ABSITE Studying after Fellowship Acceptance

[ShySpliceosome]

For those of you who were accepted to a surgery subspecialty fellowship prior to taking your PGY5 ABSITE, how much studying (if any) did you do for it?

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[SociableJimmy]

Assuming you’re going to be taking your written and oral boards, I’d still put a reasonable amount of effort into preparing. The written exam is very much like ABSITE and lays the foundation for orals. Obviously you don’t need to gun for 99th %ile unless it’s a point of pride, but I’ve also seen graduates fail their boards after blowing off ABSITE (likely among other things as well).

 

[Lem0nz]

Probably same amount as PGY4 but with much less stress. As you go through it start thinking through the questions out loud (and maybe do a lot less questions as a trade off) to translate that to oral boards. Clearly you can axe the immunosuppression and transplant garbage but the actual questions on cases that are surgical (with heavy emphasis on vascular and oncology) you can use the questions as mini oral board prompts and think/talk through those things so that you start to develop some generic canned responses for lots of different oral board situations.

Also like SJ said above if you are scoring above 50th % still on ABSITE your chances of passing written boards are silly high and instead of killing an entire month doing even MORE Truelearn questions (or whatever) in June you can focus on moving more and enjoying your new place in life. You'll still need to study but the stress of that studying is so much less.

 

[hardworkDream]

The hardest I studied for absite was pgy 3 and 4. PGY5, I studied but took it much easier because i felt confident i would do good enough. I think most take it easy. I took my GS boards recently and passed. I will say it was helpful. I did forget alot of things but it came back much quicker when studying for the oral boards. I barely studied for the written (like 1 week) and passed. It was honestly near-identical to absite in my opinion and studying for it pgy5 helped because its not long after u take the QE. Some of my co fellows thought it was harder but they still passed too even though they felt they didn't study as much as they wanted.