I'm finished! Well, not exactly finished, since my life will henceforth be a never-ending series of standardized exams, but I have just finished taking the USMLE STEP 1 and boy am I glad it is over. These last couple of weeks have been fraught with anxiety, sleepless nights, and a never-ending review of such fun topics like: hairy cell leukoplakia, oligohydramnios, and hypoxanthine-guanine phosoribosyl transferase deficiency. YAY!
Now the waiting begins. I wont receive my score for about 3-4 weeks. So I am forced to marinate in doubt and wonder how I did. If you held a gun to my head I would say I believe I passed; in fact I felt pretty good about the whole ordeal. However experience with the types of questions on this particular exam has shown that, despite being very confident about an answer, you have in fact, gotten it horribly wrong. So we will wait and see with guarded optimism.
To those of you that haven't taken the test yet, I can report that the Kaplan Q-bank questions seemed markedly harder than the actual exam did. Having done just about 2000 questions pretty much guaranteed that no topic was a surprise. So practice (and review) as many questions as you can stand! I felt pretty confident about most of my answers and there was only 2 Whiskey Tango Foxtrot questions. I know that this will not come as a surprise to any of you: I finished the exam fairly quickly. I started at 9am and was done by 2:30. I admit that this is faster than average, but I felt like the questions were not exceptionally long. Although others have said the opposite. So, take it for what it's worth.
I took advantage of 3 breaks and a quick lunch. I did 2 blocks back to back with a 10 min break then another 2 blocks then took a quick lunch . 2 more blocks and, although I felt really good, I forced myself to take a 10 min break to walk around and stay focused. The last block actually seemed like my easiest block. (despite the lack of questions on Single Malt Scotches of the World).
I did force myself to reread some of the questions and caught a few errors where I missed a key word that changed the question,(Left vs. Right etc) so read carefully and you should do fine.
Good luck to everyone who is about to take it.
No longer an intern (The Salt Lake Tribune, 7/6/13)
10 years ago
3 Comments:
Congratulations on finishing Step I...must be nice to have that finally out of the way! Hope you keep up with the updates. What ever happened to the other blog? Has it died?
Hope everything's going well back in the US....I'm a lot jealous.
Hey Scott, thanks. Yeah, with everything going on I have been very neglectful in blogging.
"Then he realized, I indeed am this creation, for I have poured it forth from myself. In that way, he became this creation. Verily, he who knows this, becomes in this creation, a creator."
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