At the finish line

At this point, I have completed some hard-to-believe 6 weeks of comprehensive preparation for STEP 1 – the exam I described in my previous post My date is exactly in a week from now.

It will have been all of 7 weeks that I will have spent taking practice tests, reading books and going over other study materials (“Sketchy,” for example, I described here). With respect to its intensity and extent, this is a very unique experience for me (as it probably would be for anyone): I need to re-study the entire curriculum from the first two years of medicine and even more than that, as our professors left out some substantial info either because they didn’t consider it important enough, or there simply wasn’t enough time for all of it. The authors of these standardized exams don’t ask what we went over and what we left out – simply put, all of medicine is “fair game” on Step 1, including anatomy, psychiatry, or even insurance. In part, this prep is so intense also because every piece of information I encounter I need to try and memorize, as I might not see it again for the rest of my studies.

According to my current plan, I will take the exam next Friday, on July 7. The test itself will take 8 hours (both in the morning and afternoon) – total of seven 1-hour blocks and an hour of breaks (including lunch) in one day. Each block contains 40 questions – so on average, I have 90 seconds for each question and there will be 280 of them. And if you think this test is a little over the top, this is my prep for it: 12 hours of studying every day for 50 days (600 hours total). During this time, I will have finished around 3,500 practice questions, read 800 pages of text and watched 85 hours of videos. But I also take some time off – about 2 hours every week. During this whole time, I went to play mini golf once and once, I also went for a dinner in a Mexican restaurant with my girlfriend (and Mexican food really isn’t my favorite). Oh, and I went to a pharmacy once for some antihistamines because the birch under my windows started pollinating.

As you can see, I have a lot to do and I still haven’t finished it all – so now, if you don’t mind, I’ll go back to my books for another week. I can’t wait for those two weeks of vacation afterwards – I’m sure all that knowledge will be so much easier (and liberating) to forget.