Dear Brothers and Sisters,
You all "rule"!
It is I who is thankful that I can help. This is part of my calling in my life. So many students emailed/PM'd me in the past couple of years telling me that my posts helped them pass. Each message like that is worth a year's salary as a doctor to me. It is really encouraging for me personally.
Really reach out to others on this message board. It IS like "family". If you pass, let others know. If you did NOT pass, share with others and ask for their advice. Share your strategies and coping skills.
And I forgot to mention how important it is to find a close MENTOR if you are having a lot of trouble passing or improving your score. If you are in trouble, it is VERY hard to really SEE yourself and understand where you are going wrong. You need someone fresh from the outside to come in and gracefully and honestly tell you what is going on.
It should be someone who is familiar with the Step 1 and how you are picking up the material and how learning works. They should be able to sit with you periodically and see if you are really understanding the mechanisms and how the boards likes to ask questions. The NBME loves to string together different subjects like pathology and biochemistry and pharm and then ask a question based on it.
Do not pay someone outrageous sums of money to help you. In fact, try to find a kind soul without paying them. In truth, they will do the most sincere work. In many of my own studies in college and medical school and now in residency, all of my own mentors helped me for free. That is when you KNOW you have quality and a good mentor. A person willing to help without payment truly DOES have your interests in mind. A person asking for a lot of money...well that person has your money in mind. A good mentor should live close by you so you can meet with him/her at least once a week.
I would love to mentor more, but I am quite busy with my own students too, plus doing the concepts for this board. But I did do a LOT more mentoring in the past. You CAN find someone. Look first in your medical school at professors. A PERFECT person would be someone like Dr. Goljan who IS your current professor AND who teaches Step 1 AND is really a nice guy.
Again, seek out a mentor who can look over your shoulder and can ANALYZE how you are PROCESSING the information and recalling it. Someone in medical school did that for me too! In a few subjects, my friend had made a computer program that would ask me questions like a Q-Bank, and figure which areas and concepts I was slower to grasp and the speed at processing and remembering the information. Then my friend would suggest reasons as to WHY I was having trouble. It was sometimes motivation related (I was not a big fan of Histology). Or other times it was just hard for me to grasp (Cardiology). So I had to adjust my studies. He was, I am almost sure, ranked like 3rd in our ENTIRE medical school class. He was a perfect mentor for me.
Oh, if you are forced to guess on a tough question on the Step 1,
let broad principles guide you to a "best guess". Eliminate the most obvious traps (things that seem too easy). Be suspicious of answer choices that seem like something that a completely uneducated person would be drawn to. Recall that distractors are distractors for a good REASON. If they do not distract and trick someone, then it would NOT be among the answer choices. And other broad principles are to pick the LEAST invasive and the LEAST side effects medicines or tests and the LEAST expensive and the most easy for the patient to follow. For instance, you would pick Amoxicillin before Vancomycin for a gram positive bug due to the side effects and lower cost. Second, you would pick "reduce salt and water & reduce weight" before using Lasix/Furosemide for treating HYPERTENSION, etc. Another broad principle that you will find is true when you analyze the NBME's released items and past retired questions is that they generally prefer the more common disease among the answer choices given a non specific question/chief complaint. And so on. There are other such broad principles to guide you, but you will either pick them up more as you go along, or you will need a mentor to guide you.
Again, to answer more student questions, stopping your pursuit for medicine IS ok, if it is for the right reasons. If you have the HOPE, time, money, motivation, life circumstance, love for medicine, then you should continue your quest. Life IS a journey, not just a passing of one test. If your heart is in medicine, it makes no sense to drop out if you are going to continue to regret it all the days of your life. However, if you are "at the end of your rope" and are going to go nuts and lose your hope, joy for life, etc. then you should pray about it and maybe take time off from studying or maybe seek another path altogether. If you run out of money and time or if you have to take care of your sick mother, then you SHOULD stop running for Step 1. But that is SUCH a tough decision. I think that would be another question for a mentor that would take ENORMOUS soul searching.
I am reminded of that U2 song, 'Stuck in a Moment.' Even if this time of trial seems so hard and never ending, "this too shall pass"...
And I also recall in the Old Testament regarding Job. Even though he suffered immeasurably, in the next stage of his life, God Blessed him more than ever with endless grace.
God Bless you all,
Much love, Tommyk