Day 8 - Lets Try A New Strategy

I realized posting during the day kind of throws off my routine in the morning. So from here on out, I'm going to try to write these up and post them by the time I go to bed.

If I'm being honest, I expected a lot from today. I was feeling great at the start of the day, and I had plenty of uninterrupted time. For some reason, I still felt kinda like I was moving at 0.5x speed.

Today, I got to go through a couple blocks of Renal, reviewed only one of them, and finished my Anki reviews and I had a thought:

My Thought

My school uses exclusively NBME-based questions for our second years (M2s) and, for the most part, I never really focused on getting every UWorld question done. I did a few, and the few were extremely helpful but after a while it plateaued.

My thought was if it worked for all of M2; why wouldn't it work for Step? I.e. why am I trying to do 2, wishing to do 3 blocks of UWorld a day? I get the rationale of building up your endurance, but I feel like a full-length exam every week is sufficient to accomplish that. No?

My Plan

Since I only have 5 weeks left 'til my exam, I can't exactly dedicate an entire week to trying out this new idea. Instead, I'm going to give it a shot just for tomorrow and see how it goes.

My plan up until now has been to do Two UWorld blocks a day and prioritize the Anki I have started since Dedicated - Day 1. And although two UWorld blocks in a day were fine, it's starting to feel like I'm rushing through again as the material is building up.

So instead of two blocks, I will do one UWorld block and spend the majority of the day reviewing the exam + reviewing older material via my Anki. This way I'll have more time for things like Sketchy without them becoming "extra" study tasks.

Plus, since I make my own Anki's that ask similar 2nd and 3rd-order questions including information I've learned from past UWorld questions. Reviewing those should help me gain the same knowledge as doing more questions.

I do realize that doing one UWorld block a day wouldn't allow me to finish my first pass before my exam date. But I figured out long ago that every UWorld question isn't unique. In the past, finishing just a portion of the suggested UWorld questions was enough to learn the majority of the information.

So my rationale is that finishing over 60% (as it's currently projected) of it will be sufficient enough.

My Study Tool

I'm focusing more on my Anki because I have built them as a reservoir of the knowledge I've gained since my first day of M1. I'm exclusively using M2 cards for the exam but I trust that they're enough to help me remember the information I had previously learned for class exams.

Here's an example of one of the Anki cards that I've made. Not exactly AnKing style but it's worked for me.

So, How Will I Know If It Worked?

So while this isn't exactly an easily "measurable" goal, my measure is going to be my gauge of how much I enjoyed the day. Specifically, how much I enjoyed the learning portion.

I experienced that joy during the first two days of dedicated and honestly haven't felt that way since. I'm hoping this could help revive those feelings again.

I hope this works, but regardless of if it does or doesn't, I'll keep you posted.

Good luck. ✌️