Good morning everyone!
It's Wednesday today.
I officially started my emergency medicine rotation on I guess Monday for orientation
and yesterday was my first shift.
And today is just lecture day so I'm just gonna be at the hospital for a couple hours.
Emergency medicine is awesome!
I have so many days off.
The way the clerkship works at my hospital or my med school is you work ten shifts in
one month.
And then you have lectures every Wednesdays.
I think it came out to about to 3 to 4 shifts per week.
I front loaded a lot of my shifts, meaning I schedule a lot of shifts towards the beginning
of the rotation for two reasons.
Number 1, I wanted to get used to everything and really just like learn the flow of the
emergency department so I just wanted to go to work kinda like many days in a row so that
I can do that and really get adjusted and learn.
Reason number 2 is, we do have a shelf exam at the end of the clerkship so I wanted enough
time to study for it towards the end.
So I think last week of the clerkship I'm only working like maybe like, I'm working
like that Monday and then I have like rest of the week off.
I'll have plenty of time to study for my exam towards the end.
So, I'm pretty happy with the scheduling.
I think this is really like essence of emergency medicine.
You just have a ton of flexibility in terms of how you wanna do your scheduling.
For example, my shift yesterday started at 11am and then it was an 8 hour shift so it
went till 7pm and everything was so fast paced and stuff happening all the time so that 8
hours went by super fast.
Anyway drinking my coffee, and getting ready for lectures, I have to actually leave like
now.
So I will see you guys later.
So I just got got out of class.
Now I'm gonna head over to maybe a cafe and get something cold to drink.
It's actually pretty nice out today.
It's getting hot so I'm gonna get some iced beverage and then I'm gonna meet up with my
boyfriend and
then maybe get something to eat.
Come on Candy!
You were doing something so cute, and now you're not doing it anymore.
Go do it!
Come!
Candy: No!
Fine.
Hey guys so I am back from school.
I wanted to talk a little bit about what resources I used to study and what it was like to study
while being in a really intense rotation like internal medicine.
So we'll start with resources.
I guess my number 1 resource was UWorld, which is like an online subscription based question,
so you buy like a years worth of subscription to UWorld and there are all these questions
and they have it by rotations.
So for internal medicine there are 1300 questions.
I did pretty much all the questions on UWorld and thats sort of how I mainly studied for
the shelf exam.
I would do all the questions kinda quickly the first time through and then I try to go
through all the wrong questions and I try to pay a little more attention the second
time around with the wrong question.
In terms of books I used Step Up to Medicine as my main resource book, like a textbook,
even though it's more like a review book, not necessarily a textbook.
But it's not something I read from front to back, cover to cover, I don't really study
that way.
When I have books like these, I usually use it to look up topics.
So if I'm doing questions and I get something wrong and I wanna read a little bit more about
it then I'll go to something like Step Up To Medicine and read about that there.
Some of the other resources I used were, surprisingly, First Aid to USMLE Step 1, very relevant stuff
to IM, I thought, there were a ton of stuff that I kept on going back and looking up from
First Aid.
And I used two of the Sketchy Books that I made.
I talked about this before.
Basically, I took the pictures from Sketchy Micro and then have my notes on top and I
made a little booklet out of it.
I have one for micro and I have one for Sketchy Pharm.
I would say I used the micro one probably a little more for this exam just because there's
a lot of micro in IM.
Then aside from that, I think if you go to NBME.org, which I think is the organization
that sort of prepares you for the shelf exams, you can purchase practice exams for $20 dollars.
So there's 4 practice exams available.
I bought all four and I did them towards the end of, pretty much the last week of my shelf
week studying.
I did one exam per day.
So I got through all the exams.
And then I went through some of my wrong questions with my friend Dania, who you guys saw from
a couple videos ago.
We were going over certain questions we got wrong.
So that's how I prepared for IM shelf exams.
So I've done, we'll go in order, I did psychiatry first, I did pediatrics, ob-gyn, family medicine,
surgery and medicine.
And now I'm doing emergency medicine.
Out of all those things, I probably struggled the most with internal medicine for several
reasons.
The number of hours that you're at the hospital, that's hard.
You work also every weekend, so you work 6 days a week and when it comes to studying
for the exam, it's like you study for everything because medicine is pretty much everything.
So there's a vast amount of things you have to know for the exam so it pretty much felt
like I was studying for Step 1 but it was a little more management of how to take care
of patients.
So I think that's what made it the hardest.
So by the way, I've been featuring some med school bloggers on my blog at thestrivetofit.com/blog
as well as my Instagram which is TheStriveToFit and you can check out some of my other pictures
there.
Meet some of the other medical students and read about their perspective on how medical
school is like for them and much more on thestrivetofit.com so make sure to check it out and follow me
on my Instagram at thestrivetofit.
So I mentioned last time that my mom was here over the weekend so we can go apartment hunting.
We actually didn't find the apartment that I--that we really really liked so we didn't
sign anything so I'm still searching for my new apartment but it's been really interesting
apartment hunting in the city.
I have to say there's a ton of weird buildings out there.
I saw a building where most of the apartments didn't have toilets inside the apartment but
they had toilets in the hallway that you use.
You like share them.
And the unit that I looked at actually did have a toilet inside the apartment and they
were like: you know this is like a really nice apartment because it actually has a toilet
inside the apartment but it had a shower stall in the kitchen.
So you basically, it's not a shower capsule thing, that's like enclosed.
It was like a straight-up stall that you use with the curtain.
And it was out in the open in the kitchen so just imagine having guests over and you
need to take a shower you would just be out there naked.
Oh I wanted to ask you guys, I'm planning on going to Amsterdam for a few days in the
next month or so and I wanted to know if you guys have any recommendations on where to
go, where to visit, what to do, what to eat, and that type of stuff and if you guys are
from Amsterdam or have any knowledge Amsterdam definitely leave me some recommendations below
in the comment box.
So with that, I'm gonna close the vlog, thank you guys so much for watching I'm super excited
to be starting emergency medicine and can't wait to share all the cool stories with you
guys.
Will definitely be keeping you guys in the loop of what I get to do in ED.
So thanks for watching and I will see you guys in the next vlog!
Bye bye!