Didatics are over!!

Well it's been a long time since I last posted. I even forgot my account information and had to spend a while this weekend looking it up. So let me begin by summing up the last six months of MSII. Then, either in this message or following ones, I can cover Boards and my first rotation.

January and February were Hell. Tests constantly and stress levels that are simply unhealthy put most of the class in depression. I pretty didn't care about grades, family or health anymore. I did ok, my lowest quarterly score overall, but only by a couple tenths of a percent. My impressoin of AZCOM and medical school in general hit a new trough.

The forty or so of us who paid to take the Northwest Medical Review course beginning the day after finals had no idea how burned out we'd be. Saturday through Wednesday we sat in class for eight hours a day covering a ton of material. I don't think I was the only one in a stupor.

I begin Spring quarter with a poor attitude towards school, but determined to do my best on Boards. I skipped a lot more class to study on my own and proceeded to work through most of Kaplan's Webprep course. Not having Micro was a relief but it was replaced by a stupid class called OCM that crammed 4 credits into 8 hours a week of lecture for the first half of the quarter. Everyone expected that we'd have a lot more time to study for Boards the last half. We were mistaken.

In the end I got through all of Webprep except the most important subject, Path. I also started onto Goljan's lectures for a second time. By not caring as much, I even got my best grades of the year. However, I had no idea how truly spent I was at the after finals.

I tried to power through Webprep Path and then dive into FirstAid, Step-up and Goljan's high yield notes while doing 100 practice questions per night (and reviews answers) plus 350 over each weekend. I burned out. I took a three day break and didn't finish Kaplan's 2100 question Qbank, let alone questions from NW Medical, Buzzwords, Rapid Review books or the freebies from NBME. The highest yield for me was Goljan's notes, Qbank and the last week of going through FirstAid and StepUp a second time. I wrote a ton of additional notes into StepUp and many of my own notes. Path, Micro and a lot of Biochem really came together over that period.

An then USMLE Step 1 on June 12th...