Marching on through March

     This month was guilded by the completion of the NBME! We have completed both Principles in Pharmacology and Medical Pharmacology and the remainder of the term is focused only on electives. With this post, I thought it profitable to give my advice for studying for this exam. 
     There are about a million and a half resources out there designed to help you do your best on the NBME. I think the hardest part of the test was not the test itself or even studying for it, but rather filtering through the plethora of resources and choosing from them which to study. Depending on your goals, I think choosing about four study supplements is wise. Any more than that and you are merely going to suffer from diminishing returns (or what in economics, they call the marginal cost). Any fewer and you may risk not studying enough. 

Sample Practice question

Sample Practice Question Explanations

     The two most helpful tools I used were PharmWiki and Practice Exams. The practice exams were particularly challenging, in that they frequently forced me to put a few concepts together. They were also extremely helpful, because they explained why the right answer was correct and why each of the other options was wrong, as well as summing up a key learning objective from the question. These were extremely challenging and I found that after mastering these questions, the NBME questions were much easier. PharmWiki also had very helpful quizzes that I used. I found that with these, however, the goal was more to solidify my foundation rather than apply it to particularly "tricky" situations. This being said, I felt that the PharmWiki quizzes did an excellent job of solidifying crucial concepts in order for me to apply them competently on more complicated questions. 
     I also used First Aid and DeJa Review as resources. First Aid was a very dry, but helpful resource. It had very effective mnemonics and useful summary tables that highlighted the most important side effects, mechanisms of action, and indications for drugs. DeJa Review is a book of questions. Basically, it is a series of flashcards in book format. There are questions on the left side of the page with the answers on the right side of the page. So you go through the questions quizzing yourself to see if you can get the question right. This was definitely helpful for solidifying fundamental concepts much more than for application of knowledge. But, without the foundation of knowledge you cannot apply the knowledge! Here I must take a pause and thank my dear mother, to whom I sent the DeJa Review book and requested that she call me and ask me the questions so that I could answer them. Her patience and dedication to helping me were undoubtedly instrumental in helping me prepare for the NBME. (More than once did she arouse me from peaceful, though lazy napping slumber in order to ask me questions!) Using these four, I found that it was easy to see high yield concepts, because they were emphasized by each learning resource. There were some concepts presented in one source that was not brought up in another, but there were many things that were emphasized in all four resources and this helped me see that "This is important!!!" 
     Other than that, I am now preparing for the final leg of my journey in pharmacology as well as the birth of my favorite study buddy! My son will be here this weekend and that shall be extremely exciting. However, I will miss him kicking during a test trying to remind me of the right answer. ;)