PG
Entrance Preps : Dr. KKV (
view bio )
Hello
all,
I have been receiving a lot of e-mails
from PG aspirants asking me to write an article about
preps for PG entrances. I will try my very best to
put down what I have been doing over the past year
or so with regard to the same.
First and foremost,
you have to be really strong in the mind
to be willing to take this course. It is going to
be hard to keep up the intensity through out the period
of preparations. You must also be willing to face
failures just in case you are not doing well in the
first attempt. This is not an attempt to scare you.
Instead, be prepared to face everything. Such mental
make-up has helped me to be more positive in an attempt
to chase my dreams.
You have to fix
the time-frame for preps. I guess most of
you are aiming for the coming AIPGE and the next set
of state entrances. That would give you about a year
to prepare. This should be adequate if you are planning
well and executing your plans.
Planning,
in the broad sense, means that you must pick
out your weaknesses (in terms of subjects
or topics) very early. What are these weaknesses?
For me, these were subjects which I did awfully during
my MBBS days or which I had a lot of trouble trying
to prepare. If you are not aware of your weaknesses
by now, you might very well spend some time trying
to find these. For a very few fortunate ones, this
passage might be boring because they are good at everything!
For me, if I had to pick four subjects where I was
weak, they would be #1 – SPM (or PSM as some
call it), #2 – Forensic Medicine, #3 –
Psychiatry, #4 – Microbiology/Pharmacology.
It was easy for me to pick out these
for the following reasons. SPM is the subject which
I flunked regularly. I was so surprised that I had
passed the University exam that I gave a treat to
my friends on passing it! Forensic Medicine is a subject
that I hated and Psychiatry was a subject which I
never bothered to read during my undergraduate days.
Microbiology/Pharmacology is in there because I am
very bad at memorizing things. Such subjects need
special attention from the less-gifted guys (like
me) because they hold the key to improving in all
subjects in the fray.
Preparing would
become a whole lot easier if you had a good
set of friends whom you can depend on. This
matters both for academics and for moral support.
That is why I would rate the concept of the “Study
Group” as the single most essential factor
for the preps. If you have a good study group, you
are going to get benefited tremendously. You might
be wondering what I mean by a good study group. Let’s
ponder over that for a minute.
A good study group
is one in which all the individuals complement
each other. It needs to be a bunch of guys
who want to prepare hard for the exams. It really
helps if each one in your study group is strong in
a particular subject. That rubs off on all the persons
in the group. A study group shoves off the dullness
in preps when you are at it all alone. You can share
your jokes and have fun. But at the same time, you
make sure you are not wasting too much of time. Another
advantage of having a study group is the fact that
the text books you have can be shared and can be used
as a reference pool for the whole group. Chances are
that a few in your study group would have studied
different text books that yourself. Some might even
have some of the classical reference text books. This
is really going to help you find the references to
those weird questions which might help you get an
edge over the rest.
To site examples, In my study group
we had persons strong in SPM, Forensic, Pharmacology,
Microbiology, Psychiatry, General Medicine etc. and
I will be the first person to tell you that these
persons helped me a hell lot in my preps. I was very
fortunate to get such a study group. Coming to the
reference text books, we had a guy who has back-referred
just about all the questions from our MCQ book (Salgunan).
That too, from all the top-rated reference books.
Just because he was around, the rest of us in the
study group didn’t have to waste time referring
the text books. About pooling books, just to give
you example. In anatomy alone we had 6 reference text
books at hand. Everyone had Chaurasia and IB Singh’s
Embryology. I had Keith L. Moore and the whole set
of Dutta including Embryology, Neuroanatomy and Osteology.
One had the whole Cunningham set. The other two persons
contributed Snell’s anatomy and NMS anatomy
books. And of course, we had Gray’s anatomy
online at Bartelbys.com for reference. This might
look really pompous. But tell you what, each of these
books helped us find references to just about all
the question from Salgunan. Not only that, they improved
our knowledge considerably in our effort.
Being in a study
group doesn’t mean that you don’t get
any time to do your reading alone. You have to split
up your study plans both in the group and alone. Being
in a group helps you find your weaknesses.
You can use your personal time to read up
these and also for regular reading. When you are with
your group later, you can feel the difference when
you go well prepared.
Okay, I assume
you have prepared your list of subjects and have an
eager study group to back you up. Now, set out to
prepare a time table. As I have mentioned
earlier, the time table has be split up into two;
one for your own reading and the other fro the group.
For preparing the time table, you have to first figure
out how much time you are going to spend on studies
daily. I suggest somewhere in between 12 and
14 hours a day as the ideal quota daily.
That would give you enough free time to have some
recreation and sleep.
Once you have
about 12 hours, I’d suggest everyone to split
up whatever time you have into sessions
of 2 – 4 hours each. I used 3 hour
sessions with about half an hour break between these.
That really helps to get you task oriented and gets
you closer to the goal instead of wandering away.
About sleeping, it is an individual’s discretion.
Everyone needs a particular amount of sleep
at a stretch or in short stretches to make themselves
comfortable. This is very essential and you should
not compromise here to increase your
study time. Try cutting it on your TV viewing etc.
If you have hobbies, finding enough
time for studies is a problem. To site an example,
I spend a lot of time at watching comedy on TV, on
the computer daily and enjoy playing my guitars and
listening to songs etc. Plus I need to sleep at least
7 hours a day to feel good. In such cases, I had to
shut out my TV viewing completely to find enough time.
There, I would save about 2 hours daily which I could
distribute evenly between my study time and recreation
time.
How do you allot
time for reading? I preferred working at a
couple of subjects at the same time so that
you don’t get bogged down. Each subject would
have different books to read. The best method that
I had come up with contained time slots for
reading/revision of all the various books
which had information about the subject. For eg. if
I were to study Pharmacology, these are books that
I would have to read. Tripathi, a bit of Harrison,
a bit of CMDT, SARP Pharmacology, the AIIMS and AIPGE
solved books *(Ashish Gupta & Mudit Khanna respectively),
Salgunan, Sure Success etc.
Back to making
the time table… You should give the
subjects time limits. An average subject
would take about 3 days to finish. The method that
I adopted was suggested by a couple of friends of
mine. Carrying on with the previous example, I would
start with Pharmacology part of Sure Success. That
would need two sessions (of 3 hours each). Next, I’d
do Salgunan Pharmacology (2 sessions) Then I would
try and solve the questions from AIIMS and AIPGE (1
½ sessions). After finishing both of these,
I would be very aware of the important topics that
are asked repeatedly (in exams) and my weaknesses.
Having found these I would spend the rest of my allotted
time improving myself by reading text books. For this
also, I would split up sessions for topics. For eg.
General Pharmacology (2 sessions), ANS (1 sessions),
Antimicrobials (2 sessions), CVS, CNS etc (1 session
each), Miscellaneous (2 sessions) and of course, new
drugs and charts in Harrison (2 session). Totaling
these up, it would be about 15 sessions. That would
be about 4 days on my schedule. If you had only 3
days in your schedule to finish pharmacology, cut
½ session each from a few topics.
Honestly, cutting
about half a session does no harm more often. If you
show urgency, chances are that you will finish
the same amount of topics, even if the session had
been longer. Another point should be highlighted
here. Imagine that you have allotted a week instead
of the 3 days for pharmacology. I’d say you
would end up getting about 70% of knowledge of for
the exams. Now imagine you are splitting the 7 days
into three sessions each one about 3 months separated.
The first one is at the time you are studying the
subject for the first time and its duration is 4 days.
The second one is for 2 ½ days for the first
revision about 4 months before the exam. And the third
one is the shortest; ½ a day for the final
revision.
You would get
about 60% of pharmacology in the first session itself.
In the next session you would add about 20% more and
reach about 80% totally. And, you wouldn’t believe
it; you would gain the next 20% in the last ½
a day session! See the difference? The same 7 days
allotted properly gave you the additional 30% info
that you need to qualify for the entrance. This is
what I want to convey from this example –
It’s very easy to misuse your time for the preps.
But if you use it properly, it’s so easy to
learn.
Our timetable
started off with about 12 months
in all, right? Split it up into a three blocks each.
First one for 6 months, the next for 4 months and
the last for 2 months. The first session would be
for the initial study. The next one for the first
revision and the last one for the pre-exam revision.
Figure out a time-table involving all the 20 subjects
and give stress to subjects that are important for
the exams. Of course, allow more time for the subjects
you are weak at.
Now, coming to
the study group part. I suggest you use your
study group to solve question banks like Salgunan,
or the RxPG Buster series of books. In the
first part, try to solve Salgunan
in stretches of about 300 questions per day.
Allot about 50 questions per persons per day.
This means that those questions need to be back-referred
by the person on the previous day. Those who are doing
this need to jot the page references and the important
points beside the questions itself. Each person ‘presents’
his allotted set of questions to the group. Everyone
can ask their queries and add to the discussion. I
would encourage everyone to start contributing more
to such discussions. This shouldn’t stop even
you utter blunders. Because the more blunders you
realize that you are committing, the less chance that
you will do the same at the exam. This way, Salgunan
would finish in about 2 months if you do that daily.
If you do it on alternate days (which is what we did),
it would finish in 4 months.
You can do RxPG Buster series of books
(of which, Medicine Buster is a must-do). In these,
you can assemble and bring your own text books. In
case of Medicine, you can bring your Harrison. You
can aim to solve about 150 questions per day. You
might be wondering why so less. That’s because
you will gain a lot by discussing the topics asked
in the questions between yourself. Take time to find
the actual references from Harrison. Instead of skipping
the important points related to the topics, take time
to ask questions based on these. This helps a lot,
believe me!
Group
study is also very effective in dealing with
extremely tough texts like Harrison.
To cover such texts, you need to allot a set of about
20 pages per person per week. He/She
needs to go through the pages and highlight all the
important points. One day each week, the study group
assembles and each person presents their topic. This
will work like a charm if everyone presents concisely.
At the end of the session, you would have covered
about 100 pages of Harrison! One more revision before
the exam, and you become a very wise PG aspirant!
These are the basic outlines to go
about your preps. Always try to stay within the limits
of the time table. That doesn’t mean that you
can’t make little changes here and there according
to your preferences.
During the course
of my preps, I decided to start collecting
all the important points, facts etc. on a notebook
which I kept with me always. I would add all the things
that I thought I would need reviewing. This helps
if you are choosy about what you enter into the books.
Don’t go astray trying to make up a trimmed
up version of a text book. Only the very essential
points concentrating on where you are confused need
to be entered.
I wrote up about
3 notebooks like this. I suggest entering the information
in a subject wise manner so that it is easy for you
to revise. This would come in very handy during
the last few days before the exam. You will
be very confident that you have reviewed the most
important points. Again, I would like to remind you
that these little notebooks help you eliminate
your grey areas totally. I have a strong
feeling that this is the clinching point when it comes
to tasting success.
Apart from reviewing, you can ask
your friends trivia from these books. And since you
will be referring back to these notebooks from time
to time, you will be very familiar with the arrangement
of the points. You might even be able to recall points
based on the arrangement on the notebook. I don’t
know if I can convey my point clearly here. I’ll
try another example here. There is a humongous chart
series in Harrison Part 2 in the region about Glomerulonephritis.
It is very hard to recall anything from this region.
I entered the information on one of my notebooks in
two pages. And needless to say, it couldn’t
have been more crucial. There were about 3 questions
from those 2 pages of my notebook. I knew it was important
and I was able to get 2 out of the 3 questions in
the AIPGE 2004. Now, you could argue that revising
Harrison would have given me the same advantage. But,
just because I had an idea about the way I had entered
the info in my notebook, I was able to recall properly.
And for me it helped! You can decide for yourself
if you want such help!
Apart from this,
I suggest aspirants to make such useful notebooks
based on anything they find difficult to study.
I made a couple of books more - One for learning named
Syndromes/Signs and the other one
for Chromosomes and Genes, HLA etc.
You could also prepare some flow charts for
sticking on the walls of your room. I have
got a few charts which really helped in preps. When
making such charts, always take note that you must
do your best to get the maximum information
in the least amount of space with good colors and
arrangement so that the picture stays in your mind.
When making such things, try to incorporate different
charts from different books into one single grand
chart. To give you an example, I made a chart based
on the Porphyrias – It included everything from
the whole sequence of reactions, their intracellular
locations, the different names of enzymes, the names
of diseases, the biochemical and clinical features
and their inheritance. I used a couple of charts from
Harper and another couple from Harrison.
I’d give
you a few tips on reading text books.
Like I’ve said before, keep a time-limit for
finishing portions or chapters from a text book. First,
go through the topics which have been asked before.
To know this, you would have to mark/highlight portions
that have been asked before. Whenever you back-refer
an MCQ, make sure you highlight the relevant portion
on the text books. If there are some additional
points, just note it on the side of the marked point
itself. If you have done your Salgunan properly,
you will already have a few highlighted portions in
the text books. This helps us getting oriented in
the topic. This means, we know what we would like
to learn when we read the text.
After getting
such an idea, go through the chapter. The more MCQs
you do, the better you become at picking important
points from the text. Whenever it occurs to you that
something is important, mark it. Just like before,
if you happen to know an additional point, note it
down. If you land up in a portion without charts,
go ahead and make a few on your own. If there is a
related topic, try to make a chart
with the comparisons and differences. Making such
charts obviously deepens your grasp on the topic.
I used to have my text books peppered with such little
notes and post-it papers.
If you happen to share a book with
someone else, ask your friend to mark the points when
he reads the topic. Surprisingly enough, there would
be a lot of points that you have missed out after
your friend reads the topic. This way, both get advantage.
Having done all
the reading, you might find it tough remembering what
you have learned. Mnemonics are very useful
in such cases. If you are skilled in making mnemonics,
making them and remembering them would become easy.
I would advise everyone to creatively think about
making these. We had a lot of mnemonics in our study
group and everyone would remember most of them. I
was never good at making these but still make
sure mnemonics are creative, funny and catchy.
A little bit of vulgarity often adds spice
to the mnemonic and it really helps in remembering
this. It would help if you write your mnemonics down
in another note book as well. I had one of these and
it was very easy to revise all of them just before
the exam.
You will be having
a lot of doubts and queries after
you finish reading. Never shy away from asking
those to your friends. The more doubts you
ask, the more you become good at the topics.
You will be wondering
what books to use for preps. Here’s
the whole list that I used. This might be a little
too much for you, but I’m of the kind who likes
having a lot of books around me.
1. Anatomy
a. Dutta (I would recommend this as the basic text
book)
b. Chaurasia (Easy for remembering the relations using
simple diagrams)
c. Keith L. Moore (Is extremely helpful in learning
hard topics like the sole, and Head & Neck.
d. Neuroanatomy (IB Singh > Dutta. Again, very
useful if you can read topics like Hypothalamus, Cerebellum,
blood supply to brain from both)
e. Embryology (IB Singh > Dutta. I found both useful
and Dutta has great General Embryology discussion.)
f. SARP – (useful for Osteology, Arthrology)
g. Osteology and Histology – only for Reference
2. Physiology
a. Ganong (Read through Ganong and do the question
on the back)
b. Guyton (Great reference book to have. CVS is excellent
and CNS/Muscle & Nerve topics might provide some
tough references)
3. Biochemistry
a. Harper (Read through the regular sections and try
to go through the last 200 pages. Those topics have
been regularly asked in the last 2 years of AIPGE
and AIIMS)
b. Vasudevan and Sreekumari (Very useful if you find
Biochemistry difficult)
c. Chaudhary (For those hard question references)
4. Pharmacology
a. Tripathi (Read through. Just about everything is
important. Try to add your own points from other texts
such as Harrison etc. into this)
b. Tumor SARP (Chemotherapeutic agents)
c. Harrison Charts (Adverse Reactions pages 431 onwards
in 15th Edition)
d. Pharmacology SARP is useful.
5. Pathology
a. Robbins (almost read through. Must read topics
are General Pathology, CVS, CNS, Kidney, Muscle and
Nerve)
b. Harrison (for the final word in pathology)
6. Microbiology
a. Ananthanarayanan (read through and give special
importance to Virology, Mycology)
b. SARP is extremely useful here.
c. Harrison (final reference, great charts on offer
in the last 100 pages in Infectious Disease topic)
7. Forensic
Medicine
a. Naryana Reddy (mainly for reference)
b. SARP (very useful, especially in Toxicology and
Identification)
8. Preventive
and Social Medicine
a. Park (Almost read through)
b. RxPG SPM Buster (is useful, but has a lot of mistakes)
9. Psychiatry
a. Neeraj Ahuja (read selectively with stress on Psychopharmacology
and substance abuse)
b. SARP series SARP (Essential)
c. Sure Success SARP (It’s even better than
the original!)
10. Anesthesia
a. Lee (A truly wonderful book. If you have the time
read it selectively. It will improve your knowledge
in many subjects.)
b. SARP Original
c. Sure Success SARP
11. Radiology
a. Sutton (only for reference)
b. SARP (essential)
c. Sure Success SARP (must-read)
12. Skin
a. Pavithran (very good book)
b. Harrison (Skin topics are very good)
c. SARP
d. Sure Success SARP
13. ENT
a. Dhingra (read selectively with importance to Larynx)
b. Sure Success ENT & Ophthalmology book is very
useful
14. Ophthalmology
a. Khurana (must read)
b. Parson (for reference)
c. Sure Success ENT & Ophthalmology
15. Orthopedics
a. Maheshwari (for reading)
b. Natarajan (for a bit of reference)
16. Surgery
a. Bailey and Love (very useful to read but has a
lot of contradictions within itself and with other
text books
b. Surgery SARP (very useful)
c. Manipal Manual of Surgery
d. Das (both Clinical and Short Cases)
17. Medicine
a. Harrison (ultimate Bible)
b. CMDT (very useful and concise. Essential for the
latest protocols in most subjects)
18. Pediatrics
a. OP Ghai (for selective reading. Don’t ever
miss out on Metabolic diseases)
b. Nelson (for reference)
c. Pediatrics SARP (very informative)
19. Obstetrics
a. Dutta (another great book. Selective reading)
b. O&G Buster (is okay)
20. Gynecology
a. Shaw’s (Great book, selective reading with
emphasis on Tumors)
b. O&G Buster (is okay)
Other
books which are extremely useful
• Mudit Khanna (AIPGE)
• Ashish Gupta (AIIMS)
• Sure Success for Medical PG Entrance 2nd edition
• Tumor SARP
• Stedmann’s Medical Dictionary (*most
of the toughest references come from this)
• Pre PG Medicine Handbook by Raj & Sulfi
• RxPG Biostatistics
• A good statistics book
I would like to clarify that I am of the opinion that
most of these solved question papers from previous
years have some mistakes in them. Some of
the explanations are very absurd sounding. I have
always backed myself and our reference books when
it comes to such questions. I really think that if
you have a sound reference against the answer given
in the guide, you might be the one who is actually
correct. So back yourself until you find something
to really back up the guide.
Lately, internet
has become one of the important reference media
available for our PG Entrance employees. I’m
the kind who likes looking up everything online. Having
done a lot of such ‘research’, I’ve
found that the content on most of the sites
is not very reliable. If you happen to find
a reference for some question on a website, make sure
you see the same thing in a couple of other websites
also. If you can’t find that, always keep the
query unsolved. Some days later, you might find a
better reference somewhere.
Finally, I ask
every one of you to remain positive through
out. Whatever you feel like during your preps,
always think positive. Never let failures falter you
in your quest for your PG. Never give up finding reference
to any question until you have found it. Put in the
effort and the results will show. If I can
pull it off, I’m sure most of you can!
Having read through the article, what
do you feel? I hope this has been helpful. I’m
looking forward to hearing from you about your thoughts.
Cheers
KKV
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