General Study Resources
This is a list of study resources that can be used for EVERY block:
- High-yield resources
- Boards and Beyond: Dr. Ryan is the king and makes great videos. As a medical student you will absolutely love him.
- First Aid: great for high-yield points! Pair it up with Boards and Beyond and you’ll be set!
- Osmosis: amazing easy-to-understand animated videos
- Sketchy Pharm: animated videos that help you remember all the pharm there is to know!
- Ninja Nerd: great videos for M1 year! They can be long, but definitely worth your time if you need extra clarification on topics.
- AMBOSS: like a Wikipedia for medical school! Combines UpToDate information together with info covered in high-yield resources like Boards and Beyond and First Aid.
- Also has a question bank, but these are better for M2’s.
- Anki: flash card app that helps you keep up with all the information
- Physeo: a relatively new resource with comprehensive lecture videos, textbooks, Anki decks, questions, and great mnemonics that will likely (speculation here) replace Sketchy in the future
- Faculty Objective Resources
- AMBOSS
- UpToDate
- StatPearls
- Class Supers
For the CRE:
The CRE can be a very stressful test, mostly because the grading criteria is never entirely clear. The only things you can do to study for it is to look over Alex’s Lab Values Guide (can help you narrow down your differential but NOT especially important for block 1) and practice using PBL cases. As for format, for the first two blocks, a helpful thing is to:
- List out all of the body systems.
- Categorize each positive finding under one or more of the body systems.
- The two body system categories that have the most positive findings could be your hypotheses (be general).
- Discuss everything else that doesn’t fit with your hypotheses.
You don’t have to follow this format, but it’s an organized way to make sure that you’re discussing all of the findings at some point.
For blocks 3-8, here is the format we found worked best:
- Blocks 3-4 only: summary paragraph of the positive and negative findings
- For the rest of the blocks: quick summary paragraph of the findings and patient (“This patient is a 30-year-old male/female with past medical history of ___ presenting with…”)
- Paragraph saying something along the lines of, “Given the patient’s constellation of findings, [diagnosis/hypothesis] is the most likely diagnosis. The pertinent positive and negative findings that support this are:”
- List
- The
- Findings
- Paragraph summarizing why these findings support the hypothesis
- Paragraph saying, “While [diagnosis] most likely explains the patient’s clinical picture, the findings that do not support this diagnosis are:”
- List
- the
- findings
- Quick discussion of why the findings may not support your diagnosis
- Do the same for the second hypothesis, but make it more brief (for blocks that require it, say which diagnosis is more likely)
- Conclude with next steps for blocks that require you to do so.
I would also recommend making sure that you sign up for the exam review session! After taking the block exams, John Hardwick will send you an email with a link to the exam review session sign-up. This session will let you go through your exams to see what you did right/wrong, and sometimes the CRE comments can be helpful, but don’t hope for much.
All in all though, you’ll be fine on the CRE. Just make sure you practice and aren’t getting more specific with your hypotheses than you can. Also, reach out to your M2 buddy for more advice!
The other exams have block specific tips for them! Check them out in the resources section.
For anatomy
Make sure you review Complete Anatomy and the structures on the list before or after the dissection. Some people would spend dissection time just looking for things and then labeling them afterwards, while others would first familiarize themselves with the structures and then find and review them in lab. Go into the lab during the weekends to review structures. Be sure that you can identify all of the structures listed on the syllabus!
Also, I made an anatomy Anki deck (PrAnki anatomy) for my class and kept it updated throughout the year. You can download it here:
Disclaimer: Students should know that these flashcards are not provided by nor sanctioned by the School of Medicine. We have not checked them for accuracy, nor for whether the questions represent an appropriate balance of information, so they may not be representative of everything the students are expected to know. We recommend that students create their own study materials and believe they will get far more learning and understanding if they make their own flashcards rather than if they use pre-made ones
Here you can find a a list of tips that some students of the Class of 2024 have for you. Remember that each person studies differently, so not everything will be applicable to your learning style.
“Start studying early, study in shorter blocks for a longer duration(weeks) rather than really long 8-12 hour sessions. Skip lectures and catch up on sleep”
“Keep a study journal! Document how much time you study each day, every day for the block. By exam time, look back at the journal to see how much time you spent studying. Reassuring myself before every exam week of how much time I invested into studying for the block let me approach exam week much more confidently. Work that you put into studying can’t be undone, so let that help your confidence and mental health with exams :)”
“Start early and do your best to stay on top of material, but also stay true to yourself and listen to your body. If you need to break during the week – do it, and then get back to it the next day. Find those things that fill you up and make them nonnegotiable. I let myself eat like crap and not workout and it affected my mental health. Med school is hard, so do yourself a favor and take care of yourself. I started studying intensely around week 3 and I do NOT recommend this. Stay on top of things from the beginning. Add cards continuously to your anki if you decide to do that. Watch lectures and review them again same day. Do anatomy prep over the weekend to get it out of the way. Watch boards videos on topics you have just learned about in lecture (same day) and draw things out and add anki cards. The more you see something the better.”
“Find a good study group and stick with them! I’m in a group of 4 that meets every Sunday to review all of faculty objectives every week. Since we review all of the material every week, it ends up taking a long time by Week 7/8, but the spaced repetition is so helpful for cumulative study pacing, and it makes studying more fun, too! Also, just stick to your guns and study in whatever way works best for your brain- you got into medical school, right?! Just trust yourself and don’t play the comparison game with how everyone in your class studies; everyone will do it a bit differently!”
“Watch Boards and Beyond for most topics and do the practice questions. Do not spend too much time looking other places before checking if Boards and Beyond covers the material because it is easy to read pages and pages of UpToDate without really understanding the basics of what you need to know. For block 2, Costanzo Physiology has most of the material, so start there from day one. I have found that taking walks while studying and watching videos on my phone or iPad has helped me concentrate more even when I feel tired.”
“The first few weeks of the block are very laid back and you can get away with studying only a few hours a day. It’s easy to get burnt out if you go to hard at first. During an average week, I study several hours each night, and then the majority of the day on Saturday and Sunday. Something that has been huge for me is giving myself Friday and Saturday night off, just to keep some balance and feel somewhat like a normal 24 year old. I know this doesn’t work for everyone, but it was huge for me!”
“I wouldn’t say start studying aggressively day one, but I would recommend staying on top of things as you go. In the earlier weeks of the block, I make sure to watch all the lectures and then review the lectures and PBL objectives over the weekend just to keep things fresh. As the block goes on, you want to amp up your studying around the 5th week to make sure you’re as prepared as possible for exams. Study at your own pace, but make sure not to leave it all for the end.”
” I actually felt pretty overwhelmed with the wealth of resources at my disposal for studying especially in block 1. If I did it over again I would have more consciously tried to figure out what seriously worked for me. Get an M4 tutor ASAP if you can or at least go to the weekly group tutoring sessions. They are amazing and really help with going over cases and prep for CRE”
Start studying objectives and lectures early in the block and you will save yourself a lot of stress later! That doesn’t mean spend all day every day studying early on in the block, but just keep up with the material. Also, if you aren’t a lecture person, that is alright– just find something else that you like better to supplement (like reading Costanzo in block 2)
“Personally, Anki was my best study resource. I used the AnKing deck and would unsuspend cards that were related to the cases we had in PBL, lecture topics, and faculty objectives. Using these cards and staying on top of what you have to do each day (finishing all of your due cards) allowed me to study effectively and have free time to relax at the end of the day.”
“Use high yield resources before you go into lecture, and if something is emphasized in lecture + board prep materials really dive deep on those subjects. Feel confident ignoring non-testable material because it’s impossible to know everything. I wasted a lot of time studying low yield minutiae from the lectures block 1.”
“I liked to study the faculty objectives using B&B plus the supers. After studying the objective I would unlock pertinent Anki cards and started doing practice questions around week 6/7. I personally only focused on lectures that were pertinent to the objectives we were given.”
“Schedule time off, pomodoro method, study early on and try to review cases in groups regularly, my goal now is to make sure I have all the content for the week reviewed at least once by the end of the weekend that is right after”
“Start studying early, make sure you understand the cases, make or use Supers, do not spend too much time on lectures (they are not quality except in block 3), understand that it will take time to get into a groove1 response”
“DO NOT WASTE TIME being focused on other people’s study habits!! Work on securing your own 65% to pass the KBE and don’t worry about anyone else’s!”
“Study throughout the block – don’t just start week 4 or 5! This helped me stay on top of material for PBL and study less around exam week.”
“Block your time. It’s easiest to just sit down and focus if you have a few hours blocked off rather than 30 mins at a time.”
“Commit to anki early in block 1 and stick with it religiously every day; I would start studying for exams around week 5”