Crista asked me this week about setting up a study schedule.
Here’s her email:
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Dear Brian,
I am looking forward to learning and utilizing the content you have provided on your site! I have purchased the PA week package and am ready to make a difference in my test taking and studying.
One thing I am asking your advice on is how to create content specific study schedule, as I am in my clinical year of PA school. I want to create a day by day calendar of exact content to cover. Like Monday (murmurs, congenital heart defects, cardiomyopathies). However I haven’t found a resource that is this specific day by day. I want to make a study schedule but I don’t know how to approach organizing the content day by day to go over. Any advice?
Thank you,
Crista
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Crista is a member of PAES, so I took a minute to answer this question the best way that I could. Then, I thought everyone should here the answer to this one. So, here is my response to Crista.
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Crista,
Good Morning.
This is a tough question to answer the way that you want me to answer it. You see everyone is different. Everyone studies and learns at different speeds. One topic might go fast for you and take forever for someone else. My grandmother had A-fib. It was easy for me to learn it because I had an anchor and I knew she was on a blood thinner and that she refused to eat green vegetables because the vitamin K might screw up her blood thinner. (she never ate a green vegetable a day in her life, but that’s beside the point)
Bottom line is that I can’t give you a study schedule without a whole lot more information about you and what’s coming up in your life. Here’s what I do recommend. Let’s say you’re getting ready for the PANCE. I would look at how much time I have. Let’s call it 2 months. Then I’d look at the blueprint and divide up my time by the percentage of the exam.
Let me show show you.
In this example let’s say 2 months = 60 days. We also aren’t goint to leave any room for rest, breaks or practice exams. I don’t recommend that, but i want to keep this example simple.
Cardio is 13% of the PANCE –> ok that means I’m going to spend 7.8 of my 60 days on cardio.
Derm is 5% of the PANCE –> so then I’m going to spend 3 of my 60 days on renal.
Make sense?
I would then probably go through and and mark out how far I need to be through the topic each of those days. So maybe something like this.
Day 1 conduction disorders
Day 2 Congenital disorders
Day 3 Valve issues
Day 4 Heart failure/hypotension/cardiomyopathy
Day 5 Congenital /HTN
Day 6 Vascular
Day 7 Lipids/Trauma/Infection/inflammation
That would leave you 0.8 of day to test yourself and review everything.
I go through this in the course Maximize Your Time and Efficiency. Also if you go through the PAER website you’ll see that I group things by time. Meaning that I like to keep the show around 25-30 minutes. So I’ll group the material by what I think will fit into that window.
Hope that helps.
Best of Luck!
Brian Wallace
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There’s a lot to unpack there and like I said everyone is different. One thing I will suggest is that if you’re reviewing medicine, you get your hands on a copy of The Final Step. It’s just over 2,000 action packed questions to help you review. There’s no better way to get that stuff to stick than to go through hundreds of questions, and TFS helps you do that fast.
Brian Wallace