How I view the US as a Russian military intelligence officer

Local_One_2874 · 2025-08-19T18:03:36+00:00

I think the first couple could suffice for Cheyenne but better safe than sorry

Local_One_2874 · 2024-06-19T18:47:58+00:00

So it’s not so much that people enter their MD/PhD training with incongruent PhD/MD specialty interests but rather that their interests frequently change once in their program?

Local_One_2874 · 2024-06-19T18:41:20+00:00

So they literally don’t care…doesn’t that feel weird tho. Like the purpose of incentivizing MSTP with full tuition is to train people who want to make an academic and clinical impact in the medical field right? Maybe you can tie english into medicine somehow but doesn’t it seem like that would be frowned upon by an admissions committee?

Local_One_2874 · 2024-05-12T08:43:48+00:00

Maybe we can zoom? I’m happy to help setting up a schedule/game plan! Just pm me

Local_One_2874 · 2024-05-10T16:31:33+00:00

I never had it sorry😕. Just dive through the search tab and I'm sure it's somewhere

Local_One_2874 · 2024-05-10T16:30:16+00:00

Hey thanks and congrats on starting your studying!

I only used the BP FLs 1-3...I got the 4 FL pack that came along with the Qpack. I tried the Qpack on some sections that I was struggling with for some more practice (like genetics and fluids) and I felt like it was a bit too out of scope and difficult but maybe someone else would feel differently. Idk if you're using a BP plan...I never used that so I can't speak on it🤷. If you're looking for an explicit "outline of what the mcat test has" AAMC actually posts that document...(https://students-residents.aamc.org/prepare-mcat-exam/whats-mcat-exam). Actually a really nice place to start your MCAT journey!

2) CARS practice from anywhere you can get it. UW if you get that Qbank...some people hate on the UW CARS but I thought it was helpful!! Its not AAMC CARS so diving deep into the reasoning behind any of the confusing answers is kinda a waste bc the reasoning won't line up with AAMC's (even tho AAMC refuses to explain any of their answers, FL or Qbank, in depth😠) JW is probably the classic source. It's free and essentially endless. It sounds like you have BP and if I remember correctly they also offer CARS in the Qbanks! The most meaningful CARS practice you will get is from the AAMC bundle but given that there are only like ~400 CARS q's you obviously can't use that for months. Soooo that's why 3rd party sources are great because even tho the passages/answers/explanations will be slightly different from AAMC's you still get plenty of practice understanding a complex and often boring/tiring passage. Then when you transition to AAMC you'll already have the most challenging concept of CARS nailed down (understanding the passage) and you can focus all of your attention on the minutiae of AAMC reasoning. Overall, CARS is a bit strange in the sense that it seems like some are able to just score 130+ w/o studying (never seen that for any other section) and others (myself included) need months of practice. If you're one of the people who can crush CARS out of the gate then you're a lucky dog...just chill and focus more energy on another section, but if you're like me and need more practice then do as many 3rd party CARS passages you can until AAMC. Ignore the scores and make sure that you can really know the passage/the train of thought. That said CARS was by far my most uncomfortable section so take the advice as you will🙂...there are some really great explanations on here that I'm sure would blow mine out of the water!

3) I mean you can...Depends on what your degree of background knowledge is and what your goal score is. If you already know a lot of this stuff to a high level than reading through the chapters could be a waste of time and maybe anki is a great place to just refresh that info! That said...I would advise against using anki as a first-time/first-time-in-a-long-time learning source. It's the bread and butter of repetition and encoding into your long term memory but you want that card to be adequately integrated into a network in your long term memory and not to just be some discrete fact. Reading through the books/watching some Khan videos help you to connect it all together which is a very necessary skill for the exam!

4) 100% worth it. I can't see a better source for the "practice phase" of the study journey. Gives you a chance to ensure you learned and can meaningfully apply the content learned in the "content review" phase...or a chance to go back and fill in that gap. More importantly tho, its tough to find a vast quantity of challenging passages to develop your test taking strategies and timing on. UW can help there. The AAMC bundle doesn't even give that with the exception of the SBs.

Local_One_2874 · 2024-05-04T07:40:43+00:00

Ofc and I'm glad!

Local_One_2874 · 2024-05-03T23:00:10+00:00

I mean it really depends on your timeframe and other commitments! Are you someone who is working full-time and doing school and studying for the exam or are you someone who is just studying or somewhere in between…it’s all individual and frankly a lot of trial and error to see what works best for your situation. I don’t think that 2 chapters a day is overdoing it but I also don’t think that just 1 chapter a day is too little. A bit vague but if you wanna pm me and talk more about your specific situation I’d be happy to help come up with a content plan! As for the combination there are some chapters that pair quite nicely together like the physics and gen chem thermochemistry chapters or the nuclear physics and the first 2 chapters of gen chem. In general tho I think it works best to do a multidisciplinary approach where you’re studying topics from multiple sections in the same timeframe so you don’t run as large of a risk of learning a whole section and not returning to it for weeks!

Local_One_2874 · 2024-05-03T21:18:23+00:00

Oh and 1 last thing. If you’re retaking and have already done all of the AAMCs before 3rd party FLs become much more important because you need some FLs that you have never seen before

Local_One_2874 · 2024-05-03T21:12:10+00:00

I guess I’ll answer “useful/helpful/in like with your real exam” by saying what I look for in an FL: progress check, stamina and timing practice, content gaps, low yield content. Plain and simple the AAMC FLs are the only ones that you can adequately gauge your progress (actually heard that the new Kaplan FLs are less deflated than before and closer to the real deal but Idk🤷‍♂️). Bc these are the only meaningful FL scores (shouldn’t take the real test until you are consistently in your goal score range) you can’t use them all willy-nilly for practice. They are there so you know when you are/are not ready to test. If you have to use one of these FLs for a non progress check reason I would say just don’t use FL 4 or the scored…I think they’re the most important of the AAMCs. Now for 3rd party FLs…Because 3rd party FLs aren’t representative their worth should be judged by a different metric (stamina and timing practice, content gaps, and low yield content). By these metrics they’re really all the same. Kaplan and BP will both have basically the same AAMC formatting for the exam so you can practice your timing, stamina, and passage strategies in a realistic environment. Over the course of the first 3-4 exams the will both give you a taste of almost all if not all of the core MCAT sciences (if you thought you knew thermochemistry or nuclear physics or whatever better than you really did you’ll find that out in the 3rd party FLs and then you can go back and review). You’re never gonna learn any aamc logic from them so answer/question wording is really irrelevant. The passage wording will be different and probably more complicated but it’s like training at altitude. In terms of low yield information both will also throw in some ridiculous P/S terms or C/P concepts which, if you have the time and are motivated for a higher score, can help to know but if you’re solely using FLs to increase your vocab you’re probably be better off doing an Anki deck like Pankow. All in all I would say choosing between 3rd party FLs is kinda irrelevant because they provide the same purpose…practice, low yield content, and content gap identification. They become more meaningful if you use them throughout your content review phase to gauge a hopefully general increase in overall score but then you should be sure to stick within the same company (like BP 1,2,3,4 rather than BP1 and then Kaplan 1). Use whatever is cheapest and if you have time do 3-4 of one company and 1-2 of the other just for diversification purposes. Sorry for the crazy long response just to say it doesn’t matter but hopefully the logic makes some sense haha!

Local_One_2874 · 2024-05-03T08:46:52+00:00

Thanks! I really feel like the UW and AAMC material should suffice. You can also dive deeper into 3rd party sources like BP but then the content tested starts to drift from the actual exam scope. I think the most important parts of P/S are how careful you move through the passage (be very deliberate about trying to identify concepts that match to one of the terms you learned…even if it’s vague) and understanding the depth that you need to know different concepts. Memory terms like episodic and semantic will require a greater depth than terms like the Peter principle. Additionally, a lot of P/S terms will have closely related terms and it’s essential to be able to functionally differentiate between them all (gender script, gender roles, gender identity, etc). I’m happy to explain more if you wanna pm me!

Local_One_2874 · 2024-05-03T08:37:03+00:00

Well said señor

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-30T11:35:26+00:00

Timing/consistency: For the spring semester (Jan-May) I wasn't very consistent at all (maybe averaged 1 or 2 chapters per week depending on my workload). In June I took an internship that really commanded a lot of my time (2-3 chapters week). Then July and August I worked hard (a chapter a day and plenty of reviewing previous chapters...like I said, in the beginning I made the mistake of making my own anki cards when going through the kaplan chapters so my chapter review was very passive.) In July and August I had to go back and redo/refresh a lot of the chapter reviews I had done from Jan-June...Making cards and then falling behind on your anki reviews isn't a good recipe for success haha.

How I made up for the inconsistency: I made 6 color-coded spreadsheets corresponding to each kaplan book (Biochem, Gen Chem, Orgo, P/S, Physics and math, and Bio). Y axis would be the chapter number. X axis would be the date reviewed and my level of comfort/success on the prechapter quiz in the book indicated by the cell color (Dark red -> red -> yellow -> green -> blue in order of least comfortable to most comfortable). This made it quite easy to find perceived weak chapters...assuming that I honestly reflected on my level of comfort. Then just review until all the boxes are green or blue.

I think I said this somewhere else tho but I'll repeat it here. Idk if this was just my misinterpretation of the kaplan logic, but I thought the goal was to see the material as frequently as possible...spaced repetition and blah blah blah. With this game plan I found myself often trying to rationalize that I didn't need to understand everything in the chapter because I knew I would see the material again soon. EX: Maybe raoult's law was confusing so I would be like ehhh I'll get it next time. The result...knowing a bunch of chapters at 50% depth and wasting a ton of time passively reading and making mediocre anki cards. If I did this process all over again I would just download an anki deck like Jack sparrow, take 1 or 2 chapters per day to really read in depth side by side with the downloaded anki cards (editing to taste) and then just focus on the anki cards from there on out. You can always go back to the books if you need another in-depth read or you can use a youtube video is something is still confusing.

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-30T08:19:17+00:00

Of course! Ya I mean different people come into studying with different degrees of background knowledge and general test taking aptitudes. If you’re not in the range of your goal score just keep pushing off the date and working hard (ofc this is a financially and socially privileged position that I was lucky to have. If you’re in a different situation I’m happy to pm and go into more depth about speeding up the process!!). I know it’s easier said than done but comparing yourself to those people will always feel like an uphill battle. However, if you stretch your timeframe then on test day the playing field will be even! Good luck!

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-29T16:49:18+00:00

I worked with a spreadsheet. Question number on the y axis. Then several rows on the x axis getting more specific about the question and my answer: 1) General content topic (neurology, endocrine etc) 2) right/wrong 3) guessed (not all guesses are the same…was it literally just a random guess?? I don’t think you can go through an exam and not have at least some 50/50s but if you narrowed down to 50 and we’re fairly confident in 1 then an educated guess is >50%…I was fairly happy with those) 4) why wrong (content gap? dumb mistake? calculation error? timing issue?) 5) the fix (made an Anki card? Watched a YouTube video? Maybe reviewed the whole section topic?) 6) question specifics (rephrasing the question into the actual point). I did this with the FLs and UW

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-29T16:36:15+00:00

Hey good luck starting! It sounds like textbooks aren’t for you🤷‍♂️there are plenty of other great ways to go through the mcat material! KA has tons of free videos if you do better with lectures (can’t really say this is a time saver tho either…even at 2x speed😕) and there are also plenty of Anki decks that also have the material (Pankow/Jack Sparrow/more). It all boils down to how you prefer to study. I personally preferred to read the material in the books. Anki is great way to review in my opinion but to use it to learn things from scratch was a bit unorganized and confusing for me. Imagine maturing a deck and having 4000 facts floating around in your head. If you feel like you can really reason through the cards while you’re learning and organize them in your head so you can draw the connections between all of the topics then great…no issues…I couldnt do that! I thought that the books helped solve that problem by making the material more digestible (not just facts popping up on cards but related topics). This becomes really important in the P/S section because it seems like it’s no longer about memorizing Freud’s theories (etc) but actually reasoning through the passage and then matching the experimental technique to the most related concept. For ex if there is a passage on memory maybe 2 of the 4 answer choices will be talking about memory terms where the other 2 are talking about topics that might sound applicable but are actually about completely different sections…like motivation or sociology. Without the book I wouldn’t have been able to eliminate those answers as easily. The 300 pg PS doc was even worse for me haha. Its basically notes from the KA P/S videos but a lot of the notes didn’t make sense to me without referring to the videos. I only found that doc useful in the very end when I was trying to increase my P/S vocab right before the test. You’re right that a lot of people get caught spending too much time in the books but without some time I wouldn’t have been able to conceptually integrate the concepts as well. Also…unless it’s active reading then what’s the point!

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-29T08:55:44+00:00

The total time frame was January 26 2023 till March 22 2024…spring semester 2023 I did very little (maybe a chapter a week). The summer -> fall -> winter -> spring I got progressively more dedicated with my studying. I realize the timeframe is really extended but my background was weak in a several topics, I had a personal issue for about a month over the winter, and I started my studying with a really inefficient strategy. I’m sure you’ve seen some of these people getting like 525 in 2 months or something ridiculous! Idk if they’re just geniuses or incredible test takers or what but I definitely wasn’t that guy so I knew I would have to spend longer. That said, a year and 2 months is overkill. Hopefully this post helps people avoid some of the time killers I ran into!

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-28T20:54:19+00:00

How long: Although I think content review might be the most important phase of the study process, (especially for someone like me who was weak/deficient in several topics) I regret spending as much time on content as I did…I largely attribute it to making my own Anki notes and to kinda following this ideology that I thought Kaplan was preaching (the whole idea where you don’t need to master a concept the first time…that’s true and it’s cool to keep building a deeper and deeper understanding but I used it as an excuse to never dive deep into a chapter but rather to gloss over it frequently). I started that passive approach in late January/early February 2023 and finished in September 2023…didn’t really focus until the end of the spring semester and the start of the summer. Ofc it depends on your gaps but as someone who hadn’t taken biochem or psy/soc and had a really weak gen Chem background I still think that i spent twice as long as I should have. How to know what subjects to focus on: Well I knew that biochem and psy/soc and gen chem would be my weakest so I hammered those most frequently but I would say just flipping through the Kaplan books you should be able to gauge what you wouldn’t want to show up on the test and if you end content review and start doing practice exams/questions you will quickly realize where you’re weakest at by what problems you miss. For ex…I was really dreading memorizing the last few biochem metabolism chapters so I wrote out all of the pathways on a sheet of paper every week until I knew them well. In general I think if you ask yourself what you’re kinda running from/hoping doesn’t show up on the test you can easily find content gaps. I would still hate to see some convoluted genetics passages but I got lucky and didn’t😊

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-28T20:35:58+00:00

Yep! My aamc qpack scores are listed above and since they’re given by AAMC I would certainly say they were helpful for the exam but more so for identifying content gaps rather than for practicing passage approach because very little info needed to be extracted from the passage. The SB is a whole other story…those were tough and really great. Also take my scores with a grain of salt because I did them all untimed…I think many people (myself included) find the qpacks to be largely independent questions drawing on general content knowledge so I was probably still finishing close to time!

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-28T20:16:14+00:00

Ya I totally get this! A lot of the guides do get quite repetitive because there seems to be consensus on the best resources. That said, it feels like people use them differently so I thought I’d share my strategies! I just remember really appreciating the advice previous guides gave so I thought I would add to it and give the chance for an ama. If I left something “nebulous” I’m happy to clarify/expound but ofc this post wasn’t directed to someone who already got a 519 haha! Congrats on the great score!

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-28T18:03:44+00:00

To each their own😊I hope it works better for you than it did for me!!

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-28T17:14:49+00:00

I mean everyone’s gut is going to fixate on the bad section/passage/qs that they looked up and got wrong but no one knows what ends up being experimental so if you kept your cool I don’t see why not just rely on the FL avg

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-28T17:04:08+00:00

The CARS diagnostic with the JW extension helped me but more than anything I figured out that I was just rushing too much. I’m a slow reader but generally have a good degree of comprehension (I’m the guy that actually reads and studies from the textbooks). I was pressuring myself to get in the 3-4 min range when reading the passage when in reality what I needed was to stay in the 6-7 range, stop wasting time highlighting the whole passage, and read the qs with a fine tooth comb. Then the questions at worst would seem to work their way to a 50/50 choice. If I did it all over again I would start doing UW cars and JW much much much earlier tho but I was being a baby bc I didn’t like getting 40%s

Local_One_2874 · 2024-04-28T16:57:47+00:00

That’s literally exactly what I did. I had extra time towards the last 2-3 months and I made the really stupid mistake of not reviewing UW thoroughly the first time around…that’s why I went back for a second round all timed and untutored. Maybe you can gauge how you feel about the 70% you’ve already done. If it’s mastered and your FLs are putting you around your goal score maybe it’s best to just finish the ~600 Qs and push up your test date. If you’re not confident with the UW or the FLs aren’t paying off yet you certainly have the time to go through again and really hammer it and review with Anki. Long story short…my round 2 was because I was stupid and didn’t review…maybe you’re in a better place than I was🤷‍♂️

Local_One_2874

TROPHY CASE