I'm in the throws of studying for Step 1, in that we're one week into our dedicated study period, and I had my first nightmare about this beast last night. This does not bode well for my mental health in the coming months.
You see, I blew off medical school for the past year and half and, as a result, there are glaring gaps in my knowledge base. Couple that with the fact that I need a good score to have any chance of matching into orthopedics (my current love), and I have a lot of stress on my hands right now.
At the end of our block curriculum, I knew that I had a lot of ground to make up, but in order to see just how much, I stupidly took a practice test last week. It was a disaster. It was so bad that I spent the rest of the afternoon scouring the internet for success stories of people who pulled up their score by upwards of 50 points. Yeah, not many of those out there. So I fell into a hopeless funk and resigned myself to sucking hard-core on the most important exam of medical school. Not surprisingly, the rest of the day was a wash.
I managed to pick myself up from that mini-depression mostly by talking to a bunch of friends who have been through this before. Some confirmed my fears that I wouldn't be able to bring up my score to where I need it to be. But others gave me hope since they were in similar situations as this and managed to pull off a miracle. I work best under fear, so I'm hoping this is the motivation I need to really buckle down and study my butt off for the next month or so.
Speaking of months, I had originally set aside 6 weeks for dedicated period, which is more than sufficient according to nearly everyone. But since half of the first week was taken up by orientation administrative things and it's now been confirmed that I know nothing, I'm most likely going to push my exam back by a week to get 6 actual weeks of studying instead of the 5-ish I currently have. I lose a week of vacation, which would've been spent in the jungles of Costa Rica with my dad, but I'm going to need those extra days even if it's only to help my psyche and not so much my score.
We have a school-administered practice exam this Friday, so I'll see how much I've improved in the two weeks since my last practice test and make a decision then. But seeing how my question bank averages are going, the answer is probably not that much.
Worst case scenario, I push back starting rotations by a month to buy myself even more time. I'm pretty sure it won't come to that, but I really like knowing worst-case scenario outcomes. It keeps the stress from overflowing into hopelessness and being too overwhelmed, which is when I truly shut down. Just enough stress, and I'm super productive. But once it boils over, I may as well call it quits.
In the meantime, I'll try to keep my exam-induced neuroses to a minimum on this blog. I hope I come out of this with some sort of success story. Fingers crossed.
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Note: I'll post more specifics about my practice exams and other scores once I'm finally done with this thing, much like I did my MCAT. I'm not so much ashamed of my practice score, but more in denial about how poorly I did. I prefer not to see the number in print again until I've hopefully managed to overcome it.
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