What's crackalacking y'all? My name is Orya almost Dr. Olapo. I'll be graduating medical school in two days. Peep the MD rings. I know a lot of people are studying for step one right now. People are also studying for step two pretty soon. And I wanted to give a few tips regarding this, especially now that I've been tutoring medical students for both of these exams. And I've done about a 100 tutoring sessions at this point. And I feel like I've gotten an idea of some of the most common and dire mistakes that students tend to run into when studying for these USML elite step exams. So, I just wanted to share them so that way you don't make the same mistakes. The first mistake I would say is not having any sort of plan or structure. And this is something that not only applies when studying for the step exams, but also when just studying for your medical school exams in general. Whether that's shelf exams, subject exams, NVME exams, it's very important to have some sort of plan in place. For example, taking a look at what needs to be covered. Whether that's by going through objectives or thinking about what resources you're trying to get through, you should have some structure, whether it's a to-do list or a schedule to know what needs to get done. Otherwise, you'll find yourself just taking shots in the dark, and you could really miss out on some things that could be important for the test if you don't plan in advance the things that you need to cover. And for the people who actually don't have a plan, these are the people who run the most into mistake number two, which is staying on the same subject for too long. And this one is very very very common I see because what do you mean you've been studying cardiology for 2 weeks now you have other things to get to if you don't actually plan in advance what you're trying to cover you can find yourself getting stuck on one thing and wanting to get everything perfect about a certain topic before moving on but that's just going to do you a disservice for example cardiology is 7 to 11% of step one you're forgetting all the other subjects and you're not going to have time during in your dedicated period to get those topics back into your brain. So, in order to not fall into the trap of staying on a certain subject for too long, I would say, like I mentioned, come up with a plan. And to do that specifically, look at first aid. Look at whatever resources you want to use. Um, I actually have like a document that has how many first aid pages are in the chapter, how long the POMA videos are, how long the boards and beyond videos are. boot camp isn't on the document I have because it is a newer resource, but look at those things. Look at how long is it going to take to cover immunology. How long is it going to take to cover biochemistry? If it's a longer chapter or it has a lot of information, I would give it 3 days to study. If it's a shorter amount of information, I would give it 2 days to study. Make your plan surrounding how long you want to dedicate to each thing. And please, please stick to it. One concern that I often hear from students who like to stay on a certain subject for too long is that they don't feel confident that they fully got it down or they feel like they're going to forget the stuff that they learn in the future or they're worried about their retention. So, in order to prevent forgetting it even after you move on from a subject would be to not fall into mistake number three, which is not doing random practice questions. I hope that sentence made sense. What I'm trying to say is the way that you retain the information that you gained when you studied it and like freshened up on it is to continue doing random mixed practice question blocks. I'm telling you this is a mistake I see too many students make. Not doing random blocks of 40. Firstly, this is important because like I mentioned, continuing to do random questions is how you remind yourself of the concepts that you've already learned. This is also in addition to doing practice tests like the UWorld self assessments, the NVMe self- assessments, doing mixed practice questions that are broad not only help you to better simulate the test because when you're actually taking step one or step two, it's everything. You don't know if it's a cardiology question, you don't know if it's a gastronology question. You just have to take the question at face value and deduce. So by simulating that, it helps prepare you for the style of the exam. But it also helps you to see what is high yield on the test. For example, for whatever reason, knowing the like branches of the sciatic nerve is important on step one. For some reason, like knowing like the common peronial nerve or the fibular nerve, the tibial nerve and like what they intervate. You don't want to wait until week six when you're trying to study msk to learn that is high yield because as you do those practice questions throughout your dedicated on the daily basis even if you haven't hit that subject yet in detail you'll get an idea of what the MVME likes to test and that way once you kind of start seeing those high yield questions over and over again when you're actually going over it you can pay more attention to it and make sure you can really hammer certain things home cuz you know what's high yield by doing practice practice questions. If you didn't know already, UWorld in particular will show you questions in volume based off how important it is to know. And this is how you're going to see study growth and also remind yourself of the things that you had already studied. I know studying for step exams, step one, step two, and also the commlex exams for my DO students is a very daunting task and it's essentially a full-time job and it can be very hard to stay focused when you're in your room by yourself, isolated and just trying to get all this knowledge in your head and stay sharp for the exam. Yeah, it can be very difficult to focus. But one thing that helped me while studying for the STEP exams has been Magic Mind. This is what the bottle looks like. Magic Mind is a mental performance shot. So unlike caffeine which can make you jittery, Magic Mind actually gives you a calm energy state. It has ingredients that help improve focus as well as lower stress. And rather than just making you crash, it actually stimulates the production of ATP, the energy source of our body. I definitely use Magic Mind a lot while I was studying for the STEP exams and even like for my shelf exams. I also use it when I'm editing YouTube videos. Magic Mind has really helped me to just laser in and get into a flow state and be able to really focus because medical school is so much information to learn and it really takes consistency and focus. So, this has been a great tool that helps me. And if you want to try out Magic Mind, you should definitely check the link in my description and you can use the code or LT20 for 20% off of a onetime purchase and up to 48% off of a subscription. And I highly recommend you guys get the subscription because it's super convenient. They'll ship it right to your door and it usually comes in a box of either 15 or 30 depending on what you get. So that's if you take it every day or every other day. And if you were to try it and don't like it, they do have a 100% money back guarantee. So there is no harm in trying it. If you are indeed, you definitely could benefit from Magic Mind. So check it out. Link in description. The next mistake that I see students make when studying for step one, and I guess this one's more subjective as far as whether you want to consider it a mistake or not, but I would say not striving for the best or not being willing to put in the work to do as best as possible. And I would say this is more of a mistake for step one studyers. You know, the exam did go past fail a few years back. And it's not that the students don't work hard. They aren't going in with a growth mindset and a mindset that they want to do the best as they can. Um, and the reason why it's important to go in studying for step one like it's a scored exam is because your studying for step one is what lays the foundation for step two, which is scored and is a huge contributing factor as far as your residency application. And it also lays the foundation for the knowledge you're going to gain throughout your clerkships and M3. But I will say there is a subset of students who don't really know how much work is actually required and therefore don't put in the work required. They might come up with a schedule but it's insufficient. Hear me now. If you are in a dedicated period for step one studying 4 hours a day is not going to cut it. 6 hours a day is not going to cut it. For step one, step two, minimum 8 hours. You have to at least treat it bare minimum like a full-time job. that is doing bare minimum 40 practice questions a day, preferably more like in the 60 to 80 range, doing your content review and so on and so forth. If you want a like video nitty-gritty how I study for step one, I have one so you guys can just watch that. Doing well and excelling in medical school takes sacrifice to an extent. I'm not saying don't relax. You should actually incorporate breaks into your schedule. I'm not saying don't have fun. You should plan for those events, family, weddings, any hobbies. plan for all of those things when you're creating your schedule. Balance is definitely key. However, there is such a thing as not putting in enough hours, not putting in enough work, and it's also important to make sure that you're doing the right things in that time. Obviously, um like I said, check out my how to study for step one video. And studying efficiently and effectively is also key. Think of it this way. The vast majority of adults are out there working 8 hour shifts. That's like the standard. As a medical student, you should at least be doing that if you have literally all day to do nothing but study. And me saying eight hours is me saying bare minimum. Ideally, 10 to 12 hours. But yeah, I think I've hammered that one home enough. The next mistake that I see students make when studying for the step exams is not prioritizing their foundation throughout their years of medical school. So, for example, most people take step one at the end of their second year and step two at the end of their third year. as someone who studied for step two in two weeks and was still able to do well. I will say the fact that I did well on my shelf exam was instrumental considering like step one trying to really understand the things that you're learning and not just trying to learn it to get through the exam and pass and really taking the time to digest what's being said. Maybe doing an cards if that's something that helps you with your long-term retention, so on and so forth. doing those things to actually come into your dedicated period and treating it like it's a review time, which it is, rather than treating it like it's your time to learn all of medical school is a huge huge advantage. So, if you're somebody who's like about to start their second year of medical school, just finished M1, biggest thing is really like building that foundation, especially like with the pathology cuz that's the chunk of these exams. And if you're already in dedicated and feel like you don't have a good foundation or a strong foundation, we can't go back in time. But what we can do is like I mentioned the growth mindset, carrying that growth mindset moving forward. Accept this period for what it is. This is your time to really identify where your weaknesses are. Now that you're in a situation where you have to remember everything and review everything, you literally have free time at your own pace to solidify those concepts and improve your technique. So just look at it as an opportunity to grow and like I said, strive for excellence. And this is coming from someone who actually failed my first few practice test for step one, but was able to really work my way up to a decent practice exam score. So view it as a blessing. And for my third-year medical students, really try your best on every shelf exam. I don't give a hoot whether you're interested in that specialty or not. It's on step two. Learn it as well as you can because really a this is your only time to learn a lot of these topics. You're a doctor first. So, you want to have a strong knowledge base in general. People are really looking up to you and look to you to assist them with their health. Something that's so intimate and so vulnerable. So, you want to come in knowing a thing or two, but also because everything's going to be on step two. And really taking interest in learning these things is also going to help your clinical grades. Yeah. Especially also, I don't know about other schools, but at my school, we don't necessarily get a step two dedicated. You might might be able to take a month off to study, but it's not like the two months that you get for step one. So, it's very important to come in with a good foundation. And the way to do that is by doing the best you can on your shelf exams and learning as much as you can on every single rotation. The next big mistake that way too many students make is using first aid as a learning tool. First aid is not a learning tool. First aid is a review book. I remember when I was in M2, I open up first aid and I was just seeing acronyms everywhere and I'm like, what is TSH? what is HTN? Like maybe not those specific ones, but when they make first aid, they are going with the assumption that you already have learned these things and it's just trying to jog your memory. But if there's no memory to be jogged, it'll be hard to learn from first aid. Resources that are learning tools, pathoma, boards and beyond, boot camp, I would say UWorld is a learning tool. I think UWorld's explanations are amazing. online med is a great learning tool especially for the people studying for shelf exams so on and so forth but first aid is not the one I would actually say first aid is a great book to go off during dedicated but when you're like actually learning this information for the first time or if it's in a subject that you feel especially especially weak in first aid is not the place to go to learn the content go elsewhere but it is the go-to book for dedicated speaking of resources the next big big big mistake is using too many of them. When you start your process of doing NVMe based exams, um if you go to a medical school that does those like during your first or second year, you're going to ask a bunch of people what they used to study and they're going to give you a bunch of different answers, a bunch of different techniques. Draw from them and make your own. Don't try and do everything that everybody is doing. I would say choose two or three and just make sure that everything is covered. For example, if you use pathoma for pathology, maybe you could use one more resource for pathology, but you have to make sure you're filling in your pharmacology or filling in your anatomy, whatever is on your test. Maybe a year before you take step one is a good time to start like shopping around and seeing which ones you vibe with. But once you find some that you vibe with, choose them. Dedicated is not the time to be trying out different resources unless you're somebody who's like never done anything NVME based. Um, and if that's your school, if your school doesn't do NVMe based exams, I would actually prepare a bit more longitudinally doing UWorld questions and just trying to get used to the style of those exam questions earlier on rather than later. Three resources that you don't need altogether. If you're doing boot camp, you have no business doing Boys and Beyond. If you are doing boot camp or Boys and Beyond, you have no business doing online med. But I do think online medad is better for M3 and the boot camp boards and beyond are better for M2. But boot camp boards and beyond essentially the same thing just giving comprehensive review. Pathoma is just pathology but I think it does a great job at pathology. So that's something else I could add in there. UWorld is a must please. You cannot escape UWorld do UWorld or Ambos and then Sketchy maybe Sketchy Micro Sketchy Farm. I think that's all you really need. But if you have other resources that you like, go with whatever those are. But you don't need to do multiple things that are just like hugely comprehensive. Choose what you like, save your time, and move on. The next mistake is avoiding negative emotions. And what do I mean by this? I find that often times students may study things that they already know that they're good at because they don't want to tackle the thing that is hard for them or they want to not feed their ego, but like it just stresses them out when they're doing practice questions and they're getting question after question after question wrong. And rather than acknowledging that this is part of the experience, this is part of the growth process and using it to improve, some students can avoid doing those things. You know, students handle things differently depending on their personalities. Some people will see a subject that they struggle with and spend entirely too long on it. Other students will avoid it or avoid questions with it or just mentally give up on learning it and be like, "Eh, it's only XYZ% of the exam. I'll just try and do better on all the other things, but they're not going to try to really put effort to improve that area because it hurts. It's hard. I acknowledge that it's hard taking L after L. When you do that, you will block and it says 30% correct. I've been there. I have been there. It's an emotional hit. You really need to work on building your resilience, building your ability to take those emotional hits because it's much better to take it now when you're in your bedroom studying than to not have that information when you need it when you're dealing with a patient. Just hear me out now. Step dedicated is the trenches. Step one. Step two, trenches. The sooner you accept it's going to be the trenches and just do your best to dig yourself out of that trench, the better. The final two mistakes that I'm going to mention are things that have to do more with like actual test taking technique. Next mistake is choosing answers that don't really have evidence to support it slash choosing answers that you know are not the correct answer. And I know this sounds silly, but it's actually very common. And actually, I think this really ties in with the last mistake. So I'll just explain them together. So the last mistake is that students often don't look at the big picture of questions. Um so let me explain these two together now. So I like to use this example with rheumatoid arthritis versus osteoarthritis. Um if you're a medical student I hope you're with me. Let's say we have a patient 49year-old female comes in with joints swelling and stiffness. It's worse in the morning and it improves throughout the day. And you look at her hands, she has swelling in the proximal interfallangial joints and the metacarpoangial joints, but she's rheumatoid factor negative. What would you choose as the answer? Some students will tell me osteoarthritis after hearing that and they'll say, "Well, she's rheumatoid factor negative." However, everything else, all the other evidence in the question, the physical exam, the symptoms, you had like any imaging labs, everything else can point to one thing, but you're going to let one piece of information throw you off and choose an answer that doesn't have evidence to support it. I have no reason to believe this is osteoarthritis, but I have four reasons to think it's rheumatoid arthritis, but one reason to think, oh, maybe it's not rheumatoid arthritis because rheumatoid factor is negative. So, you're going to anchor yourself on that one piece of information and choose an answer that has no evidence to support it. I see this too often. A saying that I often say to my students who I tutor, if it walked like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. It's a duck. Unless you have a piece of information or multiple piece of of information that tell you there is absolutely no way that this can be a duck. you have to be like very compelled to believe it cannot be that thing that has a lot of evidence to support it. So I guess this is just my way of saying don't talk yourself out of something that you know is the answer. And another saying that I like is maybe the NVME know something I don't. Let's say they give you different pieces of information and you think it might be a certain disease. However, you receive a couple of pieces of information that you're just not sure what the significance of it is. I would still go with whatever you think the answer is based off what you do know because sometimes there's just a piece of info that you may not have registered and you're going to learn and fill whatever gap needs to be filled once you actually answer the question and see the explanation. Once you read the explanation, hopefully you don't miss those key pieces of information next time. I hope that makes sense. If it doesn't make sense, comment down below. And also when I talk about looking at the big picture, it's very important to be able to pull out pieces of information and synthesize them together when you're studying and answering practice questions. Especially because sometimes the NVMe likes just throwing a whole bunch of words at you. You don't know what's relevant. You don't know what's not relevant. It's important to remain mindful of the context of the question. So that means paying extra attention to what the patient came in for. So what their symptoms were as well as the objective findings. So that's like I mentioned imaging, labs, biopsy results, physical exam, because more often than not, those objective things will point you right to the answer. And you have to be able to analyze those within the context of the symptoms that the patient presents with. And I think that's really what we do as doctors. You know, we talk about the subjective objective assessment and plan. We get the assessment and plan from the subjective and objective. Right? So when they give you word soup, you have to actually analyze, okay, which of these things could actually lead to these symptoms and these results that I'm getting and how do we manage the actual issue at hand? And not losing sight of those things is very important. Otherwise, it's very easy to get lost in the sauce. And I will say this is easier said than done, but it really comes with practice. So like I mentioned, go with what has the most evidence to support it. And when it comes to questions regarding management, go with what's the most important thing that needs to be done based off the context of the clinical scenario. If you notice 99% of questions on UWorld, the last sentence is probably going to have the word most in it. What is the most appropriate next step? What is the most likely cause? So being aware of the common things and also being aware of what is most pressing considering what the patient actually has going on in that moment in time is key. It's definitely easier said than done, but it comes with practice. So, those are all the biggest mistakes for people studying for step one or step two. I hope you found this video beneficial, and I hope I helped you avoid some scorekilling mistakes. If you enjoyed this video, give it a thumbs up, leave a comment down below, and remember to check out Magic Mind, link in description. Adios. [Music]