Boards I

I have been avoiding writing about Boards, mostly because I had a lot of other things to babble about. But here it is. After finishing school, we have about a month off to prepare for Step 1, a licensing exam which covers all the basic science we've learned in the first two years. Most people have been looking at stuff before then, but the three weeks or so before the exam really comprises the intense cramming.

I spent one week up in San Francisco, mostly using the library reserve resources there. I built myself a little fort of textbooks and realized how much anatomy (especially neuroanatomy) I had forgotten. I think the strengths of the curriculum focus on physiology and pathophysiology (alas, we're not so good at pathology) as well as micro. Our curriculum isn't particularly "Boards-focused" which prompts a lot of student anxiety, but I think the systems-based block format really helps in approaching multidisciplinary problems. We're notably weak on certain aspects like biochemistry (they gave us a list of diseases that we didn't cover in class but may appear on the test) and musculoskeletal stuff (I think in the last two years, we might have had only two hours on skin). We're oddly strong at random fuzzy stuff (behavioral sciences, epidemiology), and I think embryology should be okay since we just had it. Pharmacology is scary, and I don't know how it'll be (it is really easy in our curriculum because it is spread throughout so that for each exam, we only have to memorize a handful of drugs). I think as a whole, we do fine but not spectacularly. Our scores are buoyed by the fervent gunners in our class.