USMLE Step 2 CK Experience – An IMG Perspective In the Name | Usmle step 2 experinces
USMLE Step 2 CK Experience – An IMG Perspective
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
Here’s my full experience and advice for USMLE Step 2 CK takers in the near future.
Background: Recent Cairo University graduate. Didn’t do Step 1 or CS at the time of writing this article.
My Goal: +240
PHASE ONE (more than a year of almost wasting time!)
That was during my “internship” year here in Egypt or what we call according to the British system we’re following to some extent “training year as a Preregistration House Officer”. I just watched the whole 140-hour Kaplan video lectures except pediatrics because I couldn’t stand that guy (The Kaplan pediatric book is great but the video lectures are just the author reading his book out loud!). Then I spent about 3 months doing almost nothing regarding my USMLE preparation because of getting married .
So, about this phase: This was a huge waste of time! Don’t get me wrong; Kaplan is great and I’ll write about that in details just in a minute but doing one lecture this day and another the next week and then get busy with hospital shifts then go back to do another lecture is just not the optimal way to prepare for the USMLE. 140 hours means about 30 days of 5 hours a day and another 30 days for reading the 1400 pages set of lecture notes. That’s enough and much better than what I did, not just because of saving your precious time but also because spreading the studying over a long period of time doesn’t help in making connections between information sets you’re learning about. So, the first lesson: study every day for a decent amount of time & don’t make gaps in your studying timeline.
About Kaplan Video Lectures: all of the doctors are great (except the pediatrician). Conrad Fischer is great and everything but he tends to drop out a lot of important material, so you have to do an extra effort to understand the chapters explained by Dr. Fischer! On the other hand, you have tutors like Elmar Sakala, Charles Faselis, Steven Daugherty…you won’t really be required to do anything other than listening to them carefully and reading lightly after the lecture is finished.
Bottom line
If you want a solid introduction to USMLE Step 2 Ck do Kaplan videos.
About Kaplan Lecture Notes: They should be your main study material in all disciplines except internal medicine and surgery. Kaplan Internal Medicine is good but not very well organized (I used Master The Board for most internal medicine chapters). Kaplan Surgery book is 2 parts, part 2 is the cases that Dr. Carlos Pestana use in his lectures, those are great. However, part 1 which you’re required to study on your own is so cluttered, not organized at all and lacking a lot of stuff. So, for surgery, you can use a combination of Kaplan surgery book (part 2 only) & Board and Wards surgery section.
PHASE TWO (4 months)
I began this phase by doing Kaplan Diagnostic Test (150 questions) and I got 51% correct answers. That was on the 6th of September, 2015; i.e. 7 months before the exam. Then I started doing Kaplan Question Bank and it took me forever because I was over-annotating my books with every question bank trivial piece of information. So, it took me more than 4 months (to the 10th of January 2016) to just finish 1200 questions out of 3000! I took NBME 3 in late November and I got less than 150! (My test date was the 29th of December so, I extended the eligibility period and delayed the test to the 29th of March) and then I continued to do Kaplan Question Bank and did NBME 6 on the 10th of January 2016 and got 150! So, at this point, I said to myself: enough is enough; and started USMLE World QB.
