2 + 2 = Win

I officially have no life. But the good news is that I'm halfway done with USMLE World. I'm getting pretty worn out, but I just have to remind myself that I only have a few more days to go. I've decided to call this the "2+2 plan." Two years of slacking off followed by two weeks of getting my ass in high gear. Is it worth it? Yes. Back to the books!

I officially finished all 2413 Kaplan Qbank questions on Friday. Hallelujah. One day ahead of my target, too. But now the problem is that I don't have any new questions to do for the next week. The logical thing to do would be to get USMLE World Qbank, which is highly rated, but I wasn't sure if I could justify footing $99 for only a week. I would need to do 200 questions a day to get through it all. I shopped around for other alternatives, but I finally just took the plunge and got UW. I would stagnate if I don't continue doing new questions. The NBME offers sets of 200-question practice tests for $45 each, and they don't even have answers to them. That makes USMLE World seem like a steal. But now I need to figure out how I'm going to get through all of the First Aid material AND attempt to read a physiology book AND Goljan pathology notes AND get through 2000 questions before May 26th AND play guitar and watch TV shows and consume excessive quantities of food. AND attend my brother's graduation today! Something's gotta give. Thankfully, TV shows are wrapping up with their season finales. Realistically, my chances of accomplishing everything I want to in the next week are slim to none, so I guess I'd better get cracking.

Fortress of Solitude

85% done with QBank! Scores also came back for a couple of our final exams. I was pleasantly surprised at my pharmacology grade. I still have a ways to go, but I'm glad to at least have some tangible evidence that I'm making progress. I've been hanging out at home for the past couple of days. I'm definitely not as efficient studying here. Way too many distractions. And they're not even fun distractions like picking up my guitar on a whim or hitting a badminton birdie against the wall. It's more like fixing my mom's computer issues or having my brother hit me repeatedly for no reason. The internet is also painfully slow for some reason. I can't wait to go back to my apartment. My roommate left for his China trip on Sunday, so I'm now referring to our apartment as my Fortress of Solitude, except instead of being made of ice, it's made of books, sweat, and tears.

One Small Step

How am I going to learn two years' worth of material in two weeks? I have the perfect solution, but unfortunately, it involves traveling back in time by two years. I'm taking the USMLE Step 1 on May 26th. It seems to be the most important test of one's medical educational career. It's like the MCAT times 100. The SAT times a gazillion and one. It's like taking part in a quiz bowl competition, except nobody wins. The test destroys everyone who dares confront its clinical fury. It's like Unicron (no, not Unicorn) from the Transformers cartoon, who eats planets for breakfast. It's like that weapon from the new Star Trek movie (which was awesome BTW, despite the creative alterations liberally applied to the Star Trek world). Oh, yes. It's going to rock my world.

It's hard to pull myself away from studying or doing practice questions. Okay, maybe not. But with only two weeks to learn everything about everything, I feel like maybe I should be studying nonstop to make up for lost ground. I think I'm making progress, though. I have 558 questions left in Kaplan QBank, which is essentially a pool of USMLE-like questions that's doing a good job of reminding me about everything I supposedly should but clearly don't know. There are a little over 2400 questions in all, so I'm about 77% done. It takes me a couple of hours to get through a "standard" set of 48 questions since all the questions also come with descriptions for why an answer is correct or why an option is wrong (aka why I suck so bad at guessing). Thankfully, some of it is actually sticking. I'm hoping at this rate to be done with all questions by the end of the week. I could theoretically burn through 500 questions in one day, but I'm concurrently reading First Aid, which is arguably the Bible of med school. I have never before pored over any publication with such passion.

I survived the last finals week of my educational career on Friday. The last exam was pathology. And it was a bit anticlimactic. Supposedly, the Step 1 will feel even more so. After you finish it, you're like, "Now what?" I should probably devise a post-Step 1 plan beforehand, while I can still think straight. I guess I'd go home and watch TV and eat some chips or something. I would consider reading a book, but it would bear too much resemblance to studying. Maybe some Calvin and Hobbes. I'll need to pack for Taiwan. Play some guitar. Burn my class notes. Shower. Give my mom a hug. Have her make me dinner. Post-Step 1 life is going to be grand.

As the World Turns

My brother is finally graduating after having been in college for seven years. A cousin of mine is getting married. An uncle had a baby--well, his wife did. My facebook feed is also being bombarded by people loving their jobs and hating their jobs and getting married and making babies. And here I am, sitting in my room doing practice questions. There's a whole world going on around me, and I'm just excited that I'm through with classroom lectures.

So do you ever have this happen to you...? You're cleaning your sink, and there's this bit of food--say, a piece of tomato--that won't go into the drain no matter how much water you splash at it. It budges a bit and moves here and there, but it refuses go in the direction you want it to. And finally, you say screw it and flick this piece of food into the drain with your fingers. Well, that piece of food is me (and med students in general). We're somehow immune to the tides that shape the outside world, for better or for worse. In this messed up economy of ours, everyone is hurting. But even though med students are drowning in debt, making us some of the poorest sons of bitches you will ever meet, we remain relatively unscathed. In other words, we might be the most well-off impoverished people in the world. It's kind of weird, but I think we're all grateful for this insulative barrier that we have. But maybe all of this is a moot point because the pig flu will get us all in the end. No, not even med school can save us from that.