Pediatric Shelf Exam

To prepare for the shelf, I did all the Qbank questions, read all of Case Files, and answered all the questions in Pretest. I also looked through notes and handouts that I'd received during my time in Corpus. I'd be lying if I said I studied my butt off for this shelf (ask any of the girls who were in Corpus with me; they can tell you how little I opened the books until the last week or two), but in a way, I wasn't too worried. We'd just taken the boards two months ago; a lot of the diseases covered in the peds shelf are also covered in First Aid or the Kaplan pathology book (Kawasaki dz, HSP, intusseptions, etc.) Additional material that was not covered in board study included immunization schedules, developmental milestones, and some other kid-focused topics, but you get to learn those pretty well after a week or two of doing well-child exams.

The only people taking their shelfs today were Group C classmates, so there were about thirty-something of us in Everett today. It was good seeing other familiar faces again for sure. I listened to a few people talk about their obgyn experiences at JPS, and while they said that the schedule was busy, it was also a lot of fun. We'll see how I feel about it in a week or two.

All the shelf exams have 100 questions and we get 2 hrs 10 min to do them. My biggest enemy on the shelf: not enough time. Some question stems were long and I'd have to read and reread them multiple times before I could figure out what they were asking. After I went through all the questions once, I think I had about 10-15 minutes left to go over the ones I'd skipped. By the time I'd filled in all the bubbles, I was too tired (and hungry) to double-check and turned my exam in with about 7 minutes to spare. Overall I'd say the peds shelf was pretty do-able. I don't know how many I missed, but I'm fairly sure I didn't fail. At least...I hope not.