the beginning...

so I just got back from the US on May 18th and immediately started up with my ck
prep because I knew in order to appear in this match I had to give my exam by 1st
or 2nd week of August (or so I thought :P). I looked at various articles written by my
seniors about ck and found that most of them had a comfortable 4 to 5 months to
give their exam, but I knew that if I was going to make my deadline I barely had 3
months. so I made the decision to drop the kaplans from my course completely
apart from a few noteworthy topics (here I would like to thank my senior Huma
Saeed and my classmate Ansab in particular who helped me pinpoint those topics
that had to be done from kaplan including the following):
Medicine Endo.. neoplasia of thyroid + thyroiditis
Gastroenterology.. infectious diarrhea
Cardio.. common drugs given at the end of chapter. (I dint do those but just go thru
them if u have time)
Pulmonary system.. bronchogenic cA.
Neuro.. vertigo and dizziness and headaches wala chapter.. n dementia wala
chapter..
Surgery kaplan: Chapters 1 & 2 complete..chapter 3 only post op
complications..chapter 4: GI bleeding, acute diverticulitis, jaundice and Gall bladder
pathology algorithms( v v imp)..breast lump and thyroid nodule algorithm..chap 5:
intussusception nd hypertrophic pyloric stenosis..chapter 6: coin lesion of the
lung..chap 7:claudication algorithm..chap10: prostate cancer.
Gyne obs..u might just want to give a look to prenatal testing, isoimmunization,
acute fatty liver,intrahepatic cholestasis of preg,chapters 12&16(graphs in
particular),post partum contraception, incontinence(extremely high yield), pelvic
masses..
Paeds chapters 1,2,3,4,6
chap 7 physical abuse
chap 8 SIDS
chap 13 complete
chap17 DDH Legg-calve perthes Slipped capital,Transient synovitis,meta tarsus
adductus, nursemaids elbow,club foot, osteogenesis imperfecta chap 18 JRA
chap 19 congenital anemias
lead poisoning
And immunodef disorders from First Aid 1
so with this list I felt confident that I could get by with doing IM from MTB 2
(including derma, radiology etc) and Surgery, Gynae/Obs and Paeds from MTB3...
Psych and Ethics I did from both and Biostat I completely ignored till the last few
days because the Step 1 material was fresh in my head.
Medicine...

I was aware that uworld is the crux of step 2 ck prep so I felt confident even if I
didn't read the kaplans. I did a quick read of mtb 2 for IM 3 weeks ( it should ideally
take 2 but I was simultaneously fighting jet lag and post- cs exhaustion). I felt I was
becoming lazy just reading so decided to get my uworld subscription and start doing
the im questions once I had finished the im material in mtb 2. uworld for im took me
2 and a half weeks, making sure to make lots of notes onto my mtb alongside since
I only planned to do uworld once.
during this time I also received some seemingly bad news... as is common every
year around this time, the usmle people switch the step 2 ck q bank so any exams
given in august will get their result near the end of September :/... so now that I had
to give my exam by July 28th I had 3 fewer weeks than I had initially anticipated.
the situation wasn't ideal but I felt I could try and make the deadline, if not then
august it had to be.
Everything else...
Surgery, Gynae/obs, Paeds and Psych/Ethics/Biostat I ran through from mtb3 in 6
days and did their uworld qs in a week ( 3 blocks a day).
Quick review:
before I gave any nbme I felt I should review IM from mtb2 along with the uworld
notes I had made, took me 7 days. I genuinely believe it's not the no. of times you
do the uworld qs, it's how well you know the principle of the questions asked, for
that making notes and reviewing those later on is a good short cut to sitting back to
do the whole q bank again, though admittedly my style of studying is more oriented
to rutofying material in books compared to answering qs over and over :P
NBME 4- 263 (12 days before the exam)
then I proceeded to review "the rest"... took me 6 days
UWSA- 265 (6 days before the exam)
after this I did 10 blocks of my marked uworld qs again before I felt it was getting
redundant, so I went to review the IM topics I had difficulty with i.e. prev medicine,
cvs, resp, emergency med.. ( I wish I knew ecgs and murmurs better :/)... I also did
the FRED sample qs during this time
day before the exam:
watched some of my fave movies again and generally kept myself from thinking
about the exam. hit the bed at 930pm
the exam itself:

time management.... that is all!! lol the qs are the ones you've seen in uworld but of
course in the exam setting you want to double triple check everything you read
before answering... not possible lol. 1st block I ended up blindly guessing my last 3
qs without even reading them... abstracts and drug ads suck! still to this day have
no idea how to approach them :P so basically I just kept them for the end hoping I
could compensate with the other qs...and before long it was all over... a day I had
been looking forward too for months, very anticlimactic really :P it's just another
exam at the end of the day, nothing to be scared about