How To Study for USMLE Step 1

Hello! Alright, I see we have some folks joining I'm give it a couple of minutes just a minute or two to get started once we kind of get everybody settled in here but in the meantime for those of you who are here right on time please feel free to go ahead and go into the chat and let us know where you are tuning in from and let us know where you're at in your journey to becoming a health professional I always love to see that where people are at o starting dedicated in two days you got this DC, Kentucky, Saudi Arabia?nice applying to med school this June very exciting congratulations Colombia, California, Florida, London?see this is why it's so fun I love seeing you know folks are all over the world and I love I love when I when I see folks using Osmosis everywhere cool from ? to Louisiana it's great all right we'll give it a couple more minutes let's see okay taking step two in or taking step one in two months nice cool nice all right first year from Texas I'm from Texas too originally thinking it's this summer great oh this is fantastic all right let me go ahead and get started we'll have we'll have folks continuing to trickle in as I do a quick little int instruction here but first of all thank you all so much for joining I know this is this is a stressful topic this is you know the very first huge high stakes exam that you take in medical school I know it is a cause for a lot of anxiety and so I remember those days when I was a medical student so I'm really glad that you're all here and that we can all find community in that and that we can talk a little bit about this exam and hopefully relieve some stress and Empower you to know that you can absolutely do this and you're going to be great on this exam I'll introduce myself so this is an actually a bit of a funny situation I was not originally supposed to be doing this webinar my fantastic colleague Ahmad Ghanem who is one of my medical question writers on the team here at Osmosis he was originally supposed to do this presentation and unfortunately is ill so I want to give him credit for creating this talk for you guys he did a ton of research and was really intentional about the information that he's including so these slides are from him but I am Marina I am the director of medical assessment here at Osmosis so I oversee the creation of all of our practice questions and that's for step one level one for any do medical students in here and then also for the step two and level two to exam so that that is kind of what I focus on which means I think about step one and step two all day every day so I am excited to be able to talk to you guys about this exam something that I obviously care a lot about let me go ahead and get my screen shared here all right I'm assuming we're able to see my screen everything's great awesome okay so again I I'm so excited to be here I?m Marina Horiates Kerekes I'm an MD I graduated from medical school and decided not to pursue residency and I came to work here at Osmosis so I've been here about three and a half years now which has been a fantastic experience I love Osmosis and I'm always happy to talk about it today as I mentioned we're going to be talking about the USMLE Step 1 so it's you know one step for medical students but one giant leap for medical students or you know a note that I am presenting for a mod but we are both kind of available we're on the team and if you have questions afterwards you can submit them in the chat but I am also going to do kind of a Q?A toward the end here so please keep those questions coming I'm excited to be able to respond to you to the best of my ability although again mod is our original kind of brains behind this this presentation so let's get into it so what are we going to talk about today so I'm going to give a bit of an introduction about the exam itself we'll get into more of the details of what's actually covered on the USM step one we'll talk about kind of the timing of when folks typically take the exam and we'll talk about kind of the way that I think about the study phases kind of how those are divided and kind of the best ways of utilizing both of those periods and then we'll talk a little bit about the exam itself how to best prepare for test day and some notes on accommodations if those are needed so one big exciting I think news that happened as you all probably know at the beginning of last year January 26 2000 oh not last year two years ago 20 22 the USMLE Step 1 exam moved to pass fail now this is a really big deal so the USM step one complex level one those used to be the most important factors when program directors were reviewing residency applications and now program directors it has been demonstrated that they are focusing a bit more on the USMLE Step 2 CK that because that that test is still scored on a numeric level however step one it's as I kind of said before this is your first high pressure exam that you're going to take on your road to residency and it really tests that foundational knowledge that is required before you move on to getting more of that clinical management information for the USMLE step two so this is a core exam it's also huge the amount of content on this exam is far reaching and so it's still a very important one to take seriously and to study even though it is past fail so what is actually on the USMLE Step 1 so what I actually really love is the USMLE?S website has a content outline that you can go into and you can review these exact percentages they update this every year it doesn't typically change that much although one change that started a about two-ish years ago is that they took off any clinical management from the USMLE Step 1 so you'll see here in this section on the physician tasks or competencies the core part of is applying foundational Sciences Concept in your medical knowledge and there's a little bit about patient care that basically gets you up to diagnosis so not that management piece of things but you are expected to be able to assess clinical scenarios assess a history physical exam and a diagnosis of something and then there's also some pieces that test on communication and interpersonal skills and this little last bit about practice-based learning and Improvement is sort of filtered throughout the exam and I'll get a little bit more into how those how those questions actually work in that you know practice-based problem solving on the left here you can see the actual content specifications that they published and this goes through it is basically you know reasonably equally divided coverage of your classic organ systems there are some extra pieces such as social sciences biostatistics and epidemiology but otherwise it is it is mostly those general principles from the organ systems that you have been learning throughout medical school and then how do those actually break down within those organ systems is kind of how we think about these discipline specifications so that's going to be your you know moving from physiology Anatomy to pathology there's bits about you know biochemistry and nutrition microbiology of course and you know e extra kind of foundational Sciences and then also pharmacology things like Behavioral Sciences genetics that sort of thing so feel free to check this out I think it's a helpful guide for when you are thinking about structuring your studying and the types of content that you really need to make sure you're spending time on I think it's a great way of looking on their website making sure that you're prioritizing your time accordingly so let's talk a little bit about study phases so typically in the United States most folks will begin what is called their dedicated period around this time so January is kind of a classic time when step one studying starts to really buckle down kind of across the country for medical students as I think some of you have indicated but before that there is the kind of the predicated period where this is when you are in your classes you're going through your curriculum at your medical school and this is when you're really learning and consolidating that information that then you will bring into your dedicated period so I like to think about the kind of core tactics that you should be using while you're going through your classes so we can think of things as learning so that's kind of the first time that you see information this is your first pass you're learning things whether that's in lectures or online videos like on Osmosis through notes or you know different teaching modules in your school and then that second piece is the consolidation piece so that's where you really start to synthesize that information and you start to begin memorizing it and crystallizing that information for you so that's kind of the next pass of that information this is really done particularly as you're preparing exams as you go throughout the curriculum and then of course the importance of both self-assessment to make sure that you are able to that you have fully Consolidated that information the best way to know is to test yourself I obviously perhaps a bit biased but I firmly believe in the importance of practice questions these are great as you are going through your predicated period where you're learning the information for the first time it's a great study tool for your exams but it's also really great for testing am I able to apply this knowledge have I actually learned it so that's the assess part and the second or the last kind of piece of that is just repeat so constant repetition constantly resurfacing that information spacing it out appropriately so that by the time you get to your dedicated period you haven't completely forgotten about what you learned at the very beginning of medical school like you haven't thought about the kidneys in that amount of time and now you're getting to your dedicated period you have to review everything instead I really recommend kind of going back and doing some repetition and resurfacing those Concepts throughout your curriculum up until dedicated so that first part as I was saying this is kind of your medical school curriculum so these the typically in the United States anyway this is the first year and a half to two years of medical school and that's when you're really focusing firstly on that foundational knowledges these are your basic science Sciences like biochemistry and then you've got Anatomy physiology this is where you learn how things work then you have that integration of clinical concept so this is kind of that early introduction to how this works clinically and what does Patient Care look like so you have that basic knowledge where you learn how things work and then you think about the clinical knowledge where you learn how things Break and in order to assess how we think about those different concepts is this idea of problem based learning it's very important in your studying and in your training to focus on case studies because first of all it's just practical that's how you're going to interact with this information when you get on to your clerkships and eventually your medical practice but it also enhances your critical thinking and your problem solving skills because you know if you can work through a problem on something if you can test yourself on something if you can teach someone else about it that's how you know you've actually learned it and then of course as you all know part of your medical school curriculum as you are going through this is your professional development so you might have courses on ethics communication and professionalism in healthcare and these are important pieces of learning that identity as a physician what does this new role mean to you and how are you going to practice that and these pieces are actually also tested on the step one exam as I kind of mentioned the social sciences are in there so those are important pieces of your curriculum that I know are those extra kind of courses that don't always feel as core and important as you know learning those organ systems but they are they're so important and you're going to really see that when you get into your clinical rotations in the latter part of medical school now when I talk about consolidating that was kind of what I meant about taking all of that information making sure that you're synthesizing things and the best way to do that is to access the information in different types so on Osmosis one thing I really love about our product is that you have a full learning Loop so what do I mean by that when you first see information you might for example watch a video about it so this this video is talking about the anatomy of the nervous system in the and the spinal column so you might go through you see the information for the first time you might then review the notes that are paired with that or the notes that you took in class or that took you know during your lecture or while you were watching the videos so those are kind of ways to review and then that core piece that I keep telling you about is the assessment piece so whether that means taking full-on practice questions or working through flashcards and I can I kind of have two different examples of those types of Assessments both of which I think are very important and then to kind of keep doing that in a loop so you learned the concept you tested yourself a little bit you realized you got some stuff wrong you go back to the notes oh right I forgot that's where that spinal tract goes and the sensory information is on this side all right got it or maybe you really didn't understand a concept you watch that part of the video again then you test yourself again and so it's kind of a loop and that's how you really consolidate that knowledge and the way that you can kind of work through this on Osmosis is you have two options so all of our content is organized by both foundational sciences that was kind of that piece of the disciplines so you can go through Anatomy biochemistry microbiology Etc. or you can go by organ system it just kind of depends on how you learn and really also how your medical school is structuring their curriculum all of the information is available in both of those columns you can kind of see this column foundational Sciences or organ systems work through it and whatever M way makes sense for you what I'll say is when you get into Anatomy it'll have you know the organ systems broken down for you so you might have Anatomy it would be anatomy of the cardiovascular system anatomy of the endocrine system Etc. or when you get into organ systems you might go into the cardiovascular system and you'll have the anatomy of that the biochemistry the pathology genetics whatever so that'll all kind of be organized in those different ways whatever makes more sense to you and then lastly when you're in your dedicated period which I'm going to talk about we have this extra section for the USM step one review what we did there is we took the core topics kind of those review videos from the library from those first two columns and we Consolidated everything into this review section which has all the information that you're going to need to know for the exam it helps you kind of synthesize everything so what does that look like so as you are going through one of my favorite video series is the pathology review series so you can see that on the left this is this is our pathology review video on coronary artery disease and it goes through the different kind of pathology related to that main topic and it helps you compare and contrast these different things so that's going to be really important for that consolidation piece so your past you know learning it for the first time now you're synthesizing so these videos are great for that and then of course there are paired notes so you can go through both the notes that we have in PDF form on the platform at or of course your own notes are invaluable lastly two amazing resources that I would be remiss to not say the USMLE step one first aid is fantastic it's a great resource it's updated every year and on Osmosis we have the ability to kind of see which Pages are correlating to the content that you're watching on Osmosis so I think this is a great resource to have all of your information really condensed into one place and you can use that as a guide to know the topics that you should be studying and the other favorite is of course Pathoma, which is a fantastic resource that's really going to focus on the pathology of things though so you you'll need more than that to move past pathology but it's a fantastic resource and then that last piece of it assessing your knowledge make making sure that you can test yourself that you can apply it the way that we do that on Osmosis is you have this bottom section here for assessments and we have USMLE step one questions that have been written specifically for the content covered in these videos so it's again that really nice learning Loop of testing your knowledge on what you just learned there are two types of Assessments as I mentioned you can do flashcards so that's the really straightforward kind of basic recall level testing when you think about kind of Bloom taxonomy and then you also have these step one style board questions and those are going to be the ones that look more like the exam where they have a full clinical vignette you've got a physical exam you got vitals everything and then you're ask to synthesize all of that and come up with for example the diagnosis this is a shot from I believe a Mod's copy of first aid it is this this is kind of where you will eventually get to when you are really into it with your dedicated period the reason that first aid is so great is you have all of the content beautifully organized and summarized very condensed in there but it's helpful to add your own notes as you're constantly learning things you're constantly ingesting new information medical schools extremely you know the phrase of drinking from a fire hose it's a ton of a ton of information all coming at you all at once and so using a resource like this to write down all of the study tools that you're learning as you kind of go through your pre-dated curriculum can be really helpful for when you actually settle into dedicated now when you get in there of course it's extremely important to build a study schedule and stick to it now my biggest recommendations for study schedules are make sure that it is realistic and make sure that you build space for breaks or for you to get behind because you will you will have a day where you are sick you will have a family emergency and you miss one day of studying and you need time to be able to refresh your brain have time off do activities that fuel you like exercise or spending time with your support system that sort of thing so I really encourage you to be very realistic about your study schedule what does that look like so in Osmosis you can actually use our study schedule tool you can put in all of the resources that you want to use whether that's you know first aid that's Osmosis videos and flashcards that's Pathoma, Sketchy, whatever you want to incorporate in there another piece of advice here is try not to use too many resources again I think it's so important to be realistic you want to actually be able to get through this you don't want to reach a point halfway through your dedicated period where you're realizing oh my gosh I was so ambitious I thought I was going to read every single textbook that there is and do five million questions a day and now I'm behind on that schedule and now I'm more stressed out than I might have been if I had just been realistic with myself from the start so I encourage you to be reasonable about that and Osmosis is actually a great tool to be able to divide out all of those resources for you and give you a realistic expectation of what you might be able to do in your in your dedicated period you can filter it Down based on the amount of time that you have when you had the exam whether or not you want to study every day of the week or have weekends off that sort of thing so that's a great tool that I encourage you to check out and the other core piece of dedicated period is you have to be doing practice questions you have to do practice questions every day I recommend going through you may be studying a certain topic from your study schedule whether that's say you know cardiovascular pathology do the questions on cardiovascular pathology and you really when you are doing your practice questions in your dedicated period I encourage you to try to simulate the exam environment as much as possible so that means timing yourself eliminating distractions doing you know doing the questions without using extra resources or Consulting your notes this is all low stakes it's personal assessment no one's grading you yet so feel free to make mistakes and then go back and review your incorrect answers those are the best way that you learn now when you're in your dedicated period there's two ways of doing questions on Osmosis as I showed you earlier for that kind of pre-dated period when you're first learning and consolidating that information doing those questions on the learn page themselves makes a lot of sense but for the added rigor when you're in your dedicated period and you're doing your overall synthesis of all of that information I encourage you to use our quiz Builder so as I kind of showed here sorry you have on this left hamburger menu you can click questions and that'll bring you to you can click on the step one Q Bank that'll bring you here and that's kind of how you can go through and you can quiz yourself on for example you can filter it you can say I want pathology questions in the cardiovascular system and it'll give you a number of questions that are tagged to both of those things and then you can decide your quiz size and go from there what that does is to say you're on the learn page for heart failure and you have those practice questions on the page you kind of know most of these patients are going to have heart failure right because you're coming right from that learn page when you go into the quiz Builder you don't have that extra support you don't know what these questions were written for and so you it's more simulating the exam where you have all of the possible diagnoses in your head and you're really testing your ability to look at these clinical scenarios and make sure you're making the right diagnosis and you're thinking about the right things so for that added rigor I recommend making use of the quiz Builder and then as you go through Reading incorrect answers is one of the best ways to learn and then of course also you know on Osmosis this is our quizzing interface you have those incorrect answers that you can highlight but then of course you also have a major takeaway and kind of that main explanation and what's nice about those main explanations is usually there are screenshots from the actual video so you can kind of kind of keep that learning Loop Al together now what we recommend as you are going through your practice questions particularly when you get stuff wrong and even when you get stuff right but with low confidence make those notes in your first aid so in this case you know this is a question about idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis ah we got that wrong it's actually you know amiodarone toxicity whatever so then you go into your section in first a and you look at those restrictive lung diseases and you note to yourself okay these were the pieces of that clinical yet that I missed that made me think this was ? and so instead I'm noting that in my in my first aid so that you can kind of keep having that as a reference to continually go back to lastly in your dedicated period I cannot stress this enough you need to make sure you are prioritizing your health this is a marathon not a Sprint this is a tough exam it's a ton of information and dedicated period can be really lonely and so you really have to have a lot of self-discipline on your in your personal life so that means making sure you're getting enough sleep making sure you're eating healthy foods you are not fueling your brain if you are eating Ramen every meal every day it's tempting I know but do things like meal prep at the beginning of the week maybe you take off on Sunday afternoons you get all of your stuff together so that you have healthy brain food for the week and then I also recommend you know get Outdoors get some vitamin D do exercise all these things are great for your physical health and also your mental wellbeing and last but not least having a support system and you know setting expectations for how you can check in and how people can check in on you this as I said this time can be really isolating you're separated kind of from your fellow medical students and you're separated from your friends your family and kind of that routine of that you've been into for the rest of medical school and you're in this strange time where you're just studying alone all day maintain that support system it's going to help you carry through okay let's get into test day so in the exam itself there are certain things you're not allowed to bring in you're not allowed to bring food you're not allowed to bring bags or heavy jackets and obviously you can't bring your phones or your notes that sort of thing there's actually on Osmosis there's a whole blog post that I'm sure Stephanie is probably sharing with you now about you know tips and tricks for the step one and it gives you a lot of details about the actual test day and what you can bring and whatnot as you can see here we have a kind of picture this is what typically the testing center looks like at the Prometric centers you're in your own individual cubby you have your computer that you take the exam on and you have a noise cancelling headphones that they provide for you if you want to use those you're allowed to bring snacks we have kind of a recommendation of the types of snacks that are really good for fueling you as you go through your break periods which I'll talk about mainly kind of high protein snacks I would do not recommend bringing very heavy food because you don't want that you know post prandial lethargy where you are sleepy if you eat too big of a meal so I would recommend Bing out your snacks so that you're fueling yourself throughout the day but not making yourself tired and I also recommend familiarizing yourself with the exam interface and there's two reasons for this one that's just a good idea to be really be comfortable with it and you know making sure that you know all of the different features where the Highlight feature is where the lab normal lab values are etc. but also it'll actually give you additional time in your breaks so the way that the time is broken down for the USMLE Step 1 is you have seven testing blocks and those are 60 minutes per block and then you have 15 minutes reserved for the tutorial and 45 minutes reserved for breaks however you can do the tutorial in advance on the USMLE website and that's what I mean about really familiarizing yourself with the exam interface beforehand because if you can kind of skip those 15 minutes they are actually added to your break time so that's how you can get a full 60 Minutes of break time and the way that students divide that up is variable some people will do short breaks kind of between every single section some people will do you know kind of go through a couple sections at once and then have bigger breaks you can do it however you want and I recommend feeling that out during your dedicated period what works for you whether that's you know going through your practice questions or if you do some of those self-assessments that are available from the NBME this last note here is just a reminder to not ignore a learning disability it is very easy as medical students and health professionals we like to think of ourselves as invulnerable and we sometimes forget that we to can be patients we too can have needs and that doesn't mean anything about your ability to be an incredible physician so make sure that you're thinking about those things ahead of time and if necessary set up the accommodations that you need so examples of accommodations are extended testing time assistance with keyboard or audio tools and also potentially being granted additional break time so talk with your adviser at your medical school and figure out if those are some Logistics that you need to figure out beforehand this is all actually outlined on our on our blog post as well of kind of how you can look into those so I would recommend checking that out that is all I have I want to make sure that we are leaving plenty of room for questions in our Q?A I want to wish you the very best of luck you're going to be great this is a tough this is a tough exam but the fact that you're all here says a lot and I think that you're all going to do very well you're clearly all motivated and wonderful students so it's going to be great let's from here let's take a look at let's take a look at the chat here okay some notes about the recordings just a reminder that all of our webinars are recorded and you can find all of them on Osmosis .org events that's a great resource too I personally have some webinars on there I have did a series on test anxiety that is very near and dear to my heart I recommend checking that out it's a two-part series so feel free to go in there let's see additional questions okay so some questions about kind of the logistics of practicing so one question was how many blocks per day do you recommend taking that's a good question I'm going to give you a sort of non-specific answer I think it depends on you depends on your learning the way that I think most students will do it is do a couple of blocks per day and really structure it based on the content that you're learning so what do I mean by that maybe that means you know in the mornings you do your review of whatever topic is on your study schedule that week or that day and then in the afternoons maybe you do two or three 40 minute blocks of questions I recommend you do the blocks kind of in in sets that are simulating the sections for the exam so those are usually 40 question blocks over 60 Minutes and then you can kind of you know do your afternoons like that and again in those practice periods don't just do questions on whatever you studied that morning cardiovascular make sure that you're intro leaving a couple of topics you've already studied so that you're not leaving that information at the very beginning of your dedicated you're constantly revisiting it and for that reason when you're designing your study schedule I actually recommend putting the hardest stuff first the stuff that you were the least comfortable with in medical school if you cannot stand the kidneys and that is just the bane of your existence study renal first so that you can continually be revisiting that topic throughout your dedicated period and then you know toward the end when you are doing self-assessments which I see in another practice question I'd see another Q?A about that then you can know those pieces that you really need to focus on so what are the best resources for full-length practice tests there are there are practice tests that are available through the MB and me they are four hour tests which is of course half the length of the exam so I recommend doing at least one of those where you kind of take two the two tests the same day so do the four hours and the four hours so you can really simulate that eight hour period because it's a lot it's a long exam so you want to make sure that from a stamina perspective you're able to get through that the timing of that varies so some students like to do a full self-assessment whether that's the four hour or the eight hour I don't know if that's as necessary but at least a 4 Hour toward the beginning of their period so that they have a sense of where their weaknesses are and they can adjust their study schedule accordingly I think that's a great idea or some people will space them differently so you might do a third of the way through do a self-assessment or wait until the end go through all of your material and then when you're about two-thirds of the way through your dedicated period do that full self-assessment from whatever resource but the mbmb one is great those are retired embly questions and then really make sure that you have a sense of where are your weak points what do you need to study and also how's your stamina so that's typically what I would recommend as far as so there's a question in here about how long dedicated should be most medical students will take a month and a half two months some schools are shorter and that is actually now changing a little bit the length of dedicated period because again this is now a past fail exam so you might not need quite the full you know two months or whatever but it really depends on what your medical school allows for and what's kind of built into your schedule like that so I would I would check in with your medical school see how most folks in your in your class are structuring they're studying one main thing is if you have the flexibility to do as much time as you want I would not do longer than two months I think that there it's a very easy thing to just want more and more and more time you don't need it you know this you can do this and having a defined you know amount of time that's reasonable is going to help you to be really disciplined instead of just kind of languishing in this period because as I said dedicated period is also mentally very challenging so making sure that you know you have all of the support system for that defined amount of time I think is really important all right let's see what else to we have in here all right I'm a second year medical student which year should I do my step one exam that depends on your curriculum so as I sort of said medical schools do this a little differently they might do the first year and a half is your pre-clerkship curriculum or the first two years or just the first year however that is structured most medical students though will take the step one exam at the end of your pre-clerkship curriculum whenever that falls for you there are some medical schools that students don't take step one until they're into their clinical rotations you can take that or leave that I think that you know the clinical knowledge that you do gain in your clerkships can be very valuable but it also is challenging when you've been on the Practical aspect of clinical medicine you've been in your Internal Medicine rotation to then go back to dedicated and realize oh my gosh I haven't thought about biochemistry in two months so I think you know there's a there's give and take there and it also obviously depends on what your school allows let's see oh this a good question any advice about International medical students so and who want to take a US ml so that they can practice medicine in the US that's a great question I have had a lot of IMGs who I have worked at Osmosis and who have actually been question writers for my team some of them I think are actually some of the strongest question writers because they you know took the curriculum for the USMLE exam before they were coming to the US for residency and it meant that they really focused on just kind of the structure of that exam and they did fantastically so I love that any advice though I think that I would make sure that you're really familiarizing yourself with the content outlines so go on the USMLE website there's actually an even more detailed PDF that you can download of the content outline that show shows you all of the topics that you need to know because I think it's important to make sure that you're reconciling what's covered on the USMLE with What Might Have Been covered in your curriculum in your home country so that is one thing that I that I really recommend and otherwise it's kind of the same you know making sure that you're being mindful of a reasonable amount of time in your dedicated period using the resources that work for you for how you learn doing practice questions especially is important but I think the biggest the biggest thing that I would be aware of is checking for any gaps in those curricula between the two questions about asking for extra time and which disabilities qualify and how to get that info that is all on the USMLE website so I won't I won't give any details there just because I don't know all of the details specifically and I don't know if they change year to year but I would go on the USMLE?S website and ask and you know look up accommodations and they have the information that you need and the information about the documentation and kind of the logistics of that and how much time it can take so I would be mindful of that when you're planning when you're going to take the exam talked about that is okay a couple of questions so one question of can a person who is over 40 years old passes this exam if this person is already working as a doctor so maybe they are an immigrant and they are coming to the United States English might be their second language but they want to be board certified in this country and they need to take the USMLE exam I think of course that's possible and as I've said I've had International Medical grads who have taken this exam some of them were full-on practicing in their home country and studied specifically for this exam I will say that if you're already in clinical practice Step One is probably going to be even more challenging than step two for you because step one is really that basic sciences and it might not be something that you think about in your day-to-day practice so for that I would really make sure that you're giving yourself a reasonable amount of time for a dedicated period or you know count of however you want to do your studying and your time timing because you're really going to have to go back and relearn probably a lot of that foundational Sciences Concepts which you can do with great success with resources like Osmosis or depending on how you learn there's different ways of whether that means watching videos reading textbooks that sort of thing but I think it's absolutely possible and I've seen people do it and been very successful with it so good luck see we talked about that we talked about that do clinical rotations help us more in answering questions on the exam that'll be more clinically oriented or is there no difference that's a great question I think that it can go a few ways as I was saying you know oh sorry I getting here oh as I was saying I think that you know you learn a ton in your clinical time I remember when I was a medical student I finally finished that pre-clerkship curriculum I moved on to doing my rotations and many of those concepts of these different pathologies that I may have learned about in lecture or you know on a video or whatever when I finally saw those in practice they made a ton of sense to me for example thinking about the hypertensive disorders of pregnancy I remember memorizing the different features of that memorizing the pathology behind that how that presents the timing of it that sort of thing but then when I did my Obstetrics and Gynecology rotation I really was able to crystallize all of that information and it made it a lot more real and for me that helped with being able to memorize things so I think there's benefit if it's possible to take it after doing some clinical time however like I said you're going to need to go back and really remember some of that basic science stuff that is super important for step one that you're just not going to use frankly on your day-to-day when you're on your rotations so I think you know take it with a grain of Sal what I will say though is if you are unable to take this during your clinical time or you just don't want to which I think is completely valid then I think using practice questions is your best simulation of clinical experience so I will always go back to practice questions of course but truly I think they're invaluable because when you are reading through these clinical these style questions you are think about patients in a clinical way so when you go on for example on Osmosis and you take those USMLE step one style practice questions you're getting a new patient every single time and you're getting a full description of you know their history their you know review of systems family history what whatever is vital in that subjective portion you've Al also got the objective information you've got your vitals you've got physical exam you've got laboratory studies maybe Imaging and then it'll ask you questions about things like what's the diagnosis or it might go back which of the following is a risk factor for this condition which of the following genes is likely mutated in this in this patient or whatever so in that way you are getting your clinical knowledge by doing those practice questions which is why I can't stress those enough so if you aren't doing your rotations before your exam before you know your dedicated period for this exam practice questions are fantastic in terms of simulating that clinical reasoning which I think is great okay I think those are most of the questions we had another question about whether this will be recorded yes absolutely and that is available on our on our events page in addition to all of those extra webinars that I talked about we have other questions in here oh some questions about Pathoma and UWorld is a great resource they are a powerhouse they have a ton of practice questions and they're great I think it's a fantastic resource to use during your dedicated period particularly when you want that volume of questions what I will say is when you're are especially in that consolidating piece both in your pre-dated period curriculum and also in your dedicated period particularly early on the benefit of resources like Osmosis that give you the ability to loop back and relearn information is really helpful so you can take things you can break things down really detailed and be able to if you get something wrong click on the link and watch the video on it or read the notes or what have you or take other questions that are very similar to it so I recommend having some sort of resource like that probably in addition to UWorld because UWorld is so great for being able to kind of do those simulated testing environments and of course a huge benefit of that is being able to familiar familiarize yourself with the with the testing interface because it's intentionally created to look and mimic that okay I think those are most of the questions that I have time to answer I let's see we have anything that I can answer really quickly ah thank you so Stephanie is also sharing some detailed information about the some IMG resources and different advice for that see anything in here okay I think those are that's most of what I what I kind of covered here I want to thank you all so much for coming and I want to stress again and you're going to be great you can do this I believe in you Osmosis believes in you and I think that one thing that's really important as you go into preparing for this exam whether you are well into practice you know somewhere outside of the United States and you want to come in you want to take this exam Master this material so that you're able to practice here or you are not even in medical school yet and you're on this webinar because you want to think about the USM step one exam before you know as you're applying to medical school or you're in the middle of medical school you're in your dedicated period or it starts in two days like I think somebody said wherever you are in that Journey you have the ability to pass this exam positive self-talk self-efficacy being able to tell yourself with confidence I can do this I can master all this material I know it's daunting I know it's a ton of information in not a lot of time no matter how you slice it but you have all of the tools that you need so you know go through get the resources that you want not too many but the ones that work for you think about how you learn and set yourself up for success with a great study schedule lots of practice questions and you know really consolidating and applying all of that information while also balancing your life outside of studying so that you are mentally and physically well enough to sit and succeed in this eight hour exam I think I think that's all I have for you and yes please check out check out for any events next week for the recording that'll be out next week and I think let's see I can stop sharing my screen now that's all I've got I again I really appreciate it if you have additional you know questions about Osmosis itself feel free to write in we have an incredible support team so there's all kinds of resources on Osmosis itself check out the panel you can also do U the platform you can do a two-e free trial if this is a resource that you think might be useful for you whether in your whether in your dedicated period or beforehand and so I would I would definitely take a look at that eyes off obviously something that I really love and that I personally used as a medical student as well so thank you helping current and future clinicians Focus learn retain and thrive.