Half MD

Well, second year is officially over. I just finished my last couple of finals on Thursday and now have a three day weekend of glorious freedom to spend with my family and celebrate our son’s first birthday before Step 1 studying starts.

It’s crazy how fast our son is growing up. He is definitely becoming his own little person, and I get the impression he knows more about what’s going on around him than he lets on at times. This has actually been a really fun stage – he was cute to look at when he was a few months old, but now he likes to play in blanket forts, be chased around, roughhouse, roll balls back and forth on the ground, read books, press weird key combinations on my computer while I’m studying that change the screen orientation, and generally stir up mischief around the house. Even though school is busy, you just can’t beat coming home at the end of a day to a smiling four-toothed little rascal who wants to backwash in your water and then get chased around the living room.

I haven’t written much over the past few months. That’s partly been because second year has been increasingly hectic, but also because it’s really fairly boring and monotonous. Don’t get me wrong – I've been enjoying it, and honestly the last few months (with the exception of these past couple of weeks that we've had various finals) have actually been quite pleasant – once you hit your stride with regards to studying, everything becomes pretty manageable (hint – weekly to-do lists are a must!). That being said, though, each day isn't too different from the last. Wake up, listen to lectures, maybe work out, study those lectures, make Anki cards, review Anki cards, tackle any random other projects that have to be taken care of, maybe go into school for a few hours depending on the day, call it quits around 6 pm, rinse and repeat the next day. And the next day. And the next day. So there really hasn’t been much to write about, honestly. That will change come third year, I’m sure (although time will become even more of an issue, probably. Ah well).

But for now, we have the long weekend. So far, it’s been a glorious reprieve. The fun starts back up again on Monday, though. My test is in June, so I’ll have five weeks to study. I’ll probably write another post later about my study strategy, etc., once it’s all said and done. For now, though, I’m basically planning on going through UWorld, First Aid, Pathoma, SketchyMicro, and the Lange pharm cards. Our school provided a practice test a couple of weeks ago to give us a baseline of where we are at, which went pretty well. They’ll give us another one later on, which I’ll probably take about a week out from the real thing. I know some people are really into taking as many tests as possible, but my personal feeling is that they are best used for assessing where you are at rather than wasting time (and money! They are expensive – about $50 a pop) answering questions that, when you are done, you don’t even really get much feedback about. Anyway. I could be way off base, but I’ll write more about that stuff later.

That’s all I've got for now. I may try and get a few short posts in over the next couple of weeks. Or not. We’ll see how things go. In any event… see you on the other side.