Fact: I am attempting to have a weekly segment discussing various USMLE Step 1 topics.
Fact: I am starting that segment today.
Fact: That segment will be called Board Review Tuesdays.
Fact: That segment is this segment, and I'll start to talk about boards right now.
I stumbled onto CramFighter at around 4 in the morning during winter break, waking up in a panic, realizing that I would be taking the boards in less than half a year. But CramFighter is actually amazing, not just an impotent comfort against the waves of panic attacks that now assault me on a fairly regular basis. It's incredibly comprehensive, it's stylish (rockwell font in the logo, I'm pretty sure), it's simple, and it does what I cannot do: It makes a definitive time-line of what to study.
Well, almost definitive. You can change the schedule at any time by clicking on the "edit schedule" button. And I've been switching my scheduling a lot. I originally decided to read 18 review books in total, do 2185 UWorld questions, and look over 100s (read: 200) of flashcards for pharmacology and microbiology. This would later prove to fail.
But the CramFighter approach is very helpful for people who are preparing for the boards not through on-line or in-person classes, but through reading. It has proven incredibly helpful for me, in that I've actually studied for the boards instead of opening up First Aid and then promptly closing it, putting it aside for tomorrow, eating dinner, and going to sleep.
Ah yes, CramFighter is amazing. But it's not definitive. You can change it at any time, editing your schedule in the following ways:
- Learning Resources you want to use (text books, review books, flash cards, practice questions)
- Time you want to spend each day of the week reviewing
- Order in which you review topics (both systems based and course based)
- this is actually its best feature: it can scavenge for topics in the various review books you own so that you end up reading, say, all you have on psychiatry at the same time
- Days you want to take off (holidays, catch-up days)
So I started off with 18 review books, 2185 Uworld questions, and about 450 flashcards. This proved unsustainable: I was going to end up reading over 70 pages per day and doing about 100 practice questions a week.
That's terrifying. And after only successfully completing my readings 4 out of about 15 days (and cheating crassly) I decided to remove all my Board Review Series books, 7 in total. Now CramFighter is telling me to read about 30-50 pages per day, which is much kinder to my psyche. And actually manageable.
Although I want someone to appreciate the fact that I will be spending 2 hours every day on nothing other than preparing for an exam I will take four months from now.
Pros: Plans my "life" for me, keeps all my books in order, helps me study in the most efficient way possible, knows my name (see above: Hi, Elora!) and seems excited that I exist
Cons: The full version costs $7.99 a month (I'm just going to assume online study/review courses are much more expensive), there is no extrinsic motivation (although most medical students seem to have intrinsic motivation down).
Overall Impression: They should make this for other large exams, like the Bar. I have no idea how law school works, but I can only assume something like this would be helpful for all major exams that are terrifying and include literally every little detail on an entire field of academia.
I paid over $2000 for my bar review class. It was worth it.
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