Writing the USMLE Step 1

I've decided to write the USMLE Step 1 towards the end of this summer for two reasons.

1) US fellowships. There's a small chance I'll wind up doing a fellowship in the US and having the USMLE already written can be helpful for some of those US fellowships.

It's all very up-in-the-air at this point - I'm not considering too many fellowship-heavy specialties that would be greatly helped by a high-quality US fellowship, but I also love some of the more academic parts of medicine like research or teaching where a fellowship may be more useful. It'll be years before that gets figured out, obviously, but if I do go the super-intense fellowship route, it'll be worthwhile to have options in the US. All I need is a pass, so the bar isn't super high.

2) Clerkship prep. There's a lot of pre-clerkship information that's useful for clerkship that I've already forgotten, never learned, or never even been introduced to. Studying for the USMLE is forcing me to go over much of that information.

It also better fits my studying style than what I've experienced in pre-clerkship, where it feels like there's a lot of short-term memorization. When your major test on a subject comes only a few weeks after you start learning about that subject, there's not much time to really let information bounce around in your head. You have to learn it and be ready to spit it out again quickly. Then, since the only subsequent reason to revisit that information comes at most a few months later for and end-of-semester test, that information can get lost quickly, especially as new subjects pop up to demand your mental resources.

This sort of all-encompassing "big test" studying fits my preferred learning style well. I'll have to go over a subject and learn it as best I can, but it'll have to fit in with all the other subjects also on the test. That requires some periodic efforts to go back to material I had already studied, to make sure it's still in my brain.

I hope this strategy'll work - and that it'll pay off in clerkship, when I'll want to impress with my knowledge base (or at least not look like an idiot). I guess I'll find out soon enough!