An Update on my Cards and Future Directions

Hi all,

It's been a while. You'll notice that some changes have occurred around here. I changed the layout of the blog a bit. I'm toying around with different looks, so you'll likely see more changes in the next few days.  I want to make the blog cleaner and more accessible.

My near term goal is to transition to a new blog. I'll keep DrWillBe up and live mostly for my Anki cards, but I'm transitioning to a blog with a different name. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons:

(1) I want the new blog's name to reflect the fact that my focus is not just medicine. When I created DrWillBe, it was right before starting med school, and I intended to focus mostly on that. But I want to use my new blog as a platform to talk about multiple topics, and the name should reflect that.
(2) I want to use this new blog project as a way for me to learn some web development skills. So it will have a custom feel and more features, hopefully ones that I code myself using some CSS/HTML and Javascript.
(3) I plan to write much more regularly.

Regarding my Anki cards...
I love that so many people have downloaded them and are benefitting from them in their studies. Nothing makes me happier! Most all my decks will remain up on here. See the new Anki Decks link at the nav bar.

One major change: I've removed my Pathology deck. This is my most comprehensive and popular deck, so why have I removed it?

Well, my plan is to update the deck, clean it up, organize things more, add more cards, new media... pretty much I want to add more value to this already valuable deck. I've already spent 100's of hours putting this deck together, and I'm going to put even more time in sprucing it up. Because of this, I plan to charge a small fee for downloading the Pathology deck. All my other decks will remain free to download.

The new path deck should be ready in a few weeks. Until then, sit tight and check out the new changes happening here at DrWillBe.

Thanks for visiting my blog and for inspiring me to continue to write and share my learning resources.

Goal Setting for Grad School

In the spirit of the season, I've devised a list of fairly specific goals for my upcoming grad school career. It's time to transition from med school to the PhD years, and I want to be very purposeful about what I'm doing. If you're not careful, grad school can be period in which you become a highly trained technician, but not really a scientist that can think and act independently. To guard against that, I've laid out the things I want to learn and do in the next 4+ year. I'm putting it up here mostly to hold myself accountable, and also to invite feedback and criticism. I welcome you, dear readers, to help me with this list. For those of you in grad school, what are your experiences? What things do you wish you knew to focus on from the beginning?

Here is my (preliminary) list:

• ❑ Perfect art of presentations

• ❑ Learn meticulous scientific method and experimental design in general

• ❑ Improve general problem-solving skills

▼ ❑ Acquire robust data analysis skills 

• ❑ Learn statistics

▼ ❑ Become proficient in using computers to assist in research

• ❑ Programming

• ❑ Bioinformatics

• ❑ Web development

▼ ❑ Establish seamless workflow using digital tools

• ❑ Papers2

• ❑ Devonthink

• ❑ Anything else?

▼ ❑ Acquire outstanding domain knowledge and expertise

• ❑ Neurobiology of pain

• ❑ Acquire general knowledge of chemical biology

• ❑ Build a repository of techniques to use in pursuit of interesting scientific questions

• ❑ Perfect grant and scientific writing

• ❑ Crowdfund a science project

▼ ❑ Build strong network of smart people who I can call on to work with in the future

• ❑ Weekly lunch roundtable

▼ ❑ Self-track productivity

• ❑ Time studying

• ❑ Time working

• ❑ Output

• ❑ Attitudes

• ❑ Write science/medicine blog

▼ ❑ Extend knowledge in my domain

• ❑ Publish at least 2 first-authors papers

• ❑ At least 1 review article

• ❑ PhD thesis

▼ ❑ Improve/enhance self-learning methods

• ❑ How can I teach myself stuff throughout life?

Internal Medicine (Step 2CK) deck in Dropbox

Hey all,

Happy Holidays! I hope everyone is well rested and enjoying the season.

I've put my internal medicine clerkship deck in Dropbox (see link on sidebar). I'm not going to make a Step 2CK deck that is comprehensive, but this deck encompasses the majority of medicine topics. I used Pocket Medicine, Step Up to Medicine and USMLEWorld Step2CK qbank to make the cards. Hopefully they are helpful. For those studying for Step2CK, I'd use these cards as a base, but you're going to have to add your own. There is no ob/gyn, no peds, no psych, no emergency medicine, and only a little bit of surgery stuff.

Good luck!

Calling all med student entrepreneurs! Got coding skills? Want to change medical education?

Hi all, I've been working on a medical education startup for more than a year now. I've hinted at it here before, but I haven't given much info. We're going to start making some more public moves soon, so I thought that I would share a little more.

Check out our landing page to learn more about AgoraMed. We're looking for some help in the web development department. Ideally, we're looking for someone who is familiar with medicine (i.e. a medical student) and is highly skilled at web development. That's a tall order, but if you're out there and you want t be a part of something big, shoot me an email through the contact page.

Step 1 Post-Mortem - The Very Short Version

Hi all,

Several people have asked me to comment on the outcome of my Step 1 adventure. I want to give it a more full treatment when I get time, but right now, I'll give the short and sweet version.


First, my score.
I am hesitant to blast my Step 1 score on the interwebz for all to see. I think you can appreciate. But I also know that that result is important for judging whether my Anki strategy is worthwhile. I will give a qualitative result:  I was extremely pleased with my outcome, and I couldn't have asked for more. Take that as you will.

Short story:
1. Anki works really really.  Many questions, both in qbanks and on the real test would jump out at me as an Anki card, and that would enable me to answer them quickly and correctly.
2. UWorld is amazing. Many real q's looked very similar. Putting qbanks above content review was a good strategy for me. Because Anki started me off with a very solid base, I could take full advantage of UWorld and USMLERx from day 1.
3. 7 weeks was too long.  I should have done 5 or 6 weeks. I had to work very hard to get marginal gains in my performance compared to my initial NBME test. Diminishing returns. The silver-lining of that story, however, is that that means I was already poised to do well on Step 1 from day 1 b/c of Anki. So its conceivable that someone might use Anki and do qbanks during their normal class schedule, and then not even have to use dedicated time for Step 1. So that means a 1+ month vacation for someone with the courage to try that.
4. If I had done Anki for subjects like biochem, behavioral science, etc. early on, I probably would have done no content review at all. Maybe like 2-3 days at max. So for the future, students who use Anki from day 1 of med school may not need to do much content review at all.


I promise I'll come give more detail at another time. But the take-away now is that the Anki-Step 1 strategy I've described on this blog works. If you use good cards and are dedicated and disciplined in using them, you be set for success (however you define that). And, best of all, your learning efforts are not for naught. The knowledge will not be fleeting. The stuff I studied in the preclinical years is now burned in my head, and I hope that some of it will be useful to me in the future.

Good luck to you all on your Step 1 journeys. And thanks for following my own path here on this blog. I hope I've helped some of you.

Now it's time to start doing (and writing about) other exciting things.

Lecture 1 | Machine Learning (Stanford) - YouTube

Lecture 1 | Machine Learning (Stanford) - YouTube:

Two things of interest here:

The course itself: artificial intelligence is really interesting and increasingly relevant. This is the course, I believe, that set off Andrew Ng to create Coursera

Youtube.edu: I wasn't aware that YouTube created a .edu site. Pretty much the same, but what's interesting is that it allows 'playlists' to be generated in such a way that you can organize videos into self-contained courses.

Too much traffic to my Anki Cards; Dropbox temporarily disabled

Hey all,

Dropbox, temporarily disabled my public link to the Anki decks because of too much traffic. On the one hand, I'm flattered that there is so much traffic that DB had to shut it down for a couple of days. On the other hand, I'm really sorry people who want to download my deck can't. Just hold tight for a couple of days, and it should be back up.

Good luck