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I want to thank you for your helpful podcasts and Final Step book. I used the book the night before my IM EOR and ended up seeing several questions on my exam that were testing the exact concepts you went over in the book. There was one learning point in particular that I had never heard before (either in school or on rotations) that was on the exam that you had covered in your book! Anyway, it was a great buy. And I haven’t even gotten to the PANCE part…
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When I wrote The Final Step, I put it together for me (selfish, I know). Simple one-line questions that drill home key points.
I wrote the same type of questions all through PA school. It worked so well in school that when I started studying for my PANRE I started writing them again.
Having this list of simple, straightforward questions made it easy and quick to study. I could cover tons of information, and then cover it all over again so that I knew I knew it.
One thing that surprised me when I started offering the book to the PAER community was how many people used it for EORs as well as the PANCE and the PANRE.
It’s kind of like the podcast. I initially didn’t think about PA students when I started it. I was focused on people taking the PANRE. Reality is, I was terrified of students since I figured they knew more medicine than I did. Then, I come to find that nurse practitioners, pharmacy students, and med students are listening to the show. Amazing!
The answer is that The Final Step isn’t a PANCE review book at all. It’s a solidifying-your-foundation-of-medical-knowledge book. It’s designed so that you know the basics so well you don’t have to think about them. That’s why it helped on Jess’s EOR. That’s why it helps on the PANCE and the PANRE.
It’s like the multiplication tables from 1 to 12. I remember my green-haired fourth-grade teacher drilling those facts into our heads. (Ok, she didn’t have green hair, but she was old, and her dye job was so bad that in the fluorescent light it looked green) I knew the multiplication tables better than I knew my families birthdays. I could do them backward and forwards, and it was great because I wasn’t scared of multiplication when more complex equations started showing up.
You shouldn’t need to think to pull 3×3 out of your head – just like foundational medical information. And, if you don’t have to think about the foundational stuff, you can spend your limited energy thinking about the hard stuff.
Thursday is the BIG DAY. The Final Step 2.0 goes on sale. Stay tuned to your email, and I’ll let you know how to get your copy.
Brian Wallace