Acing the USMLE® Step 1

All right, how are you feeling today? Hi, my name is Rishi and I'm here to give you a few high yield tips for you.

Assembly step one. First off doing well, takes a lot of hard work and a lot of confidence.

And with that in mind, I've seen students score in the two sixties, two seventies and, and you can too, let's get into the nitty gritty of u sly step one and, and I've come up with kind of a five step strategy to doing really well on the test.

I'm gonna walk you through it. Um I'm going to talk about osmosis because that's the, the platform I know best, but we're going to talk about other, you know, platforms and content as well just so you kind of see how to fit it in and how it all makes sense together.

So, so let's start with step one. This is early on kind of 5 to 20 before you take the test.

So really early first year of med school, maybe kind of first part of second year and at this point, just be a good medical student, you know, just enjoy your classes, enjoy your life, you know, don't stress out people start talking about, you know, essentially, you know, immediately after white coat ceremony and, and try not to do that.

If, if you are the closet gunner, if I'm talking to you, I would say try to stay in the closet. Don't freak people out, you know, no need for that.

Uh In the old days people used to buy first aid, they would take the book and they would rip the binding off or Patho do the same thing.

They had three hole punch it and kind of open it up and highlight and annotate it. And that was good, you know, 20 years ago.

Uh Today, it, it really is a much better system to just do it all electronically. Um It, it, it allows you to kind of automatically search for keywords in your notes.

So later down the road, when you're searching through your notes, you can find them much more easily. So recommend you do that early on when you're in med school, it may seem trivial.

But when you've jotted something down and two years later, you're looking for it and you can't find it. Uh it wastes a lot of time trying to decipher words in your notes from, from who knows back when.

So just searching automatically is really great uh for this bit of time. Also, early on, you should also consider using a system that allows you to automatically search your notes osmosis handles this by automatically tagging your personal notes to your coursework.

So that um so that's huge, right? You can just quickly find it and find the exact power point where you learn that particular concept.

Uh The other thing is space repetition and and you wanna make sure you use some sort of platform that allows you to do free space repetition ideally, and it helps with long term retention, the the research points that out very clearly.

And if you do that through med school, you're gonna be in good shape. So the the data shows this, this is the way to go, you know, you don't want to be highlighting and annotating.

You want space repetition. So you're focusing on the areas that you you are struggling with rather than just kind of doing the stuff that you know, really well over and over again.

So Ony quisle osmosis basic all free of charge, they're all free of charge of the three I know osmosis is basic the best it allows you to create flashcards along with your course documents.

So right alongside of what you're doing in school, it also lets you kind of crowdsource questions really easily. So you can kind of answer questions that other people in your class have written and I want you to get in the habit for a few reasons.

One is that it's easy to answer questions you've written, but you want to start seeing how other people would phrase something, just kind of get your mind thinking about that and it really does become much more challenging.

So, so force yourself to do that if you can and, and it sets you up really well. For when you're studying for U assembly step one, you're kind of ready to go.

You've already practiced a lot of this kind of uh skill building. So step two, starting to study, this is 3 to 5 months before the test day, right?

At this point, you're starting to figure out what question banks should you use? The two that I would recommend?

Are you world and NBE? To together, it's about 4000 questions.

You wanna do a couple of NBE S figure out where your, your strengths are, your weaknesses are. So you know what to focus on uh this part of the exam, you also wanna do additional practice boards questions, you know, you don't want to use up all your you world questions at this point.

So I recommend you look at one of the other question banks. For example, osmosis has a question bank of 3000 plus questions.

Uh Qmax, Caplan Qan both have about 2000 questions, doesn't matter which one you choose, choose one of them. And the, the good thing is you want to use these for learning primarily.

Now, uh One thing that I've I've come to really enjoy about osmosis questions that I think is really neat is that the osmosis questions allow you to figure out your confidence level before you answer the question.

So it asks you how confident are you? And then you click whatever the answer is and the other ones are, are going to ask you that after.

So it's important to answer the confidence question before because then you can focus on the stuff you're not confident about as well as the stuff you're getting wrong.

And there's those two buckets of questions I really want you to kind of drill into and say, why was I not confident about that?

Why was I getting that wrong? Go and find learning resources that, that can help you figure those things out and and the classic learning resources that you're familiar with Costanzo for physiology, patho for for paths, dit high yield books, laying flashcards, whatever you need.

So now let's go fast forward a little bit to step three, the ramp up phase. This is 1 to 2 months out of the exam.

So at this point, you have to think about your goals and first off average um scores are 229. And if you're thinking about something especially for my international or four medical graduate students, if you're thinking about something competitive, you should be thinking for 26 like around 265.

If you can aim for that, if you're thinking about something less competitive like PS or family medicine, 235. So just figure out where are you on that spectrum of 235 to 265.

And what's your personal goal? What do you really kind of want to aim for?

They also want to set a time deadline. My best students are the ones that set a time deadline.

Know exactly the date they're taking the U assembly step on and really just focus in on that rather than saying, oh, I'll take it when I'm ready.

So you just wanna kind of circle a date on the calendar and just move towards that date and then you're a mental ninja. You, you wanna just get into the mindset of a mental ninja 10 to 12 hours studying every single day.

That means being disciplined with your social life with, with eating with healthy uh exercising with sleeping well, with making everything about your day, about preparation for that test and leading up to the test.

You want to figure out what resources do you want to use and you want to create a daily schedule. Um osmosis allows you to do that really easily.

You just, you know, you, you can look at the interface type in what you, you know, when you want to start studying how long you want to study for when your exam date is and then check off the resources you want to use.

Um The popular ones include UFA O, that's a fun acronym you World First Aid patho and osmosis. So UFA O and it automatically generates a day by day schedule for you.

So you can change the schedule based on how many days you want to allocate to each topic that's up to you. You can mix that up.

You can include breaks for yourself. You can assign yourself full length exams in the NB me or, or you world and as you go through everything, remember, it's best to actively think rather than passively reading or, or watching something.

So at this point, spend most of your time doing questions and then going back over your answers because that's where you get a good sense of why you're getting things right or wrong.

Also helps you get practice during questions and kind of builds endurance. So at this point, you want to squeeze every bit of information or knowledge out of each question, right?

So here's some tricks on how to do that really well, the way I like to approach questions. So first I basically cover up the answer options on a question and I say, OK, what, what do I think the answer would be?

So just don't allow myself to queue my my answer by just looking at something, but just try to recall it. And you can do that with your laptop screen just like literally covering it up or you don't scroll all the way down on your phone.

And then after you've kind of come up with an answer, you wanna verbalize why the right answer is the right answer, you know, put it into words and why are the wrong answers, the wrong answer and then say, OK, what would change about that question?

That would make one of these wrong answers correct? What would have to change?

So really kind of really interrogating that question and then finally saying, OK, what didn't I get right? You know, what, what didn't I understand about the right answers or wrong answers?

Let me go look that up. So sometimes you spend 10 minutes going and looking things up, you know, again, going to those primary resources, the, the, the, the books, the high yield books, the flash cards, the videos and it can take 10 minutes or so, but it's well well worth it.

OK. All right.

So, so step four crunch time. This is one week before the exam.

You're still doing a lot of the same things. But in the final week, I want to make sure you pack in information that's going to be heavy on memorization and kind of light on the concepts and, and this is kind of things like biochemistry, you know, microbiology.

I'm an infectious disease doctor. I'll be the first to admit that uh microbiology is in this category, pharmacology, embryology, genetics stuff where you know, there's lots of questions you don't wanna get them wrong just because you didn't memorize some fact or something that you're supposed to remember.

So, really spend that last week, really focusing on this stuff, make sure you nail it and all this stuff. It's, it's hard to keep straight.

So this is why that last week you want to kind of devote to those topics. And by this point, if you haven't already done it, finish off those N BM exams, all the other ones you want to make sure you nail those many as you can and, and they're gonna predict kind of where your real score is gonna end up.

I I've seen that time and time again. So they're gonna tell you what you can probably expect on exam day within, let's say five or 10 points.

Now, at this point, you're in the home stretch, right? So step five final day, 24 hours before the the the exam.

Now on test day, you're not gonna have anything with you. No books, no online resources, no flash cards, you're gonna walk into the test by yourself.

So the day before the test, I would suggest spending the day the same way you've studied hard, just go and relax, you know, try to get yourself in a good frame of mind.

This is a day you want to prepare for logistics, you know, make sure you know where to go, how to get there, bring snacks for the day sleep.

Well, the night before bring layered clothing, light jacket in case it rains an umbrella, all that kind of stuff, you also want to make sure you don't drink too much coffee the day of the test cause you're gonna have adrenaline influence.

You don't want to be all shaky and jittery and you want to pump yourself up, right. This is where confidence really matters.

You want to pump yourself up a couple ways to do that. That are scientifically proven.

We're going to go over them right now together two ways. First power poses.

So this is where you just raise your arms. You go.

Yes. Just real loud.

Yes. And you can do the double fist pump just like, yeah, just Yeah.

Yeah, just pump it. And then the other way is just force laughter, right?

Force yourself to laugh. You know, if you don't feel like laughing just to ha ha ha ha ha I and by the end of it and I hope you're laughing because otherwise I feel like I'm just a crazy person on youtube laughing.

But by the end of it you're gonna start feeling really good. So if you've stayed this long, a couple of bonus tips, I'm gonna give you some, just extra things.

First off, it's a marathon, studying is hard. It's really tough.

And so some, some software you can get to block out, you know, websites you don't wanna go to for me that would be like nba.com or social media, just block that stuff out.

So you don't have to go to it. It's also good to divide up your work into like 25 minute kind of real power sessions where you're just working hard and then two minutes of just like stretch out your back, stretch out your neck, just allow yourself to just breathe deeply, just relax your mind.

Um I'm also an infectious disease doctor. So that part of me has to come through and say, look in your final week, make sure you wash your hands, make sure you don't stay around people that are sick.

You don't, last thing you want is to wake up, do the test and then someone, someone got you sick and you're feeling terrible or sore throat or something that you, you don't want that, right?

And then if there's one thing, one thing you get out of this video, let it be this that you want to make sure you do little things to make yourself feel good.

You know, all, all of this is about going and taking care of patients eventually, right? This is just one hurdle that you have to cross along the way and keep that in mind.

Don't lose that perspective and keep your spirits up by doing things that are good for you, right? So go out and if, if it makes you happy, drink a smoothie, you know, if it makes you happy, go to the garden, if you, if you like, you know, animals play with your dog, you know, do the things that, that make you happy and, and on that note, I'm going to give you something that hopefully makes you happy.

It's a little cartoon from awkward getty. It always makes me smile.

So enjoy the cartoon. And I wish you the best of luck.

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