Post Step 2 Thoughts (Finally)

Finally did it friends, after originally scheduled in April finally wrote it yesterday after being cancelled 4 times! Just wanna say some thoughts and things i felt that were really helpful to do this long ass 9 hour exam.

This exam is long and tough (no surprise there if youve been on this subreddit). I had a mixture of long stems and short stems (ie 3 sentences). Most of the blocks i had about 7 minutes left but a couple I had less than 2. If i had extra time i would quickly review my flagged questions and then add a bit of time to my break because i really needed longer breaks towards the end. Leaving this exam idk how to feel other than that it was hard. Im not really freaked out but im just v unsure on how i did. Felt the closest to UWSA2 in terms of question style but UW tended to have longer stems.

For me about 50% of the exam was straightforward if you did uworld and reviewed it very well. The other 40% was either very vague heart failure/COPD exacerbation questions were 3 answers could very well be the next step or other questions were the next step could have been multiple different answers. The abstract questions are tough and frankly i left them until last in my block. The one thing about this exam is that most of the time you know the clinical presentation very well but the answer choices are things youve never seen before. And the last 10% was WTF questions where i litterally just guessed but hey since theres almost 2 hours of experimental questions you win some you lose some.

In regards to typical "Step 1" material i had very little. With that being said KNOW YOUR PEDS IMMUNODEFICIENCIES OMG I CANT STRESS THAT ENOUGH i probably had 5 questions on them. Also make sure your micro is top knotch because i got a few micro questions.The ethics questions were much more straight forward than Step 1 imo. The one thing i do have to say that has been repeated alot is listen to the military Divine podcasts, i listened to them the day before and it scored me a few questions (he covers weird micro like Q fever and anthrax which really wasnt tested in UWorld and ended up on my exam). Also id highly recommend doing both the new and old free 120 because i saw a couple questions almost word for word on there.

Step 1: 229

UWSA1 (like 2 months out because of cancellations): 253

NBME8 (10 days out): 260

UWSA2 (7 days out): 259

Free 120 (old, 7 days out): 85%

Real Deal: TBD

Hope this helps because i really did love reading other peoples reviews and found them quite helpful :) Best of luck to everyone writing, you CAN do this!!! :)