The blog is on my personal experiences during my USMLE journey. Please remember to help others when they reach out to you, since you might be the only one to do so!
My email is neilnf@gmail.com should you have any queries or suggestions.
I am writing this post to help my residents/researchers in writing their papers for publication. When I started out, I did not have the best tools to succeed, but thanks to my colleagues, mentors, and a LOT of people, I learned a lot and now I have a small number of publications.
To help everyone, I am going to break this post down into steps.
1. Create an account and install Mendeley- It is a free citation software that you can download here
2. Once installed log into your account. You can drag and drop the paper to your account and the beauty of Mendeley is that it GENERALLY auto-recognizes the paper and adds the name title to it. For example the pdf file on your desktop maybe this
But Mendeley will rename it to this
which is extremely helpful to realize what the paper is on rather than trying to rename every pdf file/article that you download off the internet.
3. In Mendeley, go to Tools and install Mendeley Cite for Microsoft Word.
4. Start writing your paper in MS Word and once you want to cite something go to References, where you should see something called Mendeley Cite-> Click on it (it will ask you to log in again)-> Click the papers you want to cite and then click 'Insert citation'
It should look something like this
5. Now you can keep it as noted above or you can change the citation style to something different like the AMA 11th edition, which is a numbers reference technique by doing the following steps
6. In the end, insert your bibliography by doing the following
7. Voila-> You have just learned the art of writing a manuscript and citing articles.
Please note, that people also use EndNote, Zotero, and many other citation software. Some of them are paid and I am NOT very well-versed in them, hence I will not try explaining them either. Hopefully, this small tutorial will be helpful to the multitude of researchers and residents out there :)
There is unfortunately no real study guide for the pediatric critical care boards and hence I decided to create this blog post.
The content outline for the Pediatric critical care exam can be found here and/or here. I am sure they will update it with time passing each year. The exam itself is 200 questions long divided into 2 sections of 2h 15m each with a 30 min break in between. Approximately 4.5 hours long in total. Details can be found here.
This is another image that the ABP will send you closer to the exam date
Stuff that I used
1. PediaLink/Prep ICU: Prep ICU has approximately 72 questions per year, each focusing on different topics/concepts. It is NOT as streamlined as the pediatric boards questions which is a bit frustrating since you cannot focus on different topics/concepts. In addition, my program director used to send the fellows a question a week with her weekly update email, which was really useful. I created a OneNote book and just started filing them into their respective section. For more details please watch this video which I created for the pediatric boards.
2. Pediatric Critical Care: Text and Study Guide [Lucking et al]: I personally loved the 1st edition as it was succinct and to the point. If you have access to it, then I would use it alone and NOT buy the 2nd edition. I bought the 2nd edition but I think it was too much like a textbook and I ended up NOT using it. I used it for concepts for a little bit but overall I personally liked the 1st edition way more.
3. Old prep questions: Like I mentioned in point 1, there are VERY few questions each year in PrepICU and hence if you get access to old question banks I would use them to study/revise. Please note that since guidelines change, the older the prep questions the more incorrect they can be. For example, the surviving sepsis guidelines have changed a lot since the 2013-2014 set of questions.
4. I bought the Multiprofessional critical care review course which can be found here. In hindsight, I am not sure if this was a great use of my CME money. The teaching videos that you get from the course are amazing and I think I would definitely do the online video section alone if possible since you get education from the leaders in the field. However, the in-person course was a bit lacking, and in their defense, as this was the first time a new hybrid method was being trialed and I think they will get better with time.
5. I also used the multiple-choice questions that SCCM has which can be found here. The questions themself were not hard. They are more factual and you either know the answer or you don't. It really helped me in solidifying my concepts a bit more, to be frank. The question bank gives you approximately 240 questions. Again, I am not sure if this helped me but I would rather just pass the boards in one attempt than have to do it all over again and hence I did it.
Once I kind of went through the resources mentioned above once and then I did it a couple more times till I remembered the reasoning and rationale for almost all the questions.
My personal journey/timeline
Thanks to my colleagues I had approximately 1 week of time off prior to the boards. My studying was not as pristine as I would have liked it to be but overall when you practice PICU you kind of are learning at the same time. Also, the one thing that really is nice about the ABP boards is that they ask you clinically relevant questions and things that you will encounter in your day-to-day practice which is way better than the obscure genetic questions that you would see in the pediatric boards.
I bought my car (Subaru Forester LTD) in 2021, during the so-called car shortage which happened due to the micro-chip shortage during the pandemic. Since this was my first car, I was not really sure what I should be doing. During my research, I came across youtube videos by the 'Your auto advocate' group https://www.youtube.com/@YourAdvocateAllianceYAA and started following them and learning more about car buying terminology through their free deal school course at https://community.joinyaa.com/c/deal-school/. It teaches you about car financing and quick terminologies to make you a smarter car buyer.
After going through the deal school and learning the terminology/tricks of the trade, I created a pseudo-email account and started sending emails to different car dealers in the area, since I did not want to be spammed by the dealers with their 'last-minute' deals. I used the email templates that the team at @yaa so painstakingly have written, which can be found here [https://joinyaa.com/guides/email-templates-to-buy-a-car-online/] I am sure they have updated the templates since the last time I used them, but I got a decent deal on my car so I have no qualms in recommending them. Please note: The dealer will ALWAYS try to get you to come to the showroom to give you a good deal, but please do not fall for that trap. If they cannot send you an email with their so-called 'good deal' then it is NOT worth driving to the dealership. If they want your business they will need to work with you for it.
Also, the yaa group had an add-on that looked up the car's VIN and could tell you have long the car sat on the dealer's lot. This just gives you some bargaining power when you are at the dealership.https://joinyaa.com/cars/#/
So coming to my journey. I started scrolling through the videos as noted above at the beginning of 2021 to just understand stuff. I started my search in earnest on June 20th, 2021, and finalized the car by June 22nd, 2021. I work in Wisconsin and I am comfortable driving around for a good deal, I contacted dealers in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.The dealers in Chicago gave me the best quote but the dealer in Iowa was amazing. Since in addition to the deal, he was ready to give me a FREE loaner vehicle till my car came in, and hence I decided to go with him.
The breakdown of my deal is approximately like this. $ MSRP -$2,566 Discount $MSRP-discount-> Sales Price plus state tax and fees
Thanks to my credit score I got 0% financing for 36 months and hence I am paying it over 3 years. I really could not have done/learned how to buy a car without the team at your-auto-advocate and a big thank you to Zach Shefska, Ray ShefskaKimberly Kline, and many others who directly/indirectly helped me in finalizing the deal.
The dealership that I worked with was C&S Subaru in Waterloo [www.candscarcompany.com] and the person I worked with was Mr. Scott Thurn. (319) 291-7321 Office; (319) 415-8051 Cell
Things that I liked about my dealer
The deal (got it below the MSRP)
Free loaner vehicle till the car came in
Just being very responsive and super helpful and no additional sale gimmick.
Even though he got the car I wanted from a nearby dealer he did not up the price because of that.
