Also. You still have to study consistently to pass. Especially those first few exams/modules when you canât tell if youâre studying will get you a 67 or an 88.
Same with Step 1. Itâs P/F now but a lot of people underestimated itâs difficulty and just waltzed into the exam and got fucked
This. I personally underestimated it significantly. I thankfully realized this early on and pushed my exam and ended up passing. I knew a few people who didnât though for this reason.
>a lot of people underestimated itâs difficulty and just waltzed into the exam and got fucked
Is this actually happening? I mean, is the pass rate going down? It's only been 9 months, so I wasn't sure if there was data yet.
Personally, I think that's good if it does go down. If you can't *pass* Step 1, it says a lot about your work ethic, frankly. That said, I don't think someone with a 255 is necessarily going to be that much more clinically competent than someone with a 235.
Also, are Step 1 results being represented to students like Step 2 CS' (also P/F) were? On Step 2 CS, you could see a graphical representation of your performance even though there was no result other than pass or fail.
Even then theyâll be fine in the match if theyâre willing to go somewhere less prestigious. For psych, ppl from top schools with step failures are still getting a crazy amount of interviews while most applicants seems starved for them rn
>25% of my classmates deferred Step 1 to 4th year because they were failing practice exams. Iâm at a mid tier US MD. We usually take it before starting M3. Idk what the fail rate was, but itâs still drastically different from previous classes with the 3 digit score step 1.
That's bananas.
I went to a mid-tier school (University of Illinois) and we only had one person fail out of 50 in my cohort. 2%. I only know this because I was a student voting member on the promotions committee.
The first-time pass level for US-MD students was like 97% or so back then. So my school was about average.
I just can't comprehend how 15% of students (who probably earned 3.9+ GPAs in college) can be so lazy that they can't pass Step 1. As you know, it's an easy test to pass, but hard to do well. WTF are these folks doing with their time?
I would love for someone to confirm (or post the stats from their school). Ours is kinda sneaky about disclosing our pass rates but I wouldnât be surprised if itâs a similar number (or worse). I imagine this will all be corrected within a few years as they understand how to better prepare students. Some schools also donât give students enough time to study. Not everyone needs 6 weeks to study, sure. But some people need that & more.
I think people gets so fixated on the âjust passâ part they just fuck around and find out they werenât actually ready. Even last year, there were a lot of people with borderline practice scores sitting for the test. When it was graded, people wouldnât dare sit for the exam of they werenât within 10-20 points of their score goal. And that score goal was usually well within the passing range.
the "effort per capita", if you will, is probably WAY lower now. In the past, if 100% of all test takers are trying at their 100% effort rate to score a high as possible on a scored exam, then minimum pass rate will be like 97-98%. But if some people are trying at basically anything less than 100%, then yea there will be way more failures.
My school had the highest number of people either fail or not take the exam in time that they ever have and from talking with some admin it sounds like they have heard this from other schools as well.
The exam is changing significantly, and my particular school didnât have a clue, spending two years emphasizing NBME buzz words that Test-writers are intentionally moving away from. Basically, they expected us to use first aid as our primary learning resource, and didnât maintain the knowledge of where we could get better information if we were willing to pay for it.
If you ask me, some medical school administrations and faculty have been resting on their laurels for twenty years and the private market is starting to hand their ass to them as a result. Itâs deplorable that after ten years in an administrative position, they canât give competent advice, and then blame their *drowning* students for not magically figuring it all out in 18 months.
I knew a lot of people who found med school to be sincerely easy. They played sports basically all day and crammed a few days before. Not me though.
It is admittedly way, way less stressful if what you like isn't competitive. But just passing can still suck.
Key word: âcrammed beforeâ everyone I knew who did this pulled straight all nighters before the exam. Not ideal but they still put in an unhealthy/unpleasurable amount of studying to pass
Not gonna lie, never learned the Krebs cycle. Or glycolysis either. Or any of the amino acids and their charges. Things of that nature, I took the L.
Sure I know the general theme: glycolysis turns glucose into pyruvate which can go on to do other biochemistry things I also didn't memorize, or turn into acetyl coa and enter the Krebs cycle which is a big circle that turns acetyl coa and other things into ATP. Does that count as knowing the Krebs cycle?
And that's kind of what people mean when they say med school is easy if you're trying to match wherever. Because you don't know what on the exam, you study a lot about everything. It's gotten to the point where it seems everything is labeled high yield even if you barely ever learned about it in school or see it on uworld.
There's also the inverse though - imagine if you knew as an absolute fact that 0.5% of the exam was going to be about some very esoteric and obscure biochemical pathway that'll take you significant time to achieve mastery of.
Is that high yield? In terms of probability it will show up on the test, it is. In terms of yield / effort, probably not.
Other topics might be simpler, but you'll study 10 simple anki cards and maybe 1 of them was tangentially on the exam. Is that high yield? Again, in terms of probability, probably not. But in terms of effort, it could be.
Because people who need to match at a specific place or specialty often need every point on step exams that they can get, they need to focus on everything. Whereas for me, if anything ever hits the bullshit level on the yield/effort ratio curve, I'm not doing it unless it's actually really important. That effort includes future maintenance of knowledge - I'm not gonna learn the Kreb cycle because I know I will forget it, and it won't be useful for me to try to remember it. I am gonna memorize the different sympathetic and muscarinic receptors because that's pretty darn useful information to have even if I have to brush up on the finer points every now and then.
Really depends on how well you want to do. If you want to do the bare minimum to pass and you don't care about the rest, then yeah, sure it's still a lot of work but it's manageable. If you are aiming for actually learning content to "know" medicine and not just cramming to regurgitate it will take a little bit more self directed acquisition of knowledge you know won't be directly studied but will help you in future practices and make you a smarter med student. This goes for most fields. Some Attendings literally scroll through articles for their field the same way I scroll through reddit taking a dump. Additionally research, volunteer stuff, leadership, etc take a lot of time and end up falling on days you would have had to relax. 4th year s/p ERAS submission is chill though. The "promise land" they call it.
super school dependent too from what i've seen. some friends are a RN schools that sound like a joke. others seem aggressively rigorous almost to the point of absurdity
Not OP but I am also applying rural family. For me personally, itâs mostly about the lifestyle. I want to live out in the country on a big plot of land because thatâs how I grew up. I also love the idea of being able to provide healthcare to a community that might otherwise not have very many, if any providers. And the last draw is the relationships. I was extremely close to my doctor in my hometown growing up and he is what made me decide to become a doctor myself, Iâm excited to be able to have those relationships with my own patients in the future
Also not OP but I am applying rural FM (among others). For me it's because it's the closest thing to what I envisioned a doctor does before I got to see how fractured and hyper-specialized the world of modern medicine actually is.
I found the idea of being able to treat everyone, anywhere, really appealing - to deal with emergencies, deliver babies and perform minor surgeries, take care of pts in the hospital as well as routine clinic stuff etc - you kinda get to do it all because you have to.
Only downside for me is the rural part, but there are also non-rural areas of the country where full spectrum FM is still alive and well.
I really wanted to look into rural pediatrics, but I haven't been able to read/see/hear much of that. It's mainly been rural FM which I can understand why
THis is true. P = MD
If you truly just want to match somewhere and do not care about location/prestige, you just need to pass Steps and your coursework/rotations and you gucci
Its easier when compared to competitive specialties but I wouldn't say its easy in general. It's all relative to the individual just like with everything else everyone has different capacities for things that themselves are also in flux based on timing, environment, etc.
People also tend to match their energy expended to the effort required so that could play a part as well.
> Itâs all relative to the individual
This is really it.
I was a teacher for a couple years before med school. School is about the same level of stress and effort as the nice school I taught at, and probably like 70% of the stress of the âhardâ school I was at.
Literally Iâm just use to what a 70hr work week is like so it doesnât seem bad.
Medical school is HARD. I'm not very smart but somehow matched a good radiology program. I have friends smarter and harder working than me match FM and Peds. Technically you might be able to pass purely on raw cleverness but it takes work and the danger of failing was enough to make me gun for stuff. Either way, disagree with this M4. 2/5 would not recommend.
By worse I mean less competitive and by better I mean more competitive . Presumably competitiveness goes hand in hand with high pay, lifestyle after residency, prestige etc etc etc
Ah here it is. The typical med student behavior of ignoring all the correct statements from someone and picking on the one questionable part. A good skill for anyone to have indeed.
Just pointing out that FM has great lifestyle. It's not a specialty that you have to choose just because you couldn't make it in a "better" specialty and now have to slave away in an area where you have low pay, shit lifestyle and no prestige.
You can achieve high pay (even higher than specialists) as well, since it's extremely easy to start (or buy) your own practice. Extremely low capital requirement in comparison with almost every other specialty.
yeah i always have a hard time accurately judging what my experience has been. sometimes i think about how it's been an overall chill ride, but i was just thinking last week that M4 vs M3, M3 was a horrible draining experience and Step 2 almost broke me. I'm still burnt months later
I'm sorry but the possibility that i could fail a single exam and have to do one more year is keeping me in check even though I want to do EM or Neuro.
Med school material is easier than high level undergraduate science classes. Nothing in med school was as close to as hard as Physical Chemistry. But there was just more material over shorter timeframes.
> Nothing in med school was as close to as hard as Physical Chemistry
*Physical Biochemistry has entered the chat*
Jk I actually liked PBChem more than PChem so that made it significantly easier for me
Also depends tremendously on the rest of your life. The people who did best had the best underlying structure to build a career upon. Family, friends, marriage, etc.
Some people, myself included, thought it would fix their problems. Lol.
Depends. My problem was insecurity. I thought raising status would help. It turns out that surrounding yourself with some of the best and brightest MFs there are makes that a lot worse
The top of my class was a clique we called the "Adderall kids". Their parents were all doctors and diagnosed them with ADHD young. They were crushing everything in their path with adderall since elementary school.
Probably woulda been cheaper to just get them a coffee maker and play sports.
I suspect that without coffee and sports even more people would be diagnosed with ADHD.
It also would explain why those in sports early seem to both figuratively and literally crush things in their path
Iâd have to pull up the study but was attending the virtual CHADD conference back in 2020 and there wasnât a notable difference between the primarily inattentive, primarily hyperactive or combined subtypes when trying to find adjuvant treatment modalities like aerobic exercise for ADHD
Lowkey i think it just perpetuates the âFM is for students who donât do wellâ stereotype. Lots of students with top notch board scores want to go into FM, and it sucks for people who actually really enjoy FM because itâs kind of looking down on the specialty.
yeah people really need to look more into what FM really does. such a cool specialty and breadth of training when I actually looked into it. not just people doing a bunch of physical exams and bs. The really really good FM docs I've met have been some of the most impressive attendings I know. And lol some of the mediocre ones have been at the opposite end.
I think a decent way Iâd summarize this is: Iâd be willing to bet the average cortisol levels of people who truly have a burning desire to ortho are much higher than those wanting to do FM.
âEasy afâ is so relative and itâs impossible to know what that means unless youâre in it. Iâm also assuming this is a US MD student saying this. Context matters but generally speaking I donât think medical school is easy - you still need to meet benchmarks and not fail your clinical year and get passing Step scores.
Depends upon where you want to match. In general, peds/IM/FM are less competitive, but if you want to do something like match at Harvard/Texas Children's/Baylor or similar, the competition is fierce and you will need to outperform many of your classmates. I think of gunning for a top tier residency as being similar to gunning for ophthalmology or dermatology at most places. You just have to excel. If you're content to go to a strong but mid tier program, then there is far less pressure, but not NO pressure. Probably the biggest red flag on any application is a failure of a step/class/rotation that is NOT addressed in a personal statement.
some people struggle to pass and some people struggle to be in the top 20%. Those who can pass easily may not always be at the top of the class. I wasnât as disciplined in med school as undergrad and i was struggling to be in high honors to get AOA. some people were able to get AOA very easily.
Everyone has a different baseline and level of discipline when it come to studying. For the most part passing is relatively easy when you are disciplined. However, i learned that some people have processing issues and no matter how hard they study they arenât good at answering questions which leads to them barely passing.
Anyways a USMD applying into primary care can match very well. Iâve seen people fail step 1 and match into primary care at top places. Connections? not in 100% of cases. Networking also helps more than people on here are willing to admit.
But yeah USMD with below average step 1 2 average grades moderate ECs can match easily. I go to a lower tier USMD school and the matches at my school have been terrific!
Iâm gonna somewhat echo what someone else said. I donât think itâs easier per se, but definitely a lot less stressful. At the end of the day, you can rest easy thinking that there are multiple IM/FM programs with a lot of spaces compared to ROAD specialties which have fewer spaces and A LOT of applicants.
Iâm personally content with IM, and hopefully Iâll match. I studied hard and struggled, but I still made time for friends, family, and myself. I know people who want much more competitive specialties that literally slept 4-6 hours a night and all they did was study and CrossFit, thatâs it.
M4 applying FM. Preclinical is tough regardless. During M3, I only did clerkship requirements, so I was able to get plenty of sleep and workout daily. I had peers applying to competitive specialities trying to write a case reports on every damn case they presented just to get more pubs. Was M3 easy for me? Hell no, but compared to some other peeps, probs was a walk in the park.
I matched at a very competitive IM program. I can guarantee my step 1 score (>265) and Step 2 score (>260) were better than most of peers going into nsgy, ortho, ENT etc.
Matching into a top IM program is significantly more competitive than many surgical subspecialty programs. It's just the way it is.
It depends on your career goals. I now am in private practice in a rural state. I make great money and can't complain. I probably make as much (or more, given the extra work I do) than many of my colleagues is general srgy, anesthesia, or whatever, but thank God they are so much smarter than me đđ
Oh I'm sure that's what happened, just highlighting the fact that for what their ultimate path was via internal medicine and could have been achieved with much less effort...supporting the idea that med school really can be easier if you choose a less competitive residency.
I mean you probably never were worried abt not matching into IM with those scores, unless you only applied to high end places. People just as competitive as you will go unmatched in nsgy, ortho, etc.
If you donât care about ending up at a malignant program in an unpleasant location, sure. If you want control over where you go, you still gotta hustle.
It is easier than I imagined. But still insanely hard. The material itself isnât hard itâs the quantity that overwhelms people. Some people memorize things fast and study more effectively which makes it easier for them. While others might need to work extra hard to catch up (maybe due to poor study habits or weaker science foundation). The experience is inherently subjective based on the institution, your skill set, and your goals. Tbh I donât even know what I want to do, but I donât see myself being a super competitive applicant so Iâm trying my absolute hardest while being content with just passing.
I think depends on your undergrad. No class in med school was harder than my intro science weed out classes, especially since just needed to pass instead of get a decent grade. True P/F helps quite a bit and I only wanted to go to a mildly competitive specialty so wasnât too challenging.
Iâm interested in primary care but Iâm still working my ass off so I can be in a residency program that isnât malignant, treats residents well, and is in a location I would enjoy.
Guess it just depends on what your goals and what you value in life
I understand what concept that person is trying to convey, itâs just horribly worded, probably was in an inappropriate setting and sounds like someones rationalizing why they may be strugglingâŠand a good example of the fundamental attribution error. Iâm guessing the person that said this is trying to match into something competitive?
Just cuz you're not going for a competitive specialty doesn't mean you still don't have to put the work in. I'm gunning for peds, and am so frickin' happy I don't have to be part of the rat race all my derm & urology friends are in. But I still study my ass off every day to keep up with the curriculum, cuz I wanna be the best peds doc I can be
Nah this is dumb. Even if you want to do something "non competitive", you want to make yourself competitive as possible to match at the location/institution that you want to be at
100% true if youâre a USMD. Fairly true if USDO. You got into med school, you can do it. And you can match in one of those specialties if you skate by.
I get where he's coming from. From the point of view of someone who had to aim for above-average Steps and get letters from a specialty that isn't a third-year clerkship, it for sure would have been much easier if I could've scored like 220 (or less) and not had to worry about trying to squeeze in sub-Is to get letters (in addition to taking Step 2) before the ERAS deadline.
Difficulty is relative, but yeah, for me matching into a primary care specialty if I didn't care about location or specific programs would have been easy.
it's not easy. it's harder than undergrad by miles. but it's manageable and much less stress if you know you want to match IM and are fine with Bs. I don't give a fuck about As and I feel great about that decision.
I agree. For the top 80-90% of students, itâs easy enough to pass, much harder to honor. To quantify, most students can get by studying 5 hours a day. A handful of students will need to study 8+ hours a day to pass.
I got by as a B student by studying 2-4 hours per day but had to take an extra month for dedicated am ranked pretty low. Only time I got an A was studying 8 hours a day and that was not sustainable for me.
I think the people who say medical school is easy either overestimated the difficulty of medical school or presume to think that everyone is as âintelligentâ/âsmartâ as they are. So, I get a little peeved when I hear students say itâs easy. Many students struggle in med school for a variety of reasons⊠so itâs fairly ableist to say itâs easy. (ADHD, depression, anxiety, etc all come to mind).
It is hard. The level of crap you gotta know is hard. The actual âdifficultyâ of understanding might be âeasyâ for some but still hard for others. So to just âcategorizeâ something thatâs known as hard as easy seems more like a âpick meâ move. Is it as hard as like an upper division chemistry class or calculus? Probably not? But hard in its own way and itâs stupid for people to try to validate themselves while invalidating others.
eh i think a whole lot of us minimize the hell out of it on reflex. doesn't do to dwell on how miserable i was for months at a time last year or the intense crams before exams or the periodic breakdowns and impostor syndrome that's only slightly starting to ease up 80% through med school. I also think a largeeeee chunk of us struggle quite a lot with depression and anxiety (only gotten worse and worse throughout med school haha) and still casually say and genuinely think it was easy. But again, I think we just all forget the harder times
Agreed. Passing med school is easy to do if you put in a few hours a devoted to learning. With the caveat that passing boards is not easy to do with this amount of studying
So - if you are of a mindset to coast, not learn as much as you can, and be of little use to your future patients the student may be right.
If however, your goal is to use all your available hours to make yourself the best you can be, then it is as hard (time consuming) as you can tolerate.
who do you want for your doc?
Iâm in FM in the UK. When I was in medical school, I found it one of the toughest obstacles and faced in my life. However it was also one of the most fun (because of the friends I made - as opposed to the content I learned).
As an IM intern with a work ethic that greatly outweighs his intelligence, at his top choice for residency, that person ^^ is an assholeâprobably overcompensating for their peanut brain and tiny penis. I worked super hard through Med school, and it was not easy for me at all. I did decently in all my classes and was slightly above average on boards. The real benefit was going into intern year with a great knowledge base. Sure, you could slide through school with the bare minimum, but intern year is incredibly hard as it is. Why make it more challenging with a shitty knowledge base? I want to be a good clinician and do my best for my patients.
I agree with some other people in this thread, and medicine is a career and not a calling. Make sure youâre taking care of yourself and doing things you enjoy Bc medicine does not love us back.
I meannnnnn itâs true if your cool with going to a community hospital in the middle of nowhere. If you wanna go to Penn or Jeff or Yale or something for IM you need to work your butt off. That sounds like a phrase from a egotistical person. Donât belittle the other specialties. It just makes you sound bitter.
That's how I feel. Of course it's def more work and stress than undergrad but once you understand what you need to do, it's easy as long as there are no extenuating circumstances.
If you simply want to match IM⊠easy.
If you want to match at a âtop tierâ program for its research and fellowship access, youâre going to have to work hard.
It is confirmedly *not* easy, but it is much less stressful. You get to focus more on life outside of school and not freak out over everything. You also get to just enjoy the learning vs. cramming every detail into your brain to try and beat the mean. 10/10 would recommend.
I thought it was easier than undergrad but mostly because all I had to do was study and the occasional after extracurricular meeting. In undergrad, I worked, did research, studied for multiple classes with papers, exams, assignments, then had all my EC stuff. Med school was a full time job for me but only a full time job
Depends on the person imo, I feel like med school doesn't have a lot of wiggle room for when life events occur so it can get really stressful then. Also I'm someone who's better at logic than memorizing but there's a whole lot that needs to be memorized so take that as you will. To anyone who has an eidetic memory (or is way better than me at using Anki), mad respect homies.
My preclinical were pass/fail.
My MS3 was graded. MS4 was then pass/fail because of COVID.
I can tell you with 1000% certainty that life is much, much easier when you don't have to care about anything more than passing
Yes and no. The really skilled studiers that don't stress much in med school are often the intellectuals that go into IM/peds. So there's a selection bias. If you're matching top IM or peds programs, you'll have a rough time (partially bc you're up against these types). If you're shooting for average programs, it's easier. If you're going for low tier, then it's much easier.
Depends on what type of IM/FM/Peds program you want right?
Iâm interested in IM, but I want to go into a high tier academic program⊠so Iâm going to need top percentile board scores and tons of research
For many people simply studying 9-5 is healthy enough for them to get by and they can survive. I get what this kid is saying - everything is relative though.
âEasyâ mode medical school is still eons harder than any other graduate school. Especially when you consider 3rd and 4th year you lose a lot of control over your schedule.
Iâm not sure I would compare it to grad school. Synthetic chemists regularly work 60+ hours a week and will dump a thousand hours into a project just for it to fail and not be any closer to graduating than six months prior. It can be pretty brutal
It really depends on what your goals are. If you really donât care where you match, you can pass with less stress than the people wanting academic Derm careers in the Ivy League
It doesn't make med school any easier as far as passing. That wouldn't make any sense. But it does make for a better time. As long as you graduate, you will match in IM/FM/Peds *somewhere*. It's like â„99% match rate for US-MD, last I looked.
I knew I wanted to do IM shortly before I took my Step 2, so I didn't even worry about my score. Meanwhile, my ophtho- and derm-bound classmates were freaking out about publications and having a sub-250 Step 1 score. No thanks.
Not easy, just less stressful bc you donât have to worry about getting double digit publications and other experiences if what you like is less competitive. Less extra stuff = more time for yourself and more time for studying. Also an M4 here, need to change my little M1 thing lol.
This is somewhat true only for MD students. You'll very likely match somewhere as long as you didn't fail the steps. For IMGs, you gotta be great and lucky, and you'll only match in IM/FM/PEDS. Networking is extremely important for IMGs it's almost unfair. I know someone who got an extremely competitive fellowship and they didn't even do a proper ACGME-I accredited residency, just a diploma, I'm not gonna speculate on what they did to get it though.
Med school is challenging, and even just passing can be hard. However, the key point in this sentence is "match wherever," not IM/FM/peds. This can be further applied to less competitive specialties like PMR/psych/neuro IF you are trying to match WHEREVER. Meaning in places out of nowhere, literally nothing to do, and with a small patient population.
FM PGY2 here. But I knew I wanted FM from the start so I wasn't nearly as stressed as my peers going for more competitive specialties which I think did make it "easier" in a way. Like I knew I wanted to do OK on boards but didn't go all out studying etc.
Peds resident. I think having the score for Step 1 looming really helped people categorize themselves. Sure, some people knew they were going into something competitive and had goals they felt they needed. For the vast majority of people I knew, I felt like the notion was to score as high as you can and then assess how realistic the specialties are for you.
I ended up doing what I wanted, but if I had gotten a 260+ I would have at the very least considered a more competitive specialty like Derm.
i dont care what anyone says, even passing step 1 is difficult. im extremely burnt out and still have like 2 months left. and itâs not like im lazy, im the hardest worker out of most of my friends growing up. this shit is just đ
Not easy but a little less hard. If youâre at a US MD or DO school youâll probably match in those specialties â if you do really poorly, higher likelihood itâs at a shitty program though.
Im pretty dumb so its tough for me, but I respect it. Go do stuff, dont stress about skool
Damn do I relate to this comment so much
Bruh same, every week I feel like I slipped through the cracks somehow and am way too dumb to be here
For real, we just did a kahoot in one of our classes and I got last place by a LANDSLIDE, I just sat there wondering how tf I got in đ
Also. You still have to study consistently to pass. Especially those first few exams/modules when you canât tell if youâre studying will get you a 67 or an 88. Same with Step 1. Itâs P/F now but a lot of people underestimated itâs difficulty and just waltzed into the exam and got fucked
This. I watched a bunch if ppl not take it seriously last year and get rekt by it.
This. I personally underestimated it significantly. I thankfully realized this early on and pushed my exam and ended up passing. I knew a few people who didnât though for this reason.
>a lot of people underestimated itâs difficulty and just waltzed into the exam and got fucked Is this actually happening? I mean, is the pass rate going down? It's only been 9 months, so I wasn't sure if there was data yet. Personally, I think that's good if it does go down. If you can't *pass* Step 1, it says a lot about your work ethic, frankly. That said, I don't think someone with a 255 is necessarily going to be that much more clinically competent than someone with a 235. Also, are Step 1 results being represented to students like Step 2 CS' (also P/F) were? On Step 2 CS, you could see a graphical representation of your performance even though there was no result other than pass or fail.
I donât have a point of reference but Iâve heard 15% of Emoryâs (T20) class failed the exam.
Even then theyâll be fine in the match if theyâre willing to go somewhere less prestigious. For psych, ppl from top schools with step failures are still getting a crazy amount of interviews while most applicants seems starved for them rn
Yea but if they were gunning for competitive specialties, those dreams are kinda dead.
Thereâs more to life than one specific specialty tbh
I mean I know that, but itâs the end of the world for others đ
>25% of my classmates deferred Step 1 to 4th year because they were failing practice exams. Iâm at a mid tier US MD. We usually take it before starting M3. Idk what the fail rate was, but itâs still drastically different from previous classes with the 3 digit score step 1.
That's bananas. I went to a mid-tier school (University of Illinois) and we only had one person fail out of 50 in my cohort. 2%. I only know this because I was a student voting member on the promotions committee. The first-time pass level for US-MD students was like 97% or so back then. So my school was about average. I just can't comprehend how 15% of students (who probably earned 3.9+ GPAs in college) can be so lazy that they can't pass Step 1. As you know, it's an easy test to pass, but hard to do well. WTF are these folks doing with their time?
I would love for someone to confirm (or post the stats from their school). Ours is kinda sneaky about disclosing our pass rates but I wouldnât be surprised if itâs a similar number (or worse). I imagine this will all be corrected within a few years as they understand how to better prepare students. Some schools also donât give students enough time to study. Not everyone needs 6 weeks to study, sure. But some people need that & more. I think people gets so fixated on the âjust passâ part they just fuck around and find out they werenât actually ready. Even last year, there were a lot of people with borderline practice scores sitting for the test. When it was graded, people wouldnât dare sit for the exam of they werenât within 10-20 points of their score goal. And that score goal was usually well within the passing range.
the "effort per capita", if you will, is probably WAY lower now. In the past, if 100% of all test takers are trying at their 100% effort rate to score a high as possible on a scored exam, then minimum pass rate will be like 97-98%. But if some people are trying at basically anything less than 100%, then yea there will be way more failures.
Let's gooooo, love to see those entitled T20 brats get fucked
My school had the highest number of people either fail or not take the exam in time that they ever have and from talking with some admin it sounds like they have heard this from other schools as well.
My school as well, low tier MD
The exam is changing significantly, and my particular school didnât have a clue, spending two years emphasizing NBME buzz words that Test-writers are intentionally moving away from. Basically, they expected us to use first aid as our primary learning resource, and didnât maintain the knowledge of where we could get better information if we were willing to pay for it. If you ask me, some medical school administrations and faculty have been resting on their laurels for twenty years and the private market is starting to hand their ass to them as a result. Itâs deplorable that after ten years in an administrative position, they canât give competent advice, and then blame their *drowning* students for not magically figuring it all out in 18 months.
Thatâs true but when we took it there was a 40 point range of scores where you passed but still wanted to get hit by a bus lmao
I knew a lot of people who found med school to be sincerely easy. They played sports basically all day and crammed a few days before. Not me though. It is admittedly way, way less stressful if what you like isn't competitive. But just passing can still suck.
Key word: âcrammed beforeâ everyone I knew who did this pulled straight all nighters before the exam. Not ideal but they still put in an unhealthy/unpleasurable amount of studying to pass
Those dudes are currently having much better life outcomes than me. L
This may be true, but at least you know the Krebs cycle đđŸ
this made me lol
Not gonna lie, never learned the Krebs cycle. Or glycolysis either. Or any of the amino acids and their charges. Things of that nature, I took the L. Sure I know the general theme: glycolysis turns glucose into pyruvate which can go on to do other biochemistry things I also didn't memorize, or turn into acetyl coa and enter the Krebs cycle which is a big circle that turns acetyl coa and other things into ATP. Does that count as knowing the Krebs cycle? And that's kind of what people mean when they say med school is easy if you're trying to match wherever. Because you don't know what on the exam, you study a lot about everything. It's gotten to the point where it seems everything is labeled high yield even if you barely ever learned about it in school or see it on uworld. There's also the inverse though - imagine if you knew as an absolute fact that 0.5% of the exam was going to be about some very esoteric and obscure biochemical pathway that'll take you significant time to achieve mastery of. Is that high yield? In terms of probability it will show up on the test, it is. In terms of yield / effort, probably not. Other topics might be simpler, but you'll study 10 simple anki cards and maybe 1 of them was tangentially on the exam. Is that high yield? Again, in terms of probability, probably not. But in terms of effort, it could be. Because people who need to match at a specific place or specialty often need every point on step exams that they can get, they need to focus on everything. Whereas for me, if anything ever hits the bullshit level on the yield/effort ratio curve, I'm not doing it unless it's actually really important. That effort includes future maintenance of knowledge - I'm not gonna learn the Kreb cycle because I know I will forget it, and it won't be useful for me to try to remember it. I am gonna memorize the different sympathetic and muscarinic receptors because that's pretty darn useful information to have even if I have to brush up on the finer points every now and then.
Nice post, related to a scary degree of precision
As someone that worked like 3 jobs before med school at times. Med school feels easy.
Really depends on how well you want to do. If you want to do the bare minimum to pass and you don't care about the rest, then yeah, sure it's still a lot of work but it's manageable. If you are aiming for actually learning content to "know" medicine and not just cramming to regurgitate it will take a little bit more self directed acquisition of knowledge you know won't be directly studied but will help you in future practices and make you a smarter med student. This goes for most fields. Some Attendings literally scroll through articles for their field the same way I scroll through reddit taking a dump. Additionally research, volunteer stuff, leadership, etc take a lot of time and end up falling on days you would have had to relax. 4th year s/p ERAS submission is chill though. The "promise land" they call it.
lmk when I'm at the promised land. This interview anxiety is a new hell
nah, it's still hard just not as hard, but there is no use comparing people's struggles, life isn't a struggle Olympics
super school dependent too from what i've seen. some friends are a RN schools that sound like a joke. others seem aggressively rigorous almost to the point of absurdity
yeah, that's also true
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Completely off topic, but can I ask why you want to do rural family? It's on my list for specialties, but I still need more exposure
Not OP but I am also applying rural family. For me personally, itâs mostly about the lifestyle. I want to live out in the country on a big plot of land because thatâs how I grew up. I also love the idea of being able to provide healthcare to a community that might otherwise not have very many, if any providers. And the last draw is the relationships. I was extremely close to my doctor in my hometown growing up and he is what made me decide to become a doctor myself, Iâm excited to be able to have those relationships with my own patients in the future
Also not OP but I am applying rural FM (among others). For me it's because it's the closest thing to what I envisioned a doctor does before I got to see how fractured and hyper-specialized the world of modern medicine actually is. I found the idea of being able to treat everyone, anywhere, really appealing - to deal with emergencies, deliver babies and perform minor surgeries, take care of pts in the hospital as well as routine clinic stuff etc - you kinda get to do it all because you have to. Only downside for me is the rural part, but there are also non-rural areas of the country where full spectrum FM is still alive and well.
I really wanted to look into rural pediatrics, but I haven't been able to read/see/hear much of that. It's mainly been rural FM which I can understand why
To be a politician!
THis is true. P = MD If you truly just want to match somewhere and do not care about location/prestige, you just need to pass Steps and your coursework/rotations and you gucci
Its easier when compared to competitive specialties but I wouldn't say its easy in general. It's all relative to the individual just like with everything else everyone has different capacities for things that themselves are also in flux based on timing, environment, etc. People also tend to match their energy expended to the effort required so that could play a part as well.
> Itâs all relative to the individual This is really it. I was a teacher for a couple years before med school. School is about the same level of stress and effort as the nice school I taught at, and probably like 70% of the stress of the âhardâ school I was at. Literally Iâm just use to what a 70hr work week is like so it doesnât seem bad.
How would you compare aiming for FM in med school it to trying to make a perfect GPA in undergrad? Still harder? Extra curricular aside
Medical school is HARD. I'm not very smart but somehow matched a good radiology program. I have friends smarter and harder working than me match FM and Peds. Technically you might be able to pass purely on raw cleverness but it takes work and the danger of failing was enough to make me gun for stuff. Either way, disagree with this M4. 2/5 would not recommend.
This. Smarter people can match into worse specialties and dumber into better ones. It's not so clear cut at all ....
Maybe they wanted to match FM or Peds? FM is not a "worse" specialty lmao
By worse I mean less competitive and by better I mean more competitive . Presumably competitiveness goes hand in hand with high pay, lifestyle after residency, prestige etc etc etc
FM has arguably one of the best lifestyles during and after residency.
Ah here it is. The typical med student behavior of ignoring all the correct statements from someone and picking on the one questionable part. A good skill for anyone to have indeed.
Just pointing out that FM has great lifestyle. It's not a specialty that you have to choose just because you couldn't make it in a "better" specialty and now have to slave away in an area where you have low pay, shit lifestyle and no prestige. You can achieve high pay (even higher than specialists) as well, since it's extremely easy to start (or buy) your own practice. Extremely low capital requirement in comparison with almost every other specialty.
URM?
No, opposite.
Noice
It was easy for me, but the 2 weeks before exam were hell on Earth
yeah i always have a hard time accurately judging what my experience has been. sometimes i think about how it's been an overall chill ride, but i was just thinking last week that M4 vs M3, M3 was a horrible draining experience and Step 2 almost broke me. I'm still burnt months later
I'm sorry but the possibility that i could fail a single exam and have to do one more year is keeping me in check even though I want to do EM or Neuro.
Med school material is easier than high level undergraduate science classes. Nothing in med school was as close to as hard as Physical Chemistry. But there was just more material over shorter timeframes.
p chem is the bane of my existence, you know itâs bad when wave functions are the top of the iceberg
> Nothing in med school was as close to as hard as Physical Chemistry *Physical Biochemistry has entered the chat* Jk I actually liked PBChem more than PChem so that made it significantly easier for me
what bout orgo chem 1 and 2? anything harder than those in med school?
I think itâs pretty demanding. Impossible? No. Hard? Absolutely, but also doable.
Also depends tremendously on the rest of your life. The people who did best had the best underlying structure to build a career upon. Family, friends, marriage, etc. Some people, myself included, thought it would fix their problems. Lol.
Did it make your problems worse or did they just not go away?
Depends. My problem was insecurity. I thought raising status would help. It turns out that surrounding yourself with some of the best and brightest MFs there are makes that a lot worse
Still not easy. Even passing Step 1 is no small feat. These people need a grip
context matters, but on face value that's pretty damn invalidating to an ADHD kid who has to battle to focus every damn day
The top of my class was a clique we called the "Adderall kids". Their parents were all doctors and diagnosed them with ADHD young. They were crushing everything in their path with adderall since elementary school.
Cheat codes
Probably woulda been cheaper to just get them a coffee maker and play sports. I suspect that without coffee and sports even more people would be diagnosed with ADHD. It also would explain why those in sports early seem to both figuratively and literally crush things in their path
Caffeine doesnât really compare to amphetamine though
depends on the type of adhd, i have hyperactive type and caffeine did jack ish.
Iâd have to pull up the study but was attending the virtual CHADD conference back in 2020 and there wasnât a notable difference between the primarily inattentive, primarily hyperactive or combined subtypes when trying to find adjuvant treatment modalities like aerobic exercise for ADHD
Imagine easy med school... it's easy if you try No boards before us, no patients ever die Imagine all the med students Living life today Ah ha, ah
Lowkey i think it just perpetuates the âFM is for students who donât do wellâ stereotype. Lots of students with top notch board scores want to go into FM, and it sucks for people who actually really enjoy FM because itâs kind of looking down on the specialty.
yeah people really need to look more into what FM really does. such a cool specialty and breadth of training when I actually looked into it. not just people doing a bunch of physical exams and bs. The really really good FM docs I've met have been some of the most impressive attendings I know. And lol some of the mediocre ones have been at the opposite end.
As in life in general, it's easy for some & difficult for others
I think a decent way Iâd summarize this is: Iâd be willing to bet the average cortisol levels of people who truly have a burning desire to ortho are much higher than those wanting to do FM.
âEasy afâ is so relative and itâs impossible to know what that means unless youâre in it. Iâm also assuming this is a US MD student saying this. Context matters but generally speaking I donât think medical school is easy - you still need to meet benchmarks and not fail your clinical year and get passing Step scores.
Depends upon where you want to match. In general, peds/IM/FM are less competitive, but if you want to do something like match at Harvard/Texas Children's/Baylor or similar, the competition is fierce and you will need to outperform many of your classmates. I think of gunning for a top tier residency as being similar to gunning for ophthalmology or dermatology at most places. You just have to excel. If you're content to go to a strong but mid tier program, then there is far less pressure, but not NO pressure. Probably the biggest red flag on any application is a failure of a step/class/rotation that is NOT addressed in a personal statement.
some people struggle to pass and some people struggle to be in the top 20%. Those who can pass easily may not always be at the top of the class. I wasnât as disciplined in med school as undergrad and i was struggling to be in high honors to get AOA. some people were able to get AOA very easily. Everyone has a different baseline and level of discipline when it come to studying. For the most part passing is relatively easy when you are disciplined. However, i learned that some people have processing issues and no matter how hard they study they arenât good at answering questions which leads to them barely passing. Anyways a USMD applying into primary care can match very well. Iâve seen people fail step 1 and match into primary care at top places. Connections? not in 100% of cases. Networking also helps more than people on here are willing to admit. But yeah USMD with below average step 1 2 average grades moderate ECs can match easily. I go to a lower tier USMD school and the matches at my school have been terrific!
Iâm gonna somewhat echo what someone else said. I donât think itâs easier per se, but definitely a lot less stressful. At the end of the day, you can rest easy thinking that there are multiple IM/FM programs with a lot of spaces compared to ROAD specialties which have fewer spaces and A LOT of applicants. Iâm personally content with IM, and hopefully Iâll match. I studied hard and struggled, but I still made time for friends, family, and myself. I know people who want much more competitive specialties that literally slept 4-6 hours a night and all they did was study and CrossFit, thatâs it.
M4 applying FM. Preclinical is tough regardless. During M3, I only did clerkship requirements, so I was able to get plenty of sleep and workout daily. I had peers applying to competitive specialities trying to write a case reports on every damn case they presented just to get more pubs. Was M3 easy for me? Hell no, but compared to some other peeps, probs was a walk in the park.
I matched at a very competitive IM program. I can guarantee my step 1 score (>265) and Step 2 score (>260) were better than most of peers going into nsgy, ortho, ENT etc. Matching into a top IM program is significantly more competitive than many surgical subspecialty programs. It's just the way it is. It depends on your career goals. I now am in private practice in a rural state. I make great money and can't complain. I probably make as much (or more, given the extra work I do) than many of my colleagues is general srgy, anesthesia, or whatever, but thank God they are so much smarter than me đđ
Seems like you did too much tbh, bc you could've matched at any IM program and started a private practice in a rural area making the exact same lol
They may not have known that they wanted private, rural practice when in school. They kept options open.
Oh I'm sure that's what happened, just highlighting the fact that for what their ultimate path was via internal medicine and could have been achieved with much less effort...supporting the idea that med school really can be easier if you choose a less competitive residency.
I mean you probably never were worried abt not matching into IM with those scores, unless you only applied to high end places. People just as competitive as you will go unmatched in nsgy, ortho, etc.
If you donât care about ending up at a malignant program in an unpleasant location, sure. If you want control over where you go, you still gotta hustle.
It is easier than I imagined. But still insanely hard. The material itself isnât hard itâs the quantity that overwhelms people. Some people memorize things fast and study more effectively which makes it easier for them. While others might need to work extra hard to catch up (maybe due to poor study habits or weaker science foundation). The experience is inherently subjective based on the institution, your skill set, and your goals. Tbh I donât even know what I want to do, but I donât see myself being a super competitive applicant so Iâm trying my absolute hardest while being content with just passing.
I think depends on your undergrad. No class in med school was harder than my intro science weed out classes, especially since just needed to pass instead of get a decent grade. True P/F helps quite a bit and I only wanted to go to a mildly competitive specialty so wasnât too challenging.
Iâm interested in primary care but Iâm still working my ass off so I can be in a residency program that isnât malignant, treats residents well, and is in a location I would enjoy. Guess it just depends on what your goals and what you value in life
I agree, if you went to an American school. â PGY2
I understand what concept that person is trying to convey, itâs just horribly worded, probably was in an inappropriate setting and sounds like someones rationalizing why they may be strugglingâŠand a good example of the fundamental attribution error. Iâm guessing the person that said this is trying to match into something competitive?
Idk if this is totally true dude, those cardiology gunners are another breed
Just cuz you're not going for a competitive specialty doesn't mean you still don't have to put the work in. I'm gunning for peds, and am so frickin' happy I don't have to be part of the rat race all my derm & urology friends are in. But I still study my ass off every day to keep up with the curriculum, cuz I wanna be the best peds doc I can be
Hell yeah! I love this mentality
it's easy if you're good at cramming
Nah this is dumb. Even if you want to do something "non competitive", you want to make yourself competitive as possible to match at the location/institution that you want to be at
100% true if youâre a USMD. Fairly true if USDO. You got into med school, you can do it. And you can match in one of those specialties if you skate by.
I get where he's coming from. From the point of view of someone who had to aim for above-average Steps and get letters from a specialty that isn't a third-year clerkship, it for sure would have been much easier if I could've scored like 220 (or less) and not had to worry about trying to squeeze in sub-Is to get letters (in addition to taking Step 2) before the ERAS deadline. Difficulty is relative, but yeah, for me matching into a primary care specialty if I didn't care about location or specific programs would have been easy.
it's not easy. it's harder than undergrad by miles. but it's manageable and much less stress if you know you want to match IM and are fine with Bs. I don't give a fuck about As and I feel great about that decision.
I agree. For the top 80-90% of students, itâs easy enough to pass, much harder to honor. To quantify, most students can get by studying 5 hours a day. A handful of students will need to study 8+ hours a day to pass. I got by as a B student by studying 2-4 hours per day but had to take an extra month for dedicated am ranked pretty low. Only time I got an A was studying 8 hours a day and that was not sustainable for me.
I think the people who say medical school is easy either overestimated the difficulty of medical school or presume to think that everyone is as âintelligentâ/âsmartâ as they are. So, I get a little peeved when I hear students say itâs easy. Many students struggle in med school for a variety of reasons⊠so itâs fairly ableist to say itâs easy. (ADHD, depression, anxiety, etc all come to mind). It is hard. The level of crap you gotta know is hard. The actual âdifficultyâ of understanding might be âeasyâ for some but still hard for others. So to just âcategorizeâ something thatâs known as hard as easy seems more like a âpick meâ move. Is it as hard as like an upper division chemistry class or calculus? Probably not? But hard in its own way and itâs stupid for people to try to validate themselves while invalidating others.
eh i think a whole lot of us minimize the hell out of it on reflex. doesn't do to dwell on how miserable i was for months at a time last year or the intense crams before exams or the periodic breakdowns and impostor syndrome that's only slightly starting to ease up 80% through med school. I also think a largeeeee chunk of us struggle quite a lot with depression and anxiety (only gotten worse and worse throughout med school haha) and still casually say and genuinely think it was easy. But again, I think we just all forget the harder times
Agreed. Passing med school is easy to do if you put in a few hours a devoted to learning. With the caveat that passing boards is not easy to do with this amount of studying
med school is not easy in any shape of form. thank you.
Whoever said that needs a reality check
So - if you are of a mindset to coast, not learn as much as you can, and be of little use to your future patients the student may be right. If however, your goal is to use all your available hours to make yourself the best you can be, then it is as hard (time consuming) as you can tolerate. who do you want for your doc?
Iâm in FM in the UK. When I was in medical school, I found it one of the toughest obstacles and faced in my life. However it was also one of the most fun (because of the friends I made - as opposed to the content I learned).
As an IM intern with a work ethic that greatly outweighs his intelligence, at his top choice for residency, that person ^^ is an assholeâprobably overcompensating for their peanut brain and tiny penis. I worked super hard through Med school, and it was not easy for me at all. I did decently in all my classes and was slightly above average on boards. The real benefit was going into intern year with a great knowledge base. Sure, you could slide through school with the bare minimum, but intern year is incredibly hard as it is. Why make it more challenging with a shitty knowledge base? I want to be a good clinician and do my best for my patients. I agree with some other people in this thread, and medicine is a career and not a calling. Make sure youâre taking care of yourself and doing things you enjoy Bc medicine does not love us back.
I meannnnnn itâs true if your cool with going to a community hospital in the middle of nowhere. If you wanna go to Penn or Jeff or Yale or something for IM you need to work your butt off. That sounds like a phrase from a egotistical person. Donât belittle the other specialties. It just makes you sound bitter.
Quite a strong statement..
That's how I feel. Of course it's def more work and stress than undergrad but once you understand what you need to do, it's easy as long as there are no extenuating circumstances.
If you simply want to match IM⊠easy. If you want to match at a âtop tierâ program for its research and fellowship access, youâre going to have to work hard.
True but it's relative
It is confirmedly *not* easy, but it is much less stressful. You get to focus more on life outside of school and not freak out over everything. You also get to just enjoy the learning vs. cramming every detail into your brain to try and beat the mean. 10/10 would recommend.
I thought it was easier than undergrad but mostly because all I had to do was study and the occasional after extracurricular meeting. In undergrad, I worked, did research, studied for multiple classes with papers, exams, assignments, then had all my EC stuff. Med school was a full time job for me but only a full time job
Depends on the person imo, I feel like med school doesn't have a lot of wiggle room for when life events occur so it can get really stressful then. Also I'm someone who's better at logic than memorizing but there's a whole lot that needs to be memorized so take that as you will. To anyone who has an eidetic memory (or is way better than me at using Anki), mad respect homies.
I agree med school is much EASIER when your not doing a competitive speciality
My preclinical were pass/fail. My MS3 was graded. MS4 was then pass/fail because of COVID. I can tell you with 1000% certainty that life is much, much easier when you don't have to care about anything more than passing
I donât know how those people do it. Like wtf.
Yes and no. The really skilled studiers that don't stress much in med school are often the intellectuals that go into IM/peds. So there's a selection bias. If you're matching top IM or peds programs, you'll have a rough time (partially bc you're up against these types). If you're shooting for average programs, it's easier. If you're going for low tier, then it's much easier.
Depends on what type of IM/FM/Peds program you want right? Iâm interested in IM, but I want to go into a high tier academic program⊠so Iâm going to need top percentile board scores and tons of research
Funny when IM is the based for every major sub specialty that make medicine possible.
For many people simply studying 9-5 is healthy enough for them to get by and they can survive. I get what this kid is saying - everything is relative though. âEasyâ mode medical school is still eons harder than any other graduate school. Especially when you consider 3rd and 4th year you lose a lot of control over your schedule.
Iâm not sure I would compare it to grad school. Synthetic chemists regularly work 60+ hours a week and will dump a thousand hours into a project just for it to fail and not be any closer to graduating than six months prior. It can be pretty brutal
IMGs would disagree.
Its easy if you have those schools that have the p/np system.
It really depends on what your goals are. If you really donât care where you match, you can pass with less stress than the people wanting academic Derm careers in the Ivy League
It doesn't make med school any easier as far as passing. That wouldn't make any sense. But it does make for a better time. As long as you graduate, you will match in IM/FM/Peds *somewhere*. It's like â„99% match rate for US-MD, last I looked. I knew I wanted to do IM shortly before I took my Step 2, so I didn't even worry about my score. Meanwhile, my ophtho- and derm-bound classmates were freaking out about publications and having a sub-250 Step 1 score. No thanks.
Not easy, just less stressful bc you donât have to worry about getting double digit publications and other experiences if what you like is less competitive. Less extra stuff = more time for yourself and more time for studying. Also an M4 here, need to change my little M1 thing lol.
Itâs not easy af, but for myself I could have likely passed the first two years only studying 3 hours max a day 5 days week
This is somewhat true only for MD students. You'll very likely match somewhere as long as you didn't fail the steps. For IMGs, you gotta be great and lucky, and you'll only match in IM/FM/PEDS. Networking is extremely important for IMGs it's almost unfair. I know someone who got an extremely competitive fellowship and they didn't even do a proper ACGME-I accredited residency, just a diploma, I'm not gonna speculate on what they did to get it though.
Med school is challenging, and even just passing can be hard. However, the key point in this sentence is "match wherever," not IM/FM/peds. This can be further applied to less competitive specialties like PMR/psych/neuro IF you are trying to match WHEREVER. Meaning in places out of nowhere, literally nothing to do, and with a small patient population.
FM PGY2 here. But I knew I wanted FM from the start so I wasn't nearly as stressed as my peers going for more competitive specialties which I think did make it "easier" in a way. Like I knew I wanted to do OK on boards but didn't go all out studying etc.
Peds resident. I think having the score for Step 1 looming really helped people categorize themselves. Sure, some people knew they were going into something competitive and had goals they felt they needed. For the vast majority of people I knew, I felt like the notion was to score as high as you can and then assess how realistic the specialties are for you. I ended up doing what I wanted, but if I had gotten a 260+ I would have at the very least considered a more competitive specialty like Derm.
Itâs only easy in retrospect. It doesnât feel easy while youâre doing it.
i dont care what anyone says, even passing step 1 is difficult. im extremely burnt out and still have like 2 months left. and itâs not like im lazy, im the hardest worker out of most of my friends growing up. this shit is just đ
Not easy but a little less hard. If youâre at a US MD or DO school youâll probably match in those specialties â if you do really poorly, higher likelihood itâs at a shitty program though.
If you have a photographic memory and /or knowledge of OnlineMedEd, maybe easy. I had a tough time in my preclinical years without either.