Now, why Kaplan over Falcon? This was a tough decision. Everyone hears that Goljan is the god of pathology and pathology is uber important for usmle step 1. Since Gojan is at Falcon, one should definitely go to Falcon. Well, that’s what I was thinking at first. Plus, Falcon is cheaper than Kaplan and 1 week longer. More bang for the buck, right?

I really liked the fact that Goljan was at Falcon, he was previously at Kaplan which is when his famous audio recordings were made, but Falcon hadn’t been around very long. Also, I had heard equally great things about Barone who filled in Goljan’s spot at Kaplan. Falcon came to our school and gave the, “Our students raise their score 20-40 points higher than previously.” But that means they failed USMLE Step 1 in the first place to be able to take it over again. So, 20 points on 180 say, only gives you 200. That’s 20 points under the mean. Falcon is also 1 week longer. Many people would say that’s a plus. That you get more for the money. Well, yeah, but they are still covering the same amount of material in 7 weeks as opposed to 6 weeks for Kaplan. To me, it was just another 8 hours a day for an extra 6 days. Very exhausting. One other point is that Kaplan gives more meals than Falcon.

In the end, I decided to go with Kaplan because of their long standing history, reputation, 1 week shorter course, more meals, and Barone rocks!

So what was Kaplan like? It was a grueling 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. It was set up so you go to lectures for 5 days, then 1 day off, then repeat. The lecturers ranged from fair to great. I do have to say, however, that for the last half of physiology I ended up just watching the videos because the lecturer told too many stupid stories and we would always end late. Also, the same lecturer took over for pharmacology because the original lecturer (who is awesome on the videos) was ill, so I watched the videos for pharm, too.

So after the 8 hour day, I would have dinner. I would need to read and do questions, but I was usually just too tired. My brain didn’t want to do much work. So what I ended up doing, after the first week of experimenting, was just annotating First Aid with my Kaplan notes. I didn’t really try to memorize anything, just add notes into FA. I figured I would would memorize after the Kaplan course. And, if I had some time/energy left, I would do a few questions from Kaplan’s Q-Bank. But usually not too many. Maybe around 10-20 questions a night. I just really hate doing questions and hate learning from questions.

By the time the Kaplan course was over, I had finished annotating First Aid. I took 2 days off, then started my 4 weeks of studying/reviewing/cramming. It worked out in the end.

Would I take the Kaplan course again? Probably not. I would, however, watch the Kaplan videos. The total number of hours for the Kaplan videos is much less than actual classroom hours. That’s because it takes more time to lecture to an actual, live audience. The interaction with the students, the questions, the jokes/stories, it all adds time. I could watch the Kaplan videos on 2x speed, and rewind if I missed or did not understand something completely, and finish much earlier than 6 weeks. Probably around 4-5 weeks. That has a couple advantages: 1. you can schedule more break/relax days; 2. it gives more room for falling behind and catching up; 3. it allows more time for thorough studying/reviewing after watching the videos.

Would I have gone with Falcon rather than Kaplan? I can’t say. I do know that people I have spoken with that took kaplan did both really well, average and not so well. The same for Falcon. I think both courses provide you with the information you need to know. It’s up to you to actually work hard and study. I just chose Kaplan for the reasons listed above, and if I had to choose a course all over again, I would still go with Kaplan.

So I needed to modify my schedule. Originally I was going to take 6 weeks: 4 weeks of studying, then 2 weeks of cramming/reviewing all the material really fast. The Kaplan course was 6 weeks. So I decided to subtract the 4 weeks from the original schedule and just tack on the 2 weeks of cramming giving me a total of 8 weeks. I thought this would be solid…

Kaplan didn’t turn out to be so great for me. It was 8 hours a day of lectures. By the end of the day, I was too tired to study on my own. At least, to do the type of studying I need to do for retaining information. So, after the 1st week of the kaplan course, I just started annotating my FA with additional material from the Kaplan books. I still was able to go to class and hear and see the material, so that was still beneficial for me. Then, after dinner, I would go to my room and annotate FA, then do some Q-bank questions. That’s what I did for 6 weeks. I did take some days off to go enjoy the night life. But not too many, because I would be hung over the next day.

After the Kaplan course, I needed to sit down and thoroughly read the material once. I decided to do this plus cram in 4 weeks. This meant I pushed my 8 week schedule now to 10 weeks. But it’s definitely a good thing that I did. I read through my annotated copy of First Aid in 2 1/2 weeks. I did this feeling like I learned/retained most of the material. I felt good. I thought to myself, if I can get through all the material in 1 1/2 weeks, I’ll feel pretty confident. So, I got through the material again during my 1 1/2 week cram session. It paid off.

Now, I haven’t really talked about question banks, except for mentioning Q-bank earlier. What I did was do Q-bank while I was at Kaplan for the 6 weeks, but I hate doing and learning from questions, so I only got through about 30% of Q-bank. I would rather know the material well, and figure the question out on test day. That’s just how I am. Some people aren’t comfortable with that. They want to be familiar with the way they can ask questions on a topic. I don’t really care.

After Kaplan was over, I switched over to USMLE World. UW is amazing. It is, in my opinion, far superior to Kaplan’s Q-bank. Mainly because it is harder. When I took the real test, I felt that it was slightly easier than U World and I wasn’t too stressed out. I felt like I was just doing 7 blocks of USMLE World questions.

So when I started doing the UWorld questions, I was doing 48 questions a night. Sometimes only 20 depending on how tired I was or if there weren’t very many questions on a topic.

This is what I did: For the first 2 1/2 weeks, I would study a section/system in First Aid, then in the evening, I would do questions on that system. This is when I did only 20 questions some nights, because some topics only have 40 or 50 questions and I wanted to save some for when I did blocks of random questions. Then, during the last 1 1/2 weeks of cramming, I would do 48 question blocks each night on random. It worked for me. By the end, I finished 53% of UWorld and my scores were in the upper 70′s lower 80′s. I was hoping that would be high enough.

Now, I know 53% isn’t very much of the q bank. But, like I said before, I don’t like learning from questions. If I had to do it over again, I would probably have spent a little more time on doing questions, just because there was some information I learned from doing the UWorld q-bank questions that got me a couple of questions on USMLE Step 1 which I wouldn’t have gotten right otherwise.

The major advantage or gain I got out of doing questions was getting used to the length of the vignettes and pacing myself. By the end, I was finishing 48-question blocks with 10-15 minutes to spare. On the real test, I ended up finishing each block 7-10 minutes early. Except for the last 2 blocks, which I only had between 3-5 minutes left each. But I’ll tell you about my Step 1 test day experience later.

I would read a section in FA and the corresponding section/subject in my review book. I would annotate in FA as I read my review book. I, then, got together with a friend once a week and would go over that section, or at least try to, every Saturday morning. Sometimes we needed two Saturday mornings to get through one section/subject. But that’s OK. The point was to get through everything once fairly thoroughly. That way I would be familiar with my annotated version of FA when I did my real, hardcore studying. This was a no stress pass through of the material.

Now, I didn’t use all of my review books. I definitely didn’t use my BRS Biochemistry and Molecular Biology except for about 20 pages. I heard during the semester that FA biochemistry section was all you needed for step 1. I chose to stick with that and it turned out to be true. I used my BRS Pathology and BRS Physiology quite heavily. I also used HY Immunology and HY Gross Anatomy heavily as well. These four books were great. I liked Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple, but it was a long book. I also heard the micro section in FA was great for the boards, so I relied on that rumor as well. Turns out it just about covered what I needed to know as well. FA really is a key to success.

How about a schedule? Well, I found two pre-made schedules on-line. One was a 30 day schedule by Lippincott Wilkins and Williams, who publishes a lot of the review books I used, and another was a 4 weeks + 2 weeks of cramming schedule I found on a blog.

TheLWW step 1 schedule was based more on subject, e.g. pathology, then physiology, then pharmacology, etc. The other schedule was based on systems, e.g. Cardiology, then GI, then Respiratory, etc. I initially was going to go with the LWW schedule because it is how we were taught in school, i.e. subject based. But, the thing was that FA is arranged by systems. So later, I decided to go with the other schedule (write me and I’ll send you a copy of the schedule, or tell me how to embed it in this page, sorry I’m a newb to this webpage crap).

I remembered seeing kids annotating in First Aid since the first day of medical school. Back then I was thinking, “what the hell are they doing? Step 1 is so far away!” But, they had a good idea. I still wouldn’t have started back then, if I could do it again, but I would have started earlier – probably the end of first term. But, the point of that little story was that I figured those were the kids that were gonna score >250, just because they would have ample time to go over the material. But I knew I could do reasonably well, and I set my goal for a two-digit score of 99. I didn’t care about the 3 digit score.

No matter, what your goal is, I think it’s really important to have one. It helps keep you motivated and on track. There were many days that I didn’t want to study, but I thought to myself, “If I don’t, then I won’t get a 99.” That drove me.

So I had my goal of 99 set. Now I needed books. I spent a great deal of time reading through online reviews of books and actually going to a bookstore and comparing different books with eachother. I think that it’s important to compare books with eachother if you are unfamiliar with their formats. Some are in outline format and some are written in paragraph form. I generally like paragraph form, but I kept my mind open to the outline format. Especially since my rock/bible was going to be First Aid for Step 1 (FA) which is pretty much a collection of facts in outline form. I knew that FA was going to be my main source from the getgo. I would read all my other review books and annotate FA and then use it for my final review.

Books that I decided to get (but not necessarily use do to time constraints):

Anatomy/Embryo/Neuro

I had the Anatomy BRS by Chung from first year, but this book gets poor reviews because of its length, so I decided to get High Yield Gross Anatomy. I earned great reviews and was much shorter than BRS. However, you really need to have a good foundation to use HY because it is more clinically based, so I used BRS to look up details of anatomy if I needed to.

As for Embryo, it was a weak subject for me. I got an A in it, but it was more of a cram and forget than retain subject for me. I read through some books but ultimately chose High Yield Embryology because it has the highest rating in the First Aid and it has lots pictures.

I really liked neuroscience. This made me buy BRS Neuroanatomy. Although it’s a great book if you are really interested in the subject, it sucks as a Step 1 review book because it’s way too long. So I also picked up High Yield Neuroanatomy which I thought was pretty good.

Biochem/Molecular Biology

Biochem is another subject where I feel strong, but I’m told that everyone gets kicked in the head on this section. I had the Lippincott’s Illustrated Reviews: Biochemistry from first year and it has a high rating, but it’s really long and I thought my biochem was strong, so I bought BRS Biochemistry. It is long too, but I like the subject so it wasn’t too painful to get through.

Histology

I hated histology. During first year, I thought it was pointless, even though the professor told us Pathology would be easier if we learned it well then. He was right. Oh well. But now I have to study it for step 1. I heard High Yield Histology and Cell Biology was a good book. I picked up a copy. It was a good book overall. Some of it was too detailed, since histology isn’t a big topic on step 1. But I was weak in histology and all the points I can get helps.

Physiology

Physiology is one of my favorite subjects. I didn’t use a textbook when I took this course and instead used the amazing handouts that were prepared by our lecturers. Costanza’s BRS Physiology seems to be the best book on the market. I buy it and it’s an excellent book.

Microbiology/Immunology

These two courses are weak spots for me. I just really hated microbiology – all the bacteria, viruses, fungi. I still hate them. I heard Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple was all that one would need for Step 1. I flipped through it at the bookstore and it had some humor and lots of cartoon drawings to help you remember different bugs. I liked it a lot. I bought High Yield Immunology for immuno. It’s a great quick review of immuno and is all you need.

Pathology/Pathophysiology

At first I was pretty sure I was going to buy BRS Pathology. Then I heard about Goljan’s Rapid Review Pathology. I was torn. I flipped through a copy of Rapid Review in the library. It was all bullet format, which I hated, but had plenty of pictures which was great. I got my hands on Goljan’s audio lectuers, so I decided to go with BRS pathology. It gets great reviews from everyone that uses it, and a new edition came out which had more pictures. I really liked the book.

Pharmacology

This is a weak subject for me, although I got A’s in the course. It was more of a cramming thing as well. But, I heard that FA is all you need to do well in pharmacology on Step 1. I took the advice, probably because I just didn’t want to learn any more pharm. It turned out that the advice was right. At least for my test. It was one of my higher scoring sections on Step 1.

Biostatistics/Behavioral Science

Not my strongest subjects or my weakest, word on the street is that people blow these sections off and it burns them on the test. After looking through both the High Yield Biostatistics and Behavioral Science, I was really happy that they were short, had good ratings, and were easy to read.

So those are the review books that I bought for the USMLE Step 1.

I do have to add another piece of information, but I’ll write about that in my next post.

So, I’m not telling you how you should study for the usmle or how you should take the test. I am just sharing with everyone how I studied for step 1 and what I did on test day. I’ll mention the books/resources I used and what I wish I had done or hadn’t done. In case you’re wondering, I took step 1 in the end of March 2009. My goal was to get a two-digit score of 99. I got a 250/99. I know it’s not a 270 like some people are saying they got, but I was pretty damn happy with my score.

I hope that some of the information I post here you find useful and I wish all of you preparing for usmle good luck!!