"Hi! I'm a third-year MD student with a strong academic record and a passion for teaching, I was a teaching assistant for 2 years in undergrad. The classes I was a TA for in undergrad were physiology with the associated physiology lab and Introduction to Genomic research methods. In undergrad I received Graduate of Distinction in Biomedical Sciences. In medical school I have I scored in the top 5% of my class and consistently achieved exceptional results on multiple NBME UWorld Step 1 practice exams, and CBSEs. In medical school I have tutored for the last year. Having tutored multiple students while in medical school, a big pitfall that a lot of my students have ran into before receiving my help is not knowing that a certain diseases full presentation. For example: there are only so many ways test writers can list the symptoms for SLE, this is where resources like U World or other practice question banks are helpful. Seeing the same disease presentation over and over can help students distinguish SLE vs rheumatoid arthritis, vs osteoarthritis vs dermatomyosisits. Yes a lot of these conditions have overlapping symptoms, but understanding that this exam is 90% pattern recognition is very crucial to your success.

Another example is where a student was having trouble timing on longer question prompts. My advice to them was to first look at the patient age (distinguishing atherosclerosis vs fibromuscular dysplasia because the patient is a 25 year old female vs 75yrs). It would be extremely rare (and not seen on USMLE or NBME) for a 25 year old female to have fibromuscular dysplasia unless they have an underlying familial dyslipidemias (in which the question will explicitly state). The thing to remember is that the test writers for NBME and USMLE are NOT trying to trick you, they are just making sure you truly understand the information. After looking at the patient age I would next skim the last 2-3 sentences of the patient vignette to see any key details and read the question." less...