#USMLESTEP2CKEXPERIENCE270 Dr. Shalhoub's #USMLE #Step2CK Exp | Usmle step 2 experinces

#USMLESTEP2CKEXPERIENCE270

Dr. Shalhoub's #USMLE #Step2CK Experience
● Duration of preparation :
From April till August 19th, roughly 4.5 months.
● Study schedule:
Average of 6-8 hours\ day. Used to hit the gym 5 times\week. Thursdays I was mostly chilling,
studied a couple of hours at the beginning of the day.
● Materials & journey:
First of all, I did step 1 on Feb 18th, and that of course helped.
I started by giving MTB2 Internal Medicine a quick look, just to get into the mood of Step 2,
and get out of Step 1 way of thinking.
I used to do the blocks of each IM chapter from UW2013 (offline),to train myself to questions
mood from the beginning.
I did not really retain that much from MTB. For me, it was just an introduction. I only did the IM
part at the beginning in like 2-3 weeks.
Then I quickly went over Kaplan ObGyn in 3-4 days, to refresh it in my mind, as there is not a
lot of commonalities between ObGyn step 1 and step 2.
I jumped right away to the pediatrics, surgery and ObGyn parts of UW13, without reading the
MTB.
I then bought the UW Online for 3 months and started doing 2 blocks\ day and take down
notes.
I read all the explanations carefully and I often went back to Uptodate.com specially when
something was not very clear to me.
Uptodate helped me a lot. When I have a question, it was easy to find the answer in one
source. When I just want to know what this topic is all about, I would only read the summary at
the end of an article, which is typically 6-12 bulletpoints. If there was an interesting idea there, I
would go back to the text and read a bit more about it. I also used to check if there are any
algorithms or tables that could help.
My average in UW was around 90%. I used to answer the questions I did wrong in the offline
UW13 with the same answer and get them wrong again, so as not the skew my %.
My plan while taking the notes was like this:
1)I am not allowed to mark more than 10 questions\ block
2)The questions that I was not going to mark, I would take all the notes that I need from them,
because I knew that I am not gonna come back to them
3)I am only going to redo the wrong\marked questions after the first round of UW
Preventive was bugging my soul, so I made a separate part for it in my notebook and used to
visit it again every now and then.
After finishing the first round of UW, I went back to MTB3. I quickly read the pediatrics,
surgery and psychiatry parts. Roughly gave 12 days for each one. I used it mainly to know the
tricks, and for it to guide me as to what to look for on Uptodate. To be honest, there are a lot of
information that I found was wrong and outdated in MTB, thats why i mostly used it to guide me
as to what to look for on UTD.
After that, I went back to my notes and read them again.
Took my first assessment, NBME4,on august 2nd(2+ weeksbefore my exam). I got 286and was thrilled. I knew it was overestimating, but I was confident I am doing the right thing. To me,
and to many others, this assessment was really easy and looked nothing like the real exam.
I started doing Clinical Mastery series, roughly a block a day. I would do the block in 1 hour,
and then meet with 2 of my friends at 10 pm and we would discuss the questions in 2 hours.
I went back to the the marked\wrong questions and finished them. There was a total of
roughly 500 questions.
Second assessment was on August 14th ( 5 daysbefore my test), NBME7, and got 267.I
knew it was underestimating and kept telling myself to believe in numbers. I hated this
assessment. The kind of questions and tricks asked are very similar to the ones they try to trick
you in in the real test.
3 days before the test, I did UWSA and got 265+,i also did the 3 FRED blocks with it, trying
to simulate an exam experience. UWSA was also way too easy and looked like nothing like the
test.
● Exam day :
The exam was so long. It’s mentally tiring. The questions ranged from direct ones to the
WTH ones where you have no idea what’s going on.
Direct questions were not the predominant pattern, like it’s the case in UW. The thing