physics, writtens, and oral board advice

[guest]

Happy to say that in June, I passed that little oral quiz in KY with plenty of room to spare. Here's what I found helpful in preparing for writtens and orals. What have other people found helpful?

Physics - Huda’s Review of Radiological Physics, cover to cover. I went through it twice, once at the very beginning and then flipped through at the end. A few day review course is very helpful. We had Villafona come to give a several day course (teemed up with the other rads program in town to cut down the cost). Raphex exams are good but are more computational than some of what we saw on the exam. Contrary to the lore at our institution, recalls from old exams were very helpful as many concepts showed up year after year and some questions were actually verbatim.

Writtens - Recalls, recalls, recalls.... and the Wolf files. Frustratingly, to a great extent, this is a test of (somewhat random) minutiae and general reading to become a great radiologist is unlikely to emphasize the particular factoids on the test. There are many recalls available online (e.g. radquiz). I found even more by putting phrases from recalled questions into google. Unfortunately, to be really helpful, questions have to be recalled correctly AND answers have to be correct. Our institution has recalls with reliable, well-researched answers but our questions aren’t always well-recalled. So I ended up using recalls from 3 institutions. I’d have each as a pdf or word file open at the same time and would search back and forth to find related questions. Helps a lot to see several recalled versions and to skim through a few different answers to be sure info is correct. I looked through the last several years. My experience was that ~1/3 of questions were direct recalls, 1/3 were same concepts, and 1/3 were totally new. Wolf files: there is a few page list circulating around that has very brief, one-line summaries on hundreds of questions. Doesn’t make much sense until you’ve read the recalls, but once you’ve seen them, it’s an excellent refresher/cram list.

Oral boards -

Practice taking cases boards style early and often. Describe the finding. Then, they want to know what are the handful of things this is most likely to be, what’s the bad thing it could be that you have to make sure it isn’t, AND what’s the next step. Short and sweet, next case. This is a very different style of taking cases than what we do at conference usually (e.g., long differentials and esoteric diagnoses). Practice timing yourself. Work with someone and give each other feedback if you can. You want to get through as many cases as possible in 25 min with the examiner.

In terms of prep, most of us spread it out over 6 months. The Case Review series is very good; I did almost all of almost all of them. There is a group of Power Point presentations that were put together I think by the residents at the University of South Alabama that are outstanding. They used oral board recalls and pulled together hundreds of pictures and factoids (so you could see this is dozens of pictures of a single disease, various manifestations and degrees of severity, etc). The Nucs section was particularly valuable because it went through normal uptake for each of the tracers (you need to know this...).

Start learning classic differentials now. Also, it helps to have one place where you keep all of your differentials and notes. Several of my classmates used their PDAs; I tried it and found it too time-consuming. I used the paper version of the MGH Primer, which has lots of good differentials, drawings, and info already, and space to add your own notes and to correct its errors and omissions.