Board Exam Study Update

My daughter is really into Pathoma! LOL

Hi all! I decided to resurface for a bit to give a quick update on how the board studying is going. Right now, I am 19 days away from taking USMLE Step 1 and I'm definitely feeling the pressure! It feels like there aren't enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I want, but I'm slowly working my way through it all. The good news is that my NBME assessment scores continue to improve by a lot each week, so even though I am nowhere near the score range that I want to be right now, knowing that I haven't hit my plateau gives me hope. 

In case you're wondering about my daily schedule, today pretty much went like this:

4:30-7:00am - Four sets of 40 UWorld Questions in random, timed-mode back-to-back (I usually finish each block with 15-20min to spare)

7-7:30am - Made sure the little one got dressed and ate breakfast, did her hair, and then headed out to the bus stop

7:30-12pm - Reviewed all of the morning's UWorld questions (even though I'm on my second official pass, this still takes me forever!)

12-1pm - Took a break to eat lunch and caught up on last night's episode of Fear the Walking Dead

1-4pm - Did two 40 question sets of USMLERX questions on tutor mode in the subjects of MSS and Embryo since my latest NBME listed those as my weak spots. I also took a break when my daughter got home to help her with her homework/discuss her day and I had a little extra time, so I did 10 Combank questions on the USMLE side.

4-5pm - Watched a chapter of Pathoma (had to speed it up a bit because 1x is too slow for me)

5-6pm - Dinner with the little one (I cooked last night and had leftovers, so it didn't take the entire hour) and then finished up some outside business

6-7:30pm - More Pathoma and got the little one ready for and tucked in bed.

At this point, I've pretty much covered everything on my list for the day with the exception of reading a chapter out of First Aid, and it equals a little under 11 hours of study time with all the breaks subtracted (I literally calculate and write down how much time I spend on every individual thing). Not sure if reading that chapter is going to happen tonight though, because I have an 8:30pm conference call that will most likely go until 10pm, and then I'm calling it a night!

My schedule is super exhausting, but since it seems to be working for me, I don't want to change it too much. I do need to get to a point where I am doing more questions per day since the COMLEX will be 400 questions (compared to only 280 with the USMLE), but I'll just have to slowly increase the amount over the next 3 weeks. Tomorrow I also have my very last written exam of medical school (yay!) for my Primary Care Skills course, so I'll have to put an hour towards my schedule in the morning towards studying for it and another hour towards taking it.

Anyway, this post pretty much sums up my life nowadays in a nutshell. I'm about take a quick shower before my call begins, so I hope everyone has an amazing week!