took my exam yesterday and here's a brief rundown of my prep and how i thought it went -
US IMG graduated recently, took step 1 in January - studied for roughly 10 weeks for CK and mainly used UWorld/MTB/Kaplan high yield videos/Pestana surgery notes. Supplemented with all the NBME clinical science mastery series and all 4 forms of the CCSSAs. Didn't use them as periodic evaluations, but similar to what Phloston mentioned in his experience document, I basically made my own qbank out of all those questions and I thought it helped me. Since there were no explanations for answers, I used uptodate to clarify anything I got wrong or happened to guess right.
UWorld was my major resource for learning, I took notes on all the questions and that was the bulk of my material. I dragged my feet through the Kaplan high yield videos to force myself to read MTB but wasn't enthusiastic about annotating into it or anything. I thought it was good for Peds and parts of IM, but I can't wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone who plans on using it as something like audio osmosis. The quality is just not there, and more often than not, they're just reading the book to you. Anyway, after spending so much time devoted to FA Step 1, I wasn't about to love another book up like that so I feel like I just had MTB in my arsenal as a comfort measure. Phloston mentioned somewhere as well that a solid Step 1 foundation will carry you far in CK and it's so true - don't underestimate how important your foundation is, because I studied a fair amount of pharm, psych, biostat and repro tumors from FA step 1 and I got plenty of Step 1 style copycat questions on my real deal CK.
NBMEs and clinical science mastery series blocks were golden - loved those because they were sometimes nitpicky but I was getting too comfortable with UWorld's style of questions and I could almost taste where they were leading you in the stems when it came to answering questions, and it made me feel like I was getting complacent with the material, so the NBMEs were a challenge and it was where a lot of my progress happened after I felt like I hit my plateau. I did all of the subjects and I thought the psych, obstetrics, and surgery forms were spot on as far as difficulty level went in comparison to the real deal. The Medicine, Peds, Neuro forms had some questions peppered in here and there that were similar, but overall I felt the difficulty level for those topics on the real deal was more in line with UWorld style.
As far as what I thought about my exam goes -
Pestana surgery notes were great - you don't need to go into more depth for that. Do the questions at the back of the book, they're short and pretty easy if you read the text first. I had a few copycat versions of those on my test. The only thing is I felt like my form was very breast-pathology heavy and that might have just been incidental, but I thought I could have studied that a little better.
UWorld was good enough for ob/gyn - I had a lot of intrapartum pathology that I was able to do fine on just by knowledge from my rotations, but if you have to, add in case files to your rotation to go over things like arrested descent, cord prolapse, when do you vacuum/forceps deliver, and practice reading those fetal monitoring strips. there was a lot of "given this risk factor, the most likely consequence would be..." kind of stuff.
I had a lot of peds - the basic stuff mostly, congenital heart disease, identifying some murmurs, foreign body/caustic ingestion, abuse, developmental hip dysplasia and legg calve perthe/slipped capital femoral epiphysis, bone tumors, intussuception/volvulus/meckels, but besides that, know really well how to tell the difference between a normal, active kid and a hyperactive, learning disabled kid. I know that sounds simplistic, but the vignettes can be really long and vague. go back into FA step 1 and read the immunodeficiencies - the differences between brutons/CGD/IgA def/CVID/SCID.
Know your infectious diseases and antibiotics really well. Prophylaxis for travelers (pregnant, nonpregnant and kids). These are almost step 1 style questions, so if you have to, go back and read FA. You might have to look at some images of bugs, but really just the heavy hitters, some for vaginal swab wet mounts/some diarrheal bugs/gram pos/gram neg diplococci, etc.
medicine i thought was decent overall - identify septic/cardiogenic shock, lots of CHF/COPD management, acid base disturbances (identify based on ABGs), managing electrolyte disturbances, TOXICOLOGY was super big - every kid/adolescent was ingesting bottles of one of thing or another and based on their toxidrome you ID what they took - easy if you did enough practice questions.
biostat was pretty doable - uworld was enough for this - calculate the ppv/npv or nnt/nnh, know what generalizability and validity of studies are. i had a drug ad that was 3qs long and couldn't be asked to spend my last 3 min in the block struggling for the answers, so i educated guessed them.
preventive medicine is huge - know what you screen for, in what age groups, and at what times of the year, given what risk factors - anything and everything you can think of as far as primary prevention goes, is fair game. i got a lot of hospital management stuff and ethics which are only slightly covered in UWorld - don't know that there are resources that you can find this info in, but the bottom line is to use your best judgement and be diplomatic in the medicolegal sense to cover your butt if you are in a sticky situation.
TL;DR: it was hard and long and requires a lot of stamina, felt like i got run over by a bus after it. there was a lot of stuff that i knew, a fair amount of stuff that i had to use my intuition about, and definitely stuff that i straight up got wrong, so. we'll see in a few weeks!
good luck everyone!
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