Hello Second Years!

Congratulations on reaching this year, and I wish you all the best as you move through this challenging year. Like with first year, I
made typed notes of each lecture with the goal of having everything you need in one source. These are a combination of the syllabus,
the PowerPoint presentations, things the lecturer actually said during their presentation, and sometimes things I had to look up because
they still didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I also tried to translate some pretty technical stuff into my own words, while turning
what was sometimes a 70-100 slide PowerPoint into a 4-5 page document. If you used these for first year, well here they are again,
and if not, you’re free to start, if it’s helpful.
How to use these notes:
1. Fact Check: while I try my very hardest to take good and accurate notes, I’m not perfect. For example, I might have written
hypokalemia when I meant hyperkalemia. I might have written hyperkalemia when I meant hypernatremia. Again, I do try
and proofread and fix things like this but there’s no promises I found everything. You’ve been warned; use at your own
discretion. (if you have these open during the lecture or compare to the syllabus, little mistakes would probably be obvious
anyway: these should still follow the lectures pretty well; as I don’t think too much has changed in a year, except maybe
Pathophys)
2. Color-coding: I highlighted by order of importance, and the general rule for highlighting here was that Yellow < Teal <
Green. That being said, sometimes I used yellow and teal interchangeably when I got bored of yellow headings, but green
means its super important. Every once in rare while if I thought something was more important than green it was magenta.
3. Make them your own: I’m a firm believer that making the material your own is what helps solidify the information. Almost
all of these documents were further reduced into 1-2 sheets of paper in the form of a flow chart, table, or just plain flashcards,
and I highly recommend doing that with these notes. In a week or two I plan on scanning my highest of yield flowcharts and
tables, and these are the ones I used to study for Step1
4. Quiz Yourself: this outline form can let you easily cover up the bottom parts and see if you can recall the main points that go
below. For example, I would cover this and ask myself, “okay what are 4
main treatments in Acute Strokes?”, then uncover and see if I knew them.
Once I had that down, I would go back and into another subsection, and
ask “What are the Exclusion criteria for using tPA?”. I’m probably
tooting my own horn here but that’s what I found these notes to be good
for.
5. Quiz each other: I won’t stay on this soapbox for too long but having a
Q&A session with a friend can work wonders when you’re sick of
studying or haven’t seen a fellow human being all day. Relationships and
taking care of yourself during second year is both difficult and necessary,
and I found this to be one way of doing that. Also, I can’t tell you guys
how many times a question that came up in a friend Q&A session came
up almost verbatim on the test. If you think its important, professors might too.
Quick and Brief Overview of my notes per class:
1. Pathology: pathology is hard to see big picture from just class lectures and presentations. As such, my study guides suffered
for the beginning of the year. (I’m not super proud of anemia/leukemia ones, and I don’t think I really understood
classification of those until Spring-ish when I was studying for Step. See the flow charts I’ll post shortly to see how those
should be classified). These notes are sufficient to do well on the tests, but for Step 1 studying I highly highly
recommended using both Goljan’s Rapid Review +Audio and Pathoma for Pathology. (see what I did there?) After
Christmas I started incorporating Pathoma into these notes and they made a whole lot more sense. Goljan’s shines on big-
picture principles, whereas Pathoma shines on important details. Some Step 1 questions I remember were a single line in
Pathoma.
2. Pathophys: at the end of the day, this is a really hard course. I tried to simplify the syllabus and organize it in logical ways,
but most of the time I ended up re-saying exactly what Werner said.
a. Sales Pitch: our lovely 4th year friend Aaron Lerner holds weekly group study sessions to cover Pathophys
concepts, and I highly recommend going to these. He kind of understands how Werner’s mind works, and I’d
especially stress this since you guys didn’t have him for PDx (I mean…doctoring)
3. Neuroscience: one stop shopping: I’m proud of these notes.
4. Psych: the syllabus has everything you need but I found it extremely verbose. Key points to know are in the notes
5. Pharm: um…yeah pharm is painful. You just kind of have to brute force memorize this stuff. I will say, don’t lose the forest
for the trees. Know the drug indications, mechanisms and side effects foremost, then other things if you have the time.
Sketchy pharm is highly recommended: try it out and decide if you like it.
6. Micro: micro has the densest lectures of all year, but the test questions are fair. I was late on using Sketchy-micro, but that’s
also highly recommended.
7. Prev Med: pretty straightforward: my only goal was to condense the information
8. Genetics: a guy in our class (Nate Hoyt) made PDFs notes over the textbook chapters that correlate to each of the lectures.
They are very good, but don’t forget to look over lecture PowerPoint information too (aka my dropbox notes :D )