23 May 2018 - Home Stretch

It's the home stretch now. It's been a long journey: 3 states, 5 out-rotations (and a day doing canine anesthesia), 1,000+ cases, and a doctoral project later we finally attended graduation from NEU earlier this month. After finishing up clinicals, we'll soon get some time dedicated to sitting down and reviewing for boards. Looking over test material it's amazing to see how much I've forgotten from Phase 1.

For review materials I've purchased a couple of review apps, a subscription to APEX earlier in Phase 2, as well as attended Valley Review. The apps were cheap question and answer banks and were worth the $50 or so I spent on them. As for Valley Review vs. APEX, I can't really endorse any one of these over another; they both have their strengths and weaknesses and is probably best discusses in another post. The short of it is that APEX is probably a more detailed and up to date but the attempt at creating third-order questions makes the rationales given seen like a stretch. Valley Review is bit dated but the questions and information are a bit more straight forward and seem well vetted. Also, people that learn better from a lecture would probably benefit from the 3-day review session. For those that don't want to spend the money, sitting down with Barash, Morgan & Mikhail, or even Nagelhout and outlining the chapters is probably just as well.

In typical Army manner, however, even though I'm studying for boards, I'm also starting to get things together to out-process and PCS to my Phase 3 duty station. There's always multiple things to do. At least I'll get some time to go visit California for a bit between stations. Will update again soon.