I just finished my Internal Medicine rotation, and it was so much fun! Yes, we would spend hours just on patient rounds, but the providers and patients were all about teaching. The hours were long, and the 6-day workweeks were brutal, but the teams tried to make the most of it! We take the NBME shelf exam, and here are a few pieces of insight that may help other students while rotating on the service: Uworld questions! Do them, and start early. There’s about 1400, which breaks down to ~20-30 a day if you’re diligent. They are super high yield. They’re reminiscent of Step1 questions, and a lot of the time you’ll be relearning old material you once crammed. Quickly learn to see patterns in questions and also determine what is low yield. Step Up to Medicine. It’s about 1000 pages and can be done if you read 2 chapters a week. It’s not easy, and I would suggest that for questions you get wrong on UWorld, you read up on in this book. Unlike Step 1, you’re going to get a lot of “next best step” management questions. They expect you to identify the diagnosis and want to assess what you want to do. Learn from your patients. Use every patient to learn about management and treatment. Use Uptodate. Give your residents a presentation on what you learn. You have long hours, and ancillary studying is so difficult, so learn from your patients. Learn when to go home. When a resident tells you to leave, you should leave. Sleep, exercise, eating healthy is really difficult on this service. Take advantage of those opportunities. No one will think lesser of you. Take risks on your assessment and plan. Your residents and attendings will ask you what you want to do for your patient. You may have no idea, but now is the time to make mistakes and guess. Attendings want to see that you’re actively thinking about the problem, not that you’re right. Rather make a mistake as a medical student than when you are an attending. Source
