Utilizing outside sources!

One thing that I have learned about attending a caribbean medical school is that YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN!  Although a few departments are amazing about being professional, organized and present lecture material that will show up on an exam......several department are not!  One bit of advice I could give an aspiring medical student is to use the lecture material presented by the professor sparingly and use outside sources!  Although many of my classmates absolutely adore Dr. Najeeb, I am less than enthused about this lectures.  The videos are lengthy, dry, and not just loaded with information that is just not that important to understanding the "testable" topic.  I think that Kaplan, and Kaplan lectures notes are the BOMB!  When studying for my shelf exams at occurred at the end of my first year I also found Kaplan Q books to be helpful for preparing for the exam.  However, I found that our shelf exam for anatomy had far more neuroscience than what any of the question books ever presented.  In regards to biochem/cell biology the shelf exam was far more difficult than the question books.  Kaplan questions for physio was right on when preparing for the Kaplan shelf.  It was also really helpful that our school hired Kaplan to come in and review physiology (cardiac, resp, and hemodynamics) and endocrine!  The endocrine review provided to us by Dr.Wazur Kudrath M.D., from Kaplan was amazing and help resolve any confusion I had in regards to the topic.

However, I loved using books like BRS for anatomy that are a "little wordy" and use them along with text such as Moores or Snell (that have great images) to get a full grasp on the topic.  Plus BRS will help you get a better idea of what is high yield instead of wading through hundreds of pages of text and trying to figure out what is helpful. This is so true when it comes to learning the muscular skeletal system. In medical school we dont get tested with pictures or with primary type questions but, with multiple choice questions and tertiary type questions. By being able to conceptualize things into words you will have an easier time answering questions on multiple choice exams.