After graduation I will be leaving the country for an extended period of time. Although it will be nice to have a vacation, I recognize that this will likely make it harder for me to settle down and get back to studying once I get back. I am aware that in the past people who have done this have seen their grades suffer. Given this information, I plan on taking as much time as necessary to study before taking the exam. I will only schedule my PANCE once I get back and see how long it takes for me to get back into the swing of things.

I intend to treat my study time as a full-time job. For several weeks I hope to dedicate the majority of each day for studying. I plan to purchase Kaplan in addition to utilizing PANCE prep pearls and Rosh review. I will set aside 1-2 weeks for each topic/body system. When approaching any specific topic, I plan to read that section in PPP, then do practice questions. I will then go back to study the topics of the questions I got wrong. Throughout PA school I noticed that I learn best by writing. Because of this, I plan to have a notebook that has several sections, with each section meant for a different topic/body system (cardiology, pulmonology…). When I get a question wrong, I plan to go back and write notes on the information I missed. This way, once I am done studying a topic, I will have a collection of all the conditions under that topic that I found challenging.

In addition to studying each topic separately, each Sunday I plan on doing a practice exam. I will treat these practice exams as if they were the PANCE so that my scores accurately represent how far along my studying has come. Once I have spent a couple of weeks going through all of the topics, I will take a few days before my PANCE just to do practice questions.

I am well aware that as I start studying there are things in my plan I will likely have to change. Regardless, I hope to stick to some form of a structured plan to ensure that I get the most of my time and give myself the best chance of passing.

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