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I have been a long time lurker and thought I'd give back to this community with a post about my experience and what I wish I'd have done differently. This is going to be a long ride, so buckle up. Skip to end to know my assessment scores. YOG: March 2019. I had thoughts about taking Step 1 in 3rd and 4th year, but didn’t have any proper guidance or a study partner. Made a decision to pursue USMLE journey during internship. Researched a lot about the exam and what resources to use on reddit and online forums. Goal is to keep limited resources and maximize your knowledge. Started prep in mid- April after graduation because I had to get it (internship) out of the way of my prep. Resources used: 1. Dr. Najeeb lectures – this was important for developing my basics 2. Boards and Beyond – Dr. Ryan explains clearly the basics of pathology and physiology. So must watch. 3. Pathoma – Gold for pathology hands down. 4. First Aid – This book has become my SO during prep period. This book has almost all the information. You just have to connect the dots. 5. UsmleWorld – Gold and obligatory Qbank. Annotated some concepts to my FA. Must do 2 passes. 6. Amboss Qbank – For solidifying your knowledge and test taking skills. 7. Goljan audio lectures – Listened to it during dedicated but was sad at the end because I couldn’t hear more of this legend. 8. Linda Costanzo’s Physiology – Beautifully explained physiology. Must read if your basics are shit. 9. Robbins Pathologic Basis of Disease- Read it occasionally because I was in awe with this book. 10. Kaplan Qbank – some really good questions but not really required for Step 1 prep. 11. Usmle Rx Qbank – Great way to drill FA into your brain. 12. ANKI – Realized late that it was even a thing. Only did for anatomy, micro and pharm in dedicated. Didn’t complete the whole thing and couldn’t keep up with my reviews. 13. Sketchy Micro – Absolute necessary for micro but only revised bacteria and viruses. 14. Conrad Fischer’s 100 Ethics cases – Read this one like a novel. 15. GOOGLE- The best one 😉 I had piss poor basics and was an average student academically. So I had start building my fundamentals first and start from scratch. Started prep with neurology (my favorite). Read Kaplan neuroanatomy but didn’t stick. Started watching Dr. Najeeb lectures again along with my notes. My plan was following this for every system: - Watch a Najeeb video (selective systems) if your poor in that topic. - Supplement that with BnB and Pathoma. - Annotate BnB (some topics) and Pathoma to my FA so it’ll be easy to revise. - Did Uworld system wise according to that. - Did Rx to solidify factoids from FA. This strategy was really helpful for my prep. I was getting 80-85% in my Uworld first pass (did it offline). It had 2300 questions then. READ EVERY UWORLD EXPLANATION THOROUGHLY. I cannot stress this enough. Read both the correct explanation and wrong ones and think about why it is wrong and learn the pathophysiology behind it instead of just memorizing. Do this for every question and annotate the topics that are difficult for you to FA. Screenshot some topics like tables, charts, diagrams and pictures for future references. - Read costanzo for physio for selected systems like CVS, Renal, Resp and Endocrine. - Read Robbins and Goljan for some weak topics (Goljan is overkill). The most important things to read in Robbins is Morphology and Pathophysiology so you can become familiarize with the topic. Most of the uworld morphology questions were straight from this book. Did some of the questions from Robbins Rapid Review and they were good. - Did not watch any Kaplan videos as most of the opinions on them were not good. - Read Kaplan lecture notes for molecular and cell biology as these were not stressed in any other resources. - Use GOOGLE as your resource. Search and read articles, Wikipedia if you had any doubts in specific topics and images. Revised every now and then. Didn’t know about anki at this time. May be I’d have done differently if I had started anki by then. Used to go to library from 9am – 9pm. Some days it was 8 hrs and on some days it was 10-11 hours. Took my lunch to library or ordered something because my house was far from my library. Played badminton every evening during this time for 1-2 hours. Really good to just relax and forget everything. Original goal was to write the exam by Feb-March. Took my first baseline assessment NBME 21 (online) - 215. Did it on a shitty day and I couldn’t concentrate much. Was dumbstruck at first and then realized it was very different style of questions from Uworld. Did a bunch of silly mistakes. I was going to set my exam date in April or may and start dedicated but COVID happened and there was a halt in my prep. April – July was quarantine mode. Didn’t do much of a studying except for Amboss. Completed the whole Qbank during this time with 80%. Most of these questions were goods but they were really nitpicking about tiny details that you may miss during studying. My suggestion is to do only 2,3,4 hammer questions. Did every old NBME (1-12). There are no explanations for these anywhere. So just did questions . Some of them are outdated concepts. I was just doing them for practice. More the questions the merrier. There were no test centres in our state so you have to go to other state. But interstate travel was closed at this time. So, there was no motivation to study at all during this period. Started dedicated in early august and set the date in middle of September. DEDICATED – 6 Weeks: TARGET : >255 - My whole plan was to do UW SECOND PASS supplemented with FA. Time gap between first pass and second pass is approx 5 months. UW second pass was about 93%. - I was studying 8-11 hours per day. Some days just taking a break. It is important to take breaks during this time. - Did 2 UW blocks (random and offline) per day in the morning. Each block took 40-50 min to complete. Explanations took about 1-1.5 hrs. so total of 4-5 hours in the morning along with FA. UW has atleast 3000 questions by now. So atleast 600-700 questions were new to me. - From afternoon did content review and referenced Robbins, Goljan and Costanzo for doubts. - From evening used to do anki for Micro, Pharm and Anatomy. - Did Dorian anatomy deck and physeo anatomy deck . Completed within a week. I think these decks covered 90% of the anatomy questions along with FA and UW. Also read CLINICAL ANATOMY MADE RIDICULOUSLY SIMPLE (recommended by fellow SP). Good book to read. Explained some concepts clearly with humor added. - Did Sketchy decks for micro and pharm. 200-300 cards per day. Only did half because couldn’t keep up with my reviews. START ANKI EARLY IN YOUR PREP IF YOU WANT TO. - Started picking up on time with UW explanations and used to complete the whole thing in 3.5-4 hours and was really doing well on assessments so I increased my target to >260. - Read Conrad Fischer’s 100 Ethics cases book. Completed in 2 days. Did UW behavoural sciences after reading this. These two has almost everything you need to know about ethics and psych. - Did UW Biostats questions supplemented with FA. Ethics and biostats were my weak spots in self assessments. So did them both twice in dedicated. - Did 2 new nbmes per week. Did old ones in quarantine. - One important goal in my whole prep was to do more questions and familiarize well with all kinds of styles so you don’t have to panic on exam day. - EXERCISE REGULARLY. Relax your body from time to time. It is the most important this for preparation of an exam of this magnitude. It doesn’t have to an intense workout. I did 20-25 min of workout 4-5 days a week. Do regular walking half hour per day. Listened to Dr.Papi during this time. Do it to get more insights and a big picture of what you studied. I would like to meet this legend one day. - Sleep regulary. Don’t neglect your health. Eat healthy during dedicated. You don’t want to lose time in your prep because of this. - My only advice in dedicated is do more questions and revise what you’ve learned. Did approximately 15000 QUESTIONS. - My aunt has passed away a week before my exam. She was very close to me and it impacted my mental health and I couldn’t study 3-4 days after that. EXAM DAY: Did free 120 a day before the exam at the test centre to familiarize with the process. You can skip the tutorial and 15 min is added to your break time on exam day. - Got to the exam centre a day before and checked the address. Booked a hotel near to the centre 2 weeks before hand. - Ate cereal, 2 eggs and a banana for breakfast. Packed peanut butter and nutella sandwiches, protein bars, bananas, dry fruits and a water bottle. - Slept at 10-10:30 pm before the exam day and woke up at 6 am. This was very important to me to get atleast 7-8 hrs of sleep. Normally I’d sleep for 8-9 hrs in order for my brain to work properly. - Went to test centre at 07:30 am. At first I was really nervous but calmed myself when I sat before the monitor. - 1st block was okay. Some straight forward questions sprinkled with wtf questions. Took a break at the table after that for only 2 min because I still had adrenaline rush from 1st block. - Marked 10 questions for first 2 blocks. 3rd block was relatively easy as I only marked 5-6. Last block was also relatively easy. - 4th, 5th, 6th blocks were relatively difficult and had like 10 wtf questions per every block. I marked 14-15 per block. Some of these were questions you’ve never seen before. I had to search pubmed for some of these answers. - Breaks: after 2 blocks – 10 min. Ate a protein bar and dry fruits during these breaks. After 3rd block – 10 min. After 4th block – 20 min. Lunch. After 5th block – 10 min. After 6th block – 10 min. - Came out exhausted and didn’t even know how I’ve done. I was praying to get atleast 230 after that. - 50% of the exam was straightforward and is not trying to trick you like UW or AMBOSS. - In other 50% half of them were difficult and you have to narrow It down to two options. While other half are just wtf questions and don’t even know what they were trying to ask here. So eliminating the options plays a key role here as well as test taking skills. - I guessed 40-50% of my exam AND IT IS OK. - I had a pic attached to the question for every 3-4 questions. It may be a graph, table, histology, gross specimen, imaging etc., Histo pictures were really of poor quality. I couldn’t see what the hell was going on in some of them. - I had 1-2 biostats for every block and only one of them were asking to calculate in the whole exam. All others were interpretations, bias, study types and most of these started with ‘an investigator’. - Micro, Pharm and Anatomy were not numerous and UW+FA+Sketchy was enough for that. I had 4-5 ques about US MARINE CORPS related to micro. - My form heavy on molecular biology which were mostly asked as experimental questions. ASSESSMENTS: I have an attention span of a 3 year old and I’m easily distractable. So it was a hectic task for me to sit through these assessments. - NBME 21 – 215 (210 days out) – 40- 50 mistakes - NBME 15 – 242 (207 days out) - 35 mistakes. - NBME 13 – 250 (200 days out) - 22 mistakes. - AMBOSS SA – 251 (198 days out) – 25 mistakes. - NBME 16 – 261 (191 days out) – 11 mistakes. - NBME 20 – 257 (41 days out) offline – 19 mistakes. - NBME 19 – 242 (36 days out) – 16 mistakes. This has a shitty curve and will demotivate you. - NBME 22 – 259 (32 days out) offline - 18 mistakes. - NBME 23 – 261 (30 days out) offline – 16 mistakes. Did good on these two because it had 10-15 repeats from old forms. - NBME 17 – 269 (16 days out) – 5 mistakes. Easiest one out there and I think I peaked here. - NBME 24 – 257 (11 days out) offline – 18 mistakes. Other NBMEs were easier than this. - UWSA 1 – 271 (9 days out) - 18 mistakes. Don’t get your hopes up by this one. - NBME 18 – 250 (7 days out) – 19 mistakes. Did a bunch of silly mistakes but was fair and not fucked up like other ones. I think the Curve is getting worse on this one. - UWSA 2 – 264 (4 days out) – 16 mistakes. Was not an easy one for sure. More biochem and genetics oriented. - FREE 120 – 88% - (2 days out) – 14 mistakes. Most of the questions were straight forward. Got 3-4 concepts in the main thing directly from here. - By now you know I am stressing more on the number of mistakes because those were more important to improvise than your scores. Read every explanation for your incorrect and think why you got it wrong. - Step 1 predictor from reddit – 258 with 11 SD (95%CI). - FINAL STEP 1 (17-09-2020) SCORE – 254. Was a bit bummed by that as I was hoping atleast 260. I was pretty calm during the whole exam except before lunch where I was really tired and hypoglycemic. But nonetheless it is a good score for programs I’m interested in (Psych and Path) and I’m satisfied. Hoping to get up my score in CK. LAST WORDS OF WISDOM: - Don’t overwhelm yourself with many resources. Pick the ones which will stick for you through the whole prep time. Even if you read one concept you should know everything about it. It is better than reading everything and retaining only a small part of it. - GET YOUR BASICS RIGHT. This is the most important thing for step 1. Don’t try to memorize everything. My exam was more focused on basic concepts and understanding than memorization of weird and random factoids. - Active reading is >>>> Passive reading. - DON’T COMPARE YOURSELF WITH OTHERS. Whatever it maybe, assessments or preparation. Everyone has their own way of learning things. So do what’s best for you. - TIME IS ESSENCE. Don’t procrastinate. You’ll be in a better place than you’re in now if you do well. Think about the quote when you are demotivated – ‘THIS TOO SHALL PASS’. - UFAPS is still gold standard for step 1. So be perfect in these things. - Read FA thoroughly. You never know what they’re going to ask on the exam. - REVISE REVISE REVISE (anki or FA). - EAT HEALTHY AND EXERCISE REGULARLY AND SLEEP WELL DURING DEDICATED. - The exam is doable. So don’t get panicked and calm your nerves on the last week before. So, that was my experience of tackling this beast. GOODBYE. Take care good people.

Hello everyone. let me just say THANK YOU SO MUCH to all the people of this reddit page for everything posted. There is so much valuable material and advice that can be found here. I would not have been able to pass the FE Exam without you! Also thank you so much to the STEM Discord group for helping me with a billion questions as well as all the active people who posted questions that helped me study for the test. YOU ALL ROCK!
(this is going to be a long post so feel free to just skip to "studying for the exam" if you want to know what studying stuff/resources I used)
BACKGROUND
I found out around February 2020 that I was going to be hired by a company I had been dying to work for in the same city as my S.O. in the USA once I finished school with a tentative start of June 1st dependent on COVID impacts. March 16th UBC told their students the rest of the semester would be online and that if we wished to leave we could. March 17th I left for Utah to be with my S.O. March 26th I received my official offer letter from the company. I finished up my university courses and was done finals April 25. I told my company that I could start earlier since I wasn't doing much given COVID restrictions and I started May 19th, 2020. About then was when I began to study for the FE exam and get my documents together since I had Canadian education and I needed to make sure I qualified etc. Thankfully my state of Utah doesn't require education verification for those coming from CAEB accredited universities (pretty sure they know Canadians are the best!). My employer also requested I get my FE exam done ASAP with a good salary increase incentive, so I had a lot of motivation to be successful. It took until August before I was able to even schedule my exam at which point October 6th was the soonest appointment I could make. So studying continued right until October 6th but I took weekends to myself and mostly was able to study while at work when it was slow. I also was finishing my work too fast so I would often add an hour or so of studying once done before I submitted my work. My boss was ok with me doing this since he didn't have anymore work to give me anyways. Come September that is when I stopped having "fun" weekends and I spent each weekend studying and doing mock exams right until I took my exam October 6th. October 14th I checked at 10:01 am eastern time and found out I passed. It was a stressful week waiting for the results and I had no idea if I would pass or fail. I felt neutral coming out of the exam, neither terrible nor amazing. I did my best and hoped it was good enough.
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STUDYING FOR THE EXAM
(Resources used are in bold and italicized)
To start studying I basically looked all over the internet for free resources to start. I read a ton a reddit posts and then I found the discord group where I found other people who were willing to share resources they found. Given I had no real idea what the FE was since I was from Canada, reading these posts, ones like this, was very helpful and got me prepared. I downloaded the manual and looked over the different categories and was happy to know my university, while not preparing me to take the FE because in Canada we have a set curriculum among all universities and once you graduate you become an EIT after registering with the regulating body (no technical exam), had prepared me well and I felt I was already one step ahead because I knew quite a bit of the listed topics. It was really just a matter of refreshing myself on the specifics of the topics.
The first book I used to study was FE Civil Review with 800 Solved Problems by M.R. Islam. It has a ton of questions in all the categories that I used as a starting point to become familiar with what things I would be tested on. I found they had decent questions (yes a few errors like all textbooks) and good explanations most of the time. It was a great starter book! I did every question in that book. When I got to a topic I didn't really know, I would watch the Marshall University videos on YouTube relating to that topic as well as the Georgia Tech Coursera videos. In the end I watched all the YouTube and Coursera videos and did every question in their videos as well. I had the Coursera quiz answers from googling online so I didn't have to pay $50 for them.
Being part of the STEM Discord introduced me to Girum S. Urgessa, the author of FE-Civil Practice Questions with Detailed Solutions. I bought his book for $40 on Amazon and worked through the first 110 questions as a form of studying more practice questions (PS if you want the book $25 and I will mail it to you as I no longer need mine. I didn't write in it and was very careful to not even bend pages). They are a good set of questions and reasonably on par with the difficulty of the questions in the real exam. He was available on Discord to help when we had questions both with his book and with other random stuff too. The second half of the book I left for a September mock exam because it was designed to be used as a mock exam. It was my first mock exam I did and I got 55%. Doing this allowed me to find out which topics I needed to review more so I could be successful on the real thing. There are a few errors in this book, but Girum has an erratum out that is up to date and you can always ask for help in the Discord group or email him.
Once I had completed these 4 sources along with being active in the discord and helping others answer all sorts of questions, I did begin to feel confident.
I completed some of the diagnostic sections out of the book Civil Practice Problems for the Civil Fundamentals of Engineering by Michael Lindeburg, but honestly those are very old and a bit on the difficult side. It was great to look at them and learn from them, but don't get discouraged if you use this resource and feel like nothing makes sense. You could skip it all together and be fine.
I started doing some of the questions from the Perdue Notes (easily findable through google and this reddit page), but found them to be riddled with errors, so while you might want to look at the ethics section and that type of stuff, don't let yourself get hung up on doing every question out of those notes because they kind of suck. I used them mostly to try and study theory things.
I also used School of PE Notes found online and felt those to be reasonably valuable in some topics. The environmental one is NOT GOOD and a waste of time. I used them to supplement in the areas where I was having issues such as surveying and transportation.
I had also around August downloaded the app ENGR Prep app on IOS by ENGINPEERS.COM and did some of their quizzes while I was at work when I was bored. They have decent questions and I liked them. You have to watch a short ad, but its free and I liked that. I used it for ethics, math, materials, and economics. It had quality questions and I didn't find any errors myself.
At this point I had two weeks to go till my exam so I spend a weekend doing the NCEES practice exam as a mock exam. I got 74% and studied up on the things I made errors on. I was feeling ready to take the test, but still had days to go and was worried I would start forgetting things so I just kind of watched YouTube videos on different topics.
With a week to my test I was able to get my hands on a few more practice tests where I just went through the questions on them mostly skipping the things I was 100% confident on such as math. It was a great reviewer in the last few days before my exam to just not loose any information. I had the PPE FE exam practice, MO S&T practice, CHAYA Engineering, and Civil Engineering Academy Ultimate Practice Exam. Some of it was redundant but nonetheless helped me.
So in total I used many resources and in the end only spent $45 on studying material. I started at the end of may with a loose schedule just doing things when I could then near the end of august and all of September hunkered down and studied as much as I could. All of this was while I was working full time, mostly in the field with September in the office.
All the material I used can be found through this reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/FE_Exam/comments/j50n0n/fe_civil_study_material_bank_updated/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Yes its a weird site but when you follow the instructions it works. I think its on a foreign site to try and protect the person who posted it. I didn't have any issues getting materials from it and have no viruses or anything.
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EXAM DAY
My nearest test center was 2 hours away but didn't have appointments until January, so I had to find somewhere else. There were some north of where I live so I picked a test center 4 hours away and we drove up on a Sunday, went to Ikea (because why not!), had dinner and went swimming at the hotel pool. That night I looked over some more notes I had just from the above resources and tried to sleep as best I could given my nerves. The next day, Monday, we just toured around national forest and enjoyed the fall colors in the mountains. It was a peaceful day. For dinner we had sushi (looking back probably should have picked something less risky hahaha) which was yummy and then went back to the hotel to rest up before my exam. Again I looked over some notes and whatnot, but nothing major. I woke up Tuesday at 6am, went and got a sandwich from the grocery store to bring with me and a banana. I was at the test center at 7am to see if I could start my test early since it was scheduled for 8am. Unfortunately the people didn't arrive till 7:30 to set up so I waited till 8 in my car and then headed back in.
When I got into the office I was asked if I washed my hands which I had because I went to the bathroom before I started. If you didn't you were made to go wash your hands in the bathroom. I was then told to take a number and given some papers that just went over NCEES rules and some info about how to use the reference manual on the computer. NOTE: it is different than using adobe pdf reader. There is a video online about it, google it and watch it so you have an idea. It is a bit slower than that I was used to, but it wasn't hard to use. You have to be quite specific and familiar with the book because sometimes symbols like % are not recognized so GET TO KNOW THE MANUL! While waiting I took a sip of water and had a caffeine pill (only do this if you are used to caffeine pills because otherwise you might have issues). Once my number was called I went to the counter, gave her my ID, used hand sanitizer, did a palm scan, took a picture where they ask you to pull your mask down around your chin for 5 seconds, and then was told to turn off my phone and put everything in a locker except to keep my ID and the locker key. I went around a corner from the waiting area to where I would be taking my test. They looked at my id, made me pat myself down, show my pockets, spin around to show my back, made me sanitize my hand again for a palm scan, and then I was brought to my computer where they logged into it and told me to press start whenever I wanted to go. They also said if I need anything raise my hand and they will come over to me and if I hold up the pen or the booklet they would bring another. I took some deep breaths and then began. It started with the NDA where you just agree and continue and then a tutorial that told you how the questions would come up on the screen and how to use the reference manual and how flagging works. It was easy enough. Then I started the test just like that and worked through everything. I once asked to use the bathroom which took about 5 minutes total to get scanned out and scanned back in once I returned. I finished the first half of the exam on the half way point taking a loss on maybe 5 questions because I wanted enough time to do the second half. I then had a break where I ate and took another caffeine pill just before I went back in. During my break I also walked around a little to try and dissipate my test adrenaline that I always get. I went back in with the same pat down / palm scan and started the second part. Make sure you ask for a new book when you are starting part 2 because the first book is useless given you can't see any of the old questions. I wasted about 5 minutes waiting for a new book. PS: the pen does not erase really unless you use spit which you cant because of masks (also ew) so don't waste space because getting new books is just kind of annoying. The second half of the exam went WAY quicker because there were a lot of fast answer conceptual/theory questions. There were some straightforward plug and chug but overall I just had a lot of either you know it, can educated guess it, or have no idea and pick C. I wish I had spent another 25 minutes on the first half of the exam where I could have probably gotten another point or two, but ya never know! half and half time is a decent method going into the exam. When I finished the exam, I just clicked end, got my stuff, and was signed out with a palm scan. I then went to the waiting area, was given a paper saying I finished the test, got my belongings, and then left. I felt very neutral coming out - neither disastrous nor amazing. I was happy it was over. I was pretty alert at the end too and did not feel mentally exhausted thankfully as I was worried I would be grouchy on the drive home. I think my caffeine strategy worked for me. I stayed up the entire 4 hour drive back home and when I did get home, didn't take long falling asleep.
There were a few questions on my exam that I just had absolutely no idea - maybe 5. 2 or 3 questions just seemed crazy and out of the blue. Probably 10-15 others I was able to made educated guesses by eliminated some choices. I think I had 3-4 where I had to type a number (alternative) and 1 multiple option question. I did not like typing in numbers because it did not say how many sig figs to use. I stuck to using 2 decimals unless it was like 1.9 then I just did a whole number 2.
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WAITING FOR RESULTS
The wait for results was horrible. I slept poorly because my brain just started overthinking every answer I made. The more time that passed, the more I felt like I wasn't going to pass by just 1 or 2 points and be devastated. I had a terrible weekend because I just felt lost and didn't know what to even do with myself. My S.O. pulled me out of the house to go on a drive and walk in some nature to try and get my back to normal and it did help. Work picked up so I was able to busy myself in that which helped too.
Finally the time came this morning 10:01 am eastern time I logged in while I was doing my morning walk and saw the green pass. I was filled with relief and did a little jump. I teared up a bit because I was so happy it was over after thinking I was surely going to fail. Unfortunately I have no real advice for the wait. I guess just try to keep yourself as busy as possible so time flies. Either work a lot or exercise a lot maybe to help with the stress.
Also know if you fail, you will be able to take it again and redeem yourself, so don't be too hard on yourself. I had already planned I was going to do a 3 month subscription to PPI if I had failed and make sure every night for 2 hours to be on the website working, but I passed so I don't have to do that. It did give me peace of mind knowing I had a plan if I needed to retake it.
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If you made it this far, bravo. I hope by sharing my experience, I can help others who are trying to take the exam. Do your very best and you should get favorable results! If you have any other questions, I would be happy to try and help!
Here was my post when I had 11 days left: https://www.reddit.com/FE_Exam/comments/izue8d/11_days_till_fe_civil_exam_what_do_i_do/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Here was my post while I was going crazy waiting for my results: https://www.reddit.com/FE_Exam/comments/jaioww/going_crazy_waiting_for_the_results_tomorrow_am/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3