Dear Holy First Aid,
At first I thought you would be my savior with your diagrams and cute mnemonics. You are part of the Holy Trinty of boards studying, 1st Aid, BRS Pathology and BRS Physiology. We are only on Day 4 of our relationship and I feel deceived and frustrated. You really do not know how to communicate well. You are simply a list of random facts with no connection between them. And your lovely learning devices in the form of mnemonics are helpful for the first 30 seconds of reading the material. Then they get jumbled in my brain into a nmemonic soup of the 17 other ones I have learned that day from your pages, and it does nothing for me when faced with a practice questions. The urea cycle... was that supposed to be about eating 10 eggs at noon or lacking nucleotide salvage or careless pissing? Hmmm. At least I did learn to Love Vermont maple syrup for the rare case of maple syrup urine disease with branched amino acids, but that seems like a tough price to pay to learn one disease via nmemonics.
The bottom line First Aid, is that you are not really working out that well, but I am in too deep to go back. I'm just going to have to put up with you for one more month. You are going to have to be good enough. I've always believed in not settling in relationships (and boy am I glad I did not in the past), but this time I'm going to have to suck it up. Hopefully, we can work through this together and you will become more helpful to me. But come June 14, we are through and you are out of my house.
Love and Kisses,
The Lone Coyote
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5 comments:
My FA is turning into a scrapbook:
- black pen: my notes
- yellow highligher: keeps me focused while I read things
- red pen: circle all the mnemonics, underline the important stuff, box the super-dooper important stuff
- tape: for that occasional old flashcard I can't bother to copy
- scissors: not yet, but I hear you Coyote, they are coming...or maybe a communal book-burning?
"You are simply a list of random facts with no connection between them."
That's exactly how I feel! Ocasionally I would crack open the First Aid the night before an exam in an attempt to be high-yield, only to discover how little information it actually included and how disconnected that information was.
Everyone always talks about how everything you need to know is in The Holy First Aid, but they must all be the kind of people who can just memorize lists (the best kind of student for the first two years of med school really). I, on the other hand, like things to connect and make sense in my head or else they won't stick.
My 1st Aid has become a rainbow of colored highlight. There are so many colors I do not know what they mean anymore.
Sharon, I am glad to hear I am not alone. Oh wait, you actually like to read too. Hmmm... that must explain it.
Yeah yeah, I'm sure both of you sat down with your old organic chemistry models and figured out the differences between Fabry's, Gaucher's Neimman-Pick, Tay-Sachs, Krabbe's, etc, etc, etc, instead of just 'memorizing the damn list'.
;-)
I'm just giving you a hard time because I'm there with you: I like to understand things, not just memorize them. Actually, I CAN'T just memorize things, it doesn't work for me. I have to reinvent the wheel every f**king time. I still get acetaminophen and ibuprofen mixed up sometimes. But at least crazy first aid gives me something to memorize, or I'd be on page 73 of Robbins by the time the test came around.
Lone Coyote, my friend, the only way to study for the Step tests is to do practice questions unceasing, without end, amen.
First Aid is the most over-hyped, over-rated, useless USMLE study tool. It is written, as you now know, for a Step test that doesn't exist. Don't make the same mistake for Step 2.
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