USMLE Step 1 Study Tips

Andrew Ko, UIC–Chicago, Class of 2005

With the obvious caveat that people learn and study differently, I offer the following general suggestions with respect to preparation for the USMLE Step I:

Make a schedule and stick to it.
Don’t waste your time.
Do a lot of questions, and read the answers.
Take some time off every once in a while; go have a few beers and watch a Cubs’ game.

To elaborate:

I decided to study for about 10 hours a day for a little over a month. This may not sound like a lot when you listen to the crazies who started studying in December. So, it’s doubly important to make sure you plan out what you’re going to cover each day. Spend the majority of your time on pathology, physiology, and their bastard stepchild pathophysiology. That’ll be about 70% of the exam. This is not to say it is safe to ignore the rest, but if need be you have a better chance of guessing on the brain-and-behavior questions (and you WILL get about one ethics/professionalism question per block) than you will on actual questions about basic sciences. Pharm and micro would be next on my list.

I think I spent four days on path, four days on physio, three days on pathophys, three days on pharm, three on micro. Two days on biochem. Then a total of one day each for molecular med, brain and behavior/development, embryology, neuroanatomy, anatomy. That’s 24 days, more or less; I’ve probably forgotten a subject or two. Sounds like it’s crazy, but you’ll see once you start that it’s not. When you put in time for questions, a few days off, you spread it out to a month or even five weeks.
Don’t dick around when you’re studying. Or dick around if you know it makes you more productive. I know I have about one hour’s worth of attention span before I need to take a break. Don’t make yourself sit around and not really concentrate just to put in time, it’s much more efficient to focus rather than go through the motions. There’s nothing worse than flying through a subject on a given day, and then realize later that you’ve just been turning pages. Sure it’s common sense but I know it happened to me unless I particularly watched out for it. If you get the feeling you’re not working well, just stop. Be honest about it. There were days when I only did about three hours of work, but then guilt usually sets in and makes you more productive the next day.
…as a corollary to (2): when you do Qbank or BSS (both of which I highly recommend) don’t just do the questions and half-assedly go through the answers. Read all the explanations, even the ones you get right. It drills it into your head and, let’s be honest, tells you why the answer you guessed is actually the right one.
Take a couple of days off. Pencil in one day a week, if you’re like me you’ll probably actually work for about half of those days because you took another half day off somewhere else, but planning these sort of days gives you a little leeway in your schedule.

Oh. And sleep is nice.

Getting on a schedule that would get you up at like 8, because that’s when the test starts, is a nice idea. It didn’t work at all for me; I seem to concentrate better at night. And I couldn’t sleep before the test anyway. So I wouldn’t sweat it.