The Next STEP!

Everything I need to know for Step 1... in flashcard form! HOW FUN!

After coasting for the last 5 weeks of 5th semester, you can imagine how hard it was getting back into the full swing of studying. I got home August 21st, took about a week off and started "studying" on the 27th... and when I say "study" I mean doing about two hours of Goljan each day and then going out and doing something not academically-related (i.e. dinner, drinks, run, movies, football). It wasn't really till about two weeks ago that I stepped up my game for my Step 1 preparation. I've been waking up at 8:30 every morning and I start studying by 9. I study for about 5 hours and then stop to go for a run and eat lunch in the early afternoon when my mind needs a break. After my shower, I push on for another 3 hours before my mom gets home and starts cooking dinner and that's right around where I call it quits for the day.

At the moment I'd say I'm putting in around 7 hours of truly productive work each day. Since mid-5th semester, I had been slowly going through Goljan's Rapid Review of Pathology making flashcards for all the diseases by organ system and I'm happy to report that I FINALLY finished the textbook and my cards yesterday. Pathology was the final frontier in my Step studying. I had already finished the notecards for my other subjects weeks ago while preparing for the Comp so now that I've finished Path, I have this very odd and slightly scary gleeful completeness whenever I look over at my little treasures. I was so proud of my work, I even took a picture to show you guys. I would have instagram-ed it (since I now know what that means), but the confining square I was mandated to use would have cut out some of my beautiful stacks and it's just heartbreaking for me to leave any of those little guys out since I put in so much time and love into them (okay... clearly I'm very tired).

Maybe I'm losing my mind or maybe I just have an obsession with flash cards. The way I see it is like this: Textbooks are so big and heavy, with such tiny, boring black print on so many pages that it's just overwhelming and intimidating to even look at from across the room. I have heart palpitations thinking about it. But when I see a nice, friendly stack of cute flashcards with colorful fun-facts on the other side of them, I just feel much happier and relaxed about studying. Flashcards are FUN, people! They are fun-sized for a reason! Haha anyway....
Thanks for indulging me.

Back to the point of this post-- I'm looking to schedule my exam for the end of October. If I'm not feeling great by then, I'll just have to push it back to the first or second week of November and that will be it! Do or die.