Background
Hey thanks for the interest so far and the words of encouragement bronchiole and Mondoshawan. It's good to know that your peers got your back.
Before I fill you in on today's studying just wanted to give you guys a review of what I've done so far:
I basically started my studying around January 5th. I heard from a lot of ppl that doing 4 months is a solid amount of time for Step 1 but I was really hoping to get the test done by end of March. So I enrolled in a 6 week Kaplan Live Course. For anybody wondering whether its a good idea, I highly recommend it!!! I know a lot of ppl get the Kaplan books and go thru it on their own. It's not like that's a bad thing. Especially if you are using the books concomitantly with the Kaplan videos. The preference for doing it one way or the other isn't intelligence. Really, I think it comes down to acquiring knowledge at your own pace (for some of us me included that could take forever) or having the lectures basically jammed into your head via 8-9 hours of class. If you opt for the latter, it's not easy but in the end you won't regret it. Key is take excellent notes and be attentive as possible in class (Hard thing to do, but important) b/c when you come back to those books again you won't remember what the anatomy prof said about the CT in week 1 of the course unless you write it down. That's my plug for doing a Kaplan course.
The challenge comes in what to do next: As you know Kaplan gives you a big huge stack of books (2011 are much slimmer but that's cuz they use glossy pages). Seems like consensus on the forum is that Kaplan notes are the premier way to get a 99. I agree. The Challenge is getting thru them. I've been out of the course for 3 weeks. Took a break a week break.
So been 2 weeks of studying. Did one dry read of Kaplan Pharm. (Love Pharm and one of my strongest subjects but also easiest one to forget, never stop reviewing pharm my friends). Also been reading Micro Made Ridiculously Simple (MMRS). GREAT BOOK GUYS!!! In my opinion, Kaplan Micro book sucks and that was the one prof who wasn't stellar for Kaplan. Too many tables and detail w/o real good correlation is what I thought of Kap Micro. MMRS brings in stories and funny diagrams into it. If you read the text well you don't even need the tables at the end of the chapters. I was correlating with my First Aid Micro and I really think that's a good way to hone in on what's board worthy from MMRS and most of it is Board worthy. Still need to finish viruses but getting somewhere on micro.
Also hearing big time that lotta ppl finding Golgan Audio helpful. I never used it during my path course in med BUT Golgan is the shiznit. I'm not a fan of the book. Outined data isn't what works for me. However, the audio is amazing. I've been doing at least 2 hours of audio a day for the past 2 weeks and I'm learning stuff I didn't know before and reinforcing what I already know. Definitely print out the transcript version also so you can follow along with the audio otherwise it's not as useful. Already went thru the Heme portion. It's GREAT!
Aite... that's the lengthy background. I'll update what was done today along with tomorrow on manana. Hope this helps give a good explanation of materials and usage. Peace, KK
