NEJM Image Challenge

As the Step 1 studying has begun, I'm always looking for ways to "change it up".  Reading First Aid, answering Doctors in Training tri-weekly question sets, and doing UWorld qbank sets is so much fun, but I love adding something different...like the New England Journal of Medicine Image Challenge.

Anyone can answer the multiple choice questions which refer to over 400 images.  After you select your answer, you can see 1) what the right answer is, 2) what everyone else thought the answer was, and 3) a small description about the right answer.  It's comforting to get results like this:

I got the correct answer along with a majority of ~700 people who answered.

But results like this make me feel stellar:

I got the correct answer; 2nd least selected answer with almost 13,000 respondents!

Now, don't think that I get every single question correct...definitely not true.  Multiple questions also leave me with a false sense of knowledge when I take an educated guess and get it right.  Of course, I always make sure to read the descriptions so I can correctly identify the image the next time it shows up (perhaps on my Step 1 exam - the first step in medical licensure in the U.S.).

For those who have trouble focusing on the same monotonous study activities each day, I highly recommend switching it up!  If you tend to lose focus doing qbank questions on your computer, try downloading the app for your phone.  I always feel like a rebel when I'm playing around on my phone...but I'm actually studying.  Twitter can also be used as a study tool.  If you've got a good med student following, tweet a question and see who responds; you can also try following accounts that solely quiz like @QuizMeAnat.  One last "out of the box" study activity: follow health blogs.  It's important to stay up-to-date on medical innovations, but it's also nice to see confirmation that childhood vaccinations are safe (and then try to remember the vaccine schedule) or terrifying to think of the plague making a comeback (the article makes no mention of the name of the bacteria - yersinia pestis; try to remember the name, clinical picture, and treatment) - although, yersinia pestis still exists in the U.S. so I don't really know why there's a big alarm about this...anyone have thoughts?  See, that would be a good question on Twitter!  Or Facebook.  But it is much easier to get off track on FB so I don't recommend it (unless you don't use Twitter; or have excellent self-control).

Happy studying!