Year 2 - General Overview

For Year 2, I used what I dubbed "The Holy Trinity" for boards: Pathoma, Sketchy, and First Aid. I would highly recommend getting all three of these resources. First Aid can be downloaded as a pdf free from the RVU library website, while the others will need to be brought. However, if money is an issue, please reach out to me personally and I can help accomodate you!

Side note: There are sketchy path videos, but I personally didn't use it and just used Pathoma for my path stuff, so my guides won't include those videos. However, if you like them and learn better that way, then go for it!

So how I was able to do mainly 3rd party resources was by first downloading the in-house lecture slides, then very quickly go through the lecture objectives, while cross-referencing key words on the other resources. This would include using the sketchy search bar to look up the drugs, or the find function on my pdf reader for Pathoma/First Aid.

If you're planning on using the AnKing deck, this was my process of unsuspending cards: For Pathoma, I would watch the relevant video lecture and then unsuspended the appropriate "#" tagged cards. See below for an example. I would do the same with Sketchy and the #sketchy cards. I would only use First Aid as a reference for when I needed more information or if I wanted to have a nice mnemonic or diagram. I would only unsuspend cards those cards if neither Pathoma nor Sketchy covered what I needed to know. I will say that First Aid is great since whatever is in there is fair game to be tested on boards, so reference it early and often!

Personally, I didn't balance at all. I went balls to the wall and used primarily these 3rd party sources using the method described above. I didn't watch or read over any lecture slides as study material, aside from CISes, as I thought those would give me an idea of what the profs thought were HY. Also I would do tutor powerpoints as well, for the current year and the past few years. That was sufficient enough to fill in any gaps from not studying the in-house lectures.

BUT, would I recommend this? Idk. It worked out fine for me, but everyone is different, and if you know anything about stats, n=1 is not very substantial. I thought I was well prepared for boards however when dedicated hit, but there are a few caveats I want to mention:

Firstly, those anki cards I unsuspended as mentioned above? Yeah, I never suspended them after each block. It eventually got to a point during Neuro II where I would have 700-800 reviews a day. My streak was godly, but goddamn I got real tired of doing cards during dedicated.

Secondly, I did manage to also squeeze in some boards questions every day starting around the end of September. I used USMLE-Rx QMax (3 month subscription) first, doing about 10 questions a day, and slowly ramping up. I liked USMLE-Rx as a lil taster on how board questions will be and I thought it was a nice intro before diving into the hell-hole that is UWorld. In terms of how I set up what questions to do, this is how I did it: at that point (end of Sept), we had already done Renal II and CV II, so I started doing Renal questions, keeping a running word doc with very short notes for important details on questions I missed or guessed correctly on. As soon as I finised renal, I'd move on to CV, then Resp and so on and so forth, essentially following the order of the blocks we took to keep the info fresh. Here's an example.

After my subscription ended for USMLE-Rx, I bought UWorld (6 month sub) and started again with system based tests, starting back with renal, then CV, etc., and again keeping a running word doc. At this point I was used to doing about 20-25 questions a day, so that's what I did for UWorld. By the time I reached dedicated, I had probably done about 50% of UWorld, on top of however many I did for USMLE-Rx.

Why do I tell you all this? I'm not trying to brag that I was able to do qbanks on top of school stuff (and honestly, I wasn't exactly doing school stuff), this was just how I wanted to approach the 2nd year and I wanted dedicated studying to be as painless as possible, by essentially spreading the pain throughout the whole year. Again, would I recommend this? Probably not, but knowing how I tackled this year might give you a foundation for how you can tailor your studying.