nbme exams I had more time because I found that the questions were a little bit shorter and some of them had less Orders like there were more first or second order questions as opposed to third order questions And the sooner you become accustomed to very quickly reading the question Extracting the important information and choosing an answer the better you're going to feel on exam day and the less rush You're going to be on top of that Of course, you're going to come across questions that you will have not seen before or not prepared for yet But that's going to prime your brain for when you actually do come across it when you're going through your boards and beyonds videos Or you're reading through fa or bathoma or whatever You'll already have seen this material once and so you're going to be building on top of that As opposed to seeing it for the very first time You need to get your brain used to switching from doing a cardiology question to a respiratory question To reproductive to endocrine to whatever and the more practice and opportunity you give yourself to do that The better you're going to do come exam day Probably my biggest regret when it comes to studying for the step one exam Is not finishing the u-world practice questions because I studied for this exam from start to finish in six months I honestly was under quite a lot of time pressure and I didn't get to do as many questions as I wanted to Looking back. I wish I had prioritized questions more than rereading the material or other things I was doing in my studying because like I said before practice questions were honestly the best thing that helped me learn So do your best to prioritize doing those practice questions and schedule them in as a priority So that you make sure you get as many as you can done And like I said the question banks actually very closely resemble the questions that I saw on exam day So the more of those questions you do the better you're going to be prepared The last thing I want to say about the question banks is that I know a lot of students use them as a way To test their knowledge or see what their scores could be like on the actual exam day Personally, I used the question banks as a learning resource and I found it very very helpful Every time you do a question, obviously, you know, which answer was right But you can also learn so much information from all of the wrong answers Each one of those wrong answers will probably be the material for an upcoming question And so personally I took a lot of time to go through the wrong answers and figure out why they were wrong And what was important about those answers how I could exclude them, etc And that definitely helped me moving forward So I guess it's personal preference if you want to use those question banks as a way of testing yourself Or you want to use them as a resource of learning as a resource for increasing your knowledge But honestly, I wouldn't just dismiss them as a learning resource because question banks have tons of valuable information Okay, now moving on to practice tests There's tons of information out there about which practice tests are best to do and which ones will most closely resemble Your actual exam score on testing personally What I did was the u-world one and u-world two practice exams and then I did a bunch of nbme's as well I think I did 24, 23, 22, 21, 20 and 18 Now what I found from doing those practice exams is that they actually closely resemble what you're going to see on exam day And so I would encourage you to do as many practice tests as you can Now the very unfortunate thing about this is that those practice tests are very expensive and their costs add up very very quickly On top of that the nbme exams don't actually provide explanations for their correct and incorrect answers They just tell you if you got it right or wrong And so I ended up paying for a subscription for this website called nbmeanswers.com Which is a user-generated forum discussing all the different questions from the nbme exams So all in all the cost really does add up and it adds up quite quickly Since they are so similar to the actual test day questions I would recommend doing as many as you can and they are a very good resource And the last thing I want to talk about in this video is mental health I know that for a lot of students including myself this exam is just a huge project A huge undertaking that really takes a toll on both our physical and mental health And I think it's more important than ever that when you're studying for this exam You make sure you leave time for yourself to de-stress to do things you enjoy and to actually have fun I can honestly say that doing physical exercise like going for runs every couple of days Is the only reason that I was able to keep my sanity and just continue studying for six months as much as I did And whatever form of exercise you enjoy or you can fit into your schedule I really really encourage you to do that and keep up with it regularly because Nothing can replace doing physical exercise as far as de-stressing yourself Giving yourself a blank slate to continue studying for the next day I promise you the exercise helps relieve stress and clears your mind So that you can study for long periods of time every single day All right, and I think that's everything that I wanted to mention when it comes to studying for the step one exam What I wish I knew when I was studying and I really hope it helps you guys in your own preparation I feel like this video took on a more serious note a more serious turn And that's probably because you know this exam period is just associated with so much difficulty and stress in my life But I want to say that I know how difficult this exam is I know how much stress it puts on you when you're studying But every medical student does it we all get out on the other side and no matter your score You will have done it You will have learned so much throughout that experience And you're going to be a better doctor in the future for having done it and okay on that note I think I'm going to end this video if you want any more information about studying for the step one exam Studying resources things like that. I'll leave links to them in the description down below and up here on screen If you enjoyed this video, please do leave a like on it and also subscribe to my channel See more content from me in the future and I will catch you in the next one. Peace