USMLE advice you won’t get anywhere else

Once I started studying for the boards, I found that most of the advice I had heard was crap. Not that it was bad advice in its own character, really; it just didn’t apply to me at all. I just don’t think I learn the same way the average med student does. Maybe this is why I went MSTP instead of MD. Anyway, here’s my list of unorthodox strategies that I found helpful while studying for the USMLE.

1. Learn excel. Learn it really, really well.
Let’s say (in theory) you somehow got your hands on an electronic copy of First Aid or some other boards review book and you really want to make some flashcards. If you know excel really well, you can just highlight the columns of the table in Acrobat, paste into Word, run your cleaning macros (Oh, BTW, learn Word programming really well, too), and paste into excel. Repeat this with all of the columns from the First Aid table and you have reproduced it. Then just write some formula like:
=C38&IF(D38<>"","<><>"&D38,"")
Or
=IF(C139<>"",$C$113&C139&$I$113,"")&IF(D139<>"",$D$113&D139&$I$113,"")&IF(E139<>"",$E$113&E139&$I$113,"")&IF(F139<>"",$F$113&F139&$I$113,"")
Fill down, copy all the results, paste into Flashcardexchange.com with “<>” as the line break indicator, and you’re done. Seems like a lot of work, huh? Well it isn’t; you just made 100+ flashcards in under 10 minutes. All you need to do this is really solid knowledge of excel functions and how to link them together. I’d go into this more, but it’d be really boring pretty much everyone but me.

2. Get flashcards on your iphone/ipod touch.
I used Mental case despite not having a Mac. I bought the premium version, too. Worked great with all those flashcardexchange.com sets. Now you’re studying while in line at the grocery store or bank. Awesome.

3. If you’re not one to burn out, don’t think you’re going to burn out.
Everyone I talked to from the class above said things like “after 2 weeks, I couldn’t read any more” or “anything after 3 weeks is useless as you’re going to burn out anyway.” I never thought I was a burning-out kind of guy, but I believed them. Well, turns out I don’t burn out. I got a little wobbly a few days before exam, but that was due to the number of days remaining opposed to the number of days behind me. Not everyone burns out, so just go with what you know about your work ethic.

4. You don’t NEED to take a break first.
Everyone and their mother seems to believe that in order to survive the USMLE, you MUST take at least a few days, and as much as a week off between 2nd year finals and studying for the boards. Nope. I suspected that I’d rather start right away and get more days off at the end. I was spot on. Turns out that advice was crap.

5. Nearly everything anyone tells you about the boards is anecdote, not fact.
Duh, right? This should be obvious, but soooo many people spout advice and stories like it’s all absolute Truth. “The test doesn’t really mention X or Y” “You need to study by doing Z” etc., etc. Well, their words apply to them and maybe a subset of everyone else, but you can’t be sure it works for you.

#5 is the most important one here. It tells you that #s 1-4 of my post are complete crap. They are! Those things applied to ME, and I am an outlier (and that is an understatement). I would be shocked if any of it proved useful to more than 1 or 2 people. If you seek advice from SDN forum members or classmates already done with the USMLE, take it all lightly; you are a different person. It’s like a vacation: if someone you know has been to Venice and tells you about it, you wouldn’t assume that their Venetian vacation is the only right Venetian vacation, right? It’s just like that, only the vacation sucks.

Update

I am in the throes of the USMLE right now. I have oodles to spew forth on the interwebs once I have the time, but for now I need to keep at this. For the record: my last post (where I said I was studying for the USMLE already in December) makes me laugh. I did that for, like, 3 days. Some good that did.

Topics to come:
- buying a home as an MSTP (with your own money!)
- USMLE advice you won't get anywhere else (alternatively titled: Why >80% of the USMLE advice I received did not apply to me at all)
- USMLE advice you likely will get somewhere else
- MSTP0 - MSTP2: how it changed what I thought about science/medicine/intellectualism
- Rants! I have 1 or 2 things I just need to rip to shreds.

I'm sure I will come up with more as I go. I promise, before I hit "publish", I will make sure I keep the wishy-washy nonsense to a minimum and keep things as short as possible.

Until then
R

2nd year represented in 1 image

I took a quick break from studying to take and stitch together this shoddy panorama of our study carrel. The desks here mostly belong to MSTPs, some of whom use this space as mere storage and others who use it for daily studying. Note the piles of study materials and beverage containers. We have 2 minifridges stocked with food, juices, and beer, about a dozen different dry teas, a microwave, water boiler, rice cooker, food cabinets, etc. It's pretty much a home away from home, and many of us spend 12+ hours a day in this little room.

(We got really unlucky in the lottery for carrel space. Most carrels are much larger and have windows. We live in a closet. Although this sucks during sunny days, it does help you forget that it's 11 PM and you are still studying. A mixed blessing, for sure.)

Back to pathology...

class show tidbits

If you want to see what antics our crazy class our class is getting into these days, check out these youtube videos. If you know the MSTs (through interviews or second looks) you will notice that we were pretty omnipresent in the class show. There are some more vids on the WUMS2011 youtube account if you care to see some more.

Oh yeah, and we got the final roster of the incoming MSTP class. I look forward to meeting the ones I haven’t yet. Alright, I gotta study for Neuroscience; final’s next week.

end of interview season!

Yes, yes… bad MSTP blogger. I haven’t written about the grandeur and glamour that is the life of an MD/PhD in a while. I kind of thought I would have time to do so while recovering from a recent surgery, but it turns out I just slept a lot.

There are some of you that I really liked and was saddened to find out that you were not offered a spot on the admissions list. Let’s just say that if I had some say, I would have changed that for a few of you. Seeing as how I enjoyed meeting you because you were intelligent, balanced, and fun to talk to, I am sure you got an offer from other great schools. The national MSTP crowd is well connected enough that I can reasonably expect to cross paths with you sometime again in our careers.

And now I just want to take a few minutes to say:

-it was awesome meeting those applicants that I was fortunate enough to meet

-I am pumped to learn that there are already a good number of you signed on and committed to the program

-come to second look weekend

-no, really, come to second look weekend. It’s FREE.

Second look is absurdly fun (really, it’s ridiculous.) If you can, I suggest that you come to the one that combines the MD class with the MSTPs. If not, at least go to the MSTP only one. Even if you aren’t totally into WashU at that point, second look is a great time to network with other MSTPs, some of whom will end up here and some of whom will choose other schools.

Oh, and I am helping to plan the MD/MSTP combined weekend. Unfortunately, the MSTP-exclusive weekend falls on our spring break, so the 1^st and 2^nd years will be mostly out of town by then. I might still try to meet up with you on the Friday prior, but that’s pending.

At any rate, being an MSTP here is still awesome and I am still having the time of my life. And I can speak first hand that if you for any reason must take some time off from school (say, to get your leg repaired), the school is wonderful to you throughout the process. You don’t appreciate it until you need it.

See you in April…

social studies

Oh… is that an MSTP thing?

So it appears that the divide between MSTPs and MS1s has been widening. I first started noticing it at the med school applicant parties. When all of the next day’s applicants are relaxing and enjoying free pizza courtesy of WUSM, the first years will descend and answer questions, eat free food, and shoot the shit. Every once in a while, an applicant would ask a question and an MS1 will finish their answer with something like “… unless you’re an MSTP, then it’s different.” This evolved over the weeks into some variants, such as “unless you’re an MSTP. They get all the money/they’re spoiled/they’re special.” Sometimes, an applicant would ask me a question and an MS1 will cut in and say something like “he wouldn’t know, he’s an MSTP.” Aggravating, huh? Really, we are just like MS1s. The only differences are that we have the option to take one different class than the MS1s do, we get paid tuition (ahem… 16 MS1s have free rides, but who thinks of that?), and that we have the occasional research talk over lunch.

Well, it went to a new level last Thursday. I was talking to a MS1 that I consider a pretty good friend. We were talking about Indian restaurants in the area, and she recommended her favorite. I said “Hey! I’m going to be there on Sunday!” Her response was “Oh, is this another MSTP lunch?”

This bothered me. Yes, some of the MSTPs are good friends. About a third of us are very, very close, at least half are good enough friends that we often will eat dinner/see a movie /etc. with each other. When we do so, however, there are usually MS1s there as well. We are by no means exclusive. Now on the flipside, the person that organized this Indian lunch on Sunday invited only MSTPs, but that’s her prerogative, not ours as a whole. In fact, last night I was hanging out with 9 people, of whom I was the only MSTP. Basically, what I’m getting at here is that there is no such thing as a Sunday MSTP lunch. It’s just a lunch among friends, but I guess some in our class feel otherwise and see the MSTPs as an exclusive group. Oh well, I guess it’s bound to happen to some extent.

On a related note, I am now also in a hard place because of my lack of social exclusivity. The class as a whole is 123 people. I am now involved in planning a trip with some friends (mostly MS1s, to relate this to the previous story). I want to have my friends with me, of course, but there’s a problem. Because I refuse to be cliqued off, many of my friends come from separate social groups. No big deal, as most people still get along fine. The problem lies in that there are some seeds of contempt here and there. What to do when some of my friends really don’t like some of my other friends?

Oi. They weren’t kidding when they said med school = high school with smarter people.

more of the same + a random rant

So, things around here have become a bit routine. Not in a bad way for an MSTP student, mind you, but for you guys as readers. There’s little else about which to write. I mean, as L has already written, our first anatomy exam (not too bad) and first MCB (molecular cell biology, the grad school course a bunch of us take) exam (OI VEH! Don’t get me started…) have past us by, and some MSTPs are currently cranking for their MFM (molecular foundations of medicine, a.k.a. mother f*%&ing molecules) tomorrow. The rest of the MSTPs, however, are chilling until histology (Wednesday’s exam) and physiology (Thursday).

Cliff’s notes: school is moving along, and there is very little that we can write about at this point.

Oh, but it’s interview season! I can honestly say that I love seeing applicants. I take the MD applicants on little unofficial tours where I show them stuff that they don’t get so see on theirs. The MSTP tours, however, are much more thorough. I digress: what I want to get at is if you find me during your MSTP interview, I’ll talk your ear off and distract you from the stress of the whole process.

On to something totally unrelated to life here: does anyone else think that Rosalind Franklin’s status as some sort of feminist martyr is little more than BS? I only bring this up because WIRED magazine is running a thing on the most underappreciated scientists in history, and Franklin is near the top (a position dominated by Tesla, and rightfully so, in my opinion.) Yes, photograph 51 was vital to the W-C model of B-DNA, but honestly, she just took a photograph. She was a good crystallographer in that she could take a good photo, but if she was that good, couldn’t she solve the structure herself? She sat on the data. She was ready to drop the project and leave altogether because she hated working at King’s. Yes, yes, she hated it because King’s was an institution full of sexism, but that had nothing to do with Watson’s or Crick’s ideas. People just make this assumption, which I think was wrong: Franklin was a victim of sexism in science, and Franklin’s photo was used* without her knowledge to elucidate the structure of DNA, therefore she should have gotten credit as the true discoverer of the DNA structure to rectify the sexism.

I don’t buy it. I am not saying anything about her here other than that her role in this particular paper was little more than that of a technician. And at least a technician would have had intellectual input. She had none (for whatever reason: some basically hold to it that she was a hostile bitch and had no interest in any sort of contribution, others say that the man kept her down and disallowed her to add her intellectual muscle should she have it in this particular experiment.) So when I hear someone saying that Franklin is the real discoverer of the double helix, I interpret that as worse than sexism – scientific ignorance and reactionary feminism.

I’m bound to get hate mail/comments about this. Whatever, I have researched this plenty and I love the intellectual exercise.

PS I finally got a camera. Expect some more photographs of life as an MSTP, especially come spring when things really get fun/crazy.

-R

*: “used” is a very, very loose word here. She presented a lot of data to her peers at a talk prior to this, and photo 51 merely received a glanced at by Crick. That’s all he needed to do. He didn’t really use the photograph as the intellectual workhorse of the structural study.

work hard, play hard

So the routine is settling in. Most of us MSTPs are fixtures at the study carrels after lecture and for most of the afternoons during the weekend. The carrels are actually a great place for “social studying” so it keeps the stress kinda low. Don’t fret, however, as we are not really boring due to all of this studying. In fact, two of the MSTPs were just elected to the social chair position, which means people seem to have gotten the idea that MSTPs are actually fun and can organize a good party. Some of the second years even think that the MSTP class this year is a little too crazy.

Oh, and I hope to see some of you readers (there are a few hundred of you now! I am shocked.) at the interviews that are fast approaching. You won’t have much trouble figuring out who I am.

-R