Blueprint Med School Blog (formerly Cram Fighter & Med School Tutors)
The blog for Blueprint Medical, supporting your MedEd journey with our exam study planner, tutoring, residency consulting, and advanced boards.

3 Tips to Help You Study For Your Internal Medicine Shelf Exam
As a med student, shelf exams serve as important milestones for you to measure your learning progress and identify areas where you need improvement before Step 2. Shelf exams are often seen as a dry-run for the USMLEs and provide you with valuable experience in taking standardized exams. By evaluating your understanding of the material,
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How to Ace the Surgery Shelf Exam
The general surgery clerkship is known for being one of the most challenging rotations for third-year medical students. You spend long hours in the wards and operating room, navigate a hectic schedule with frequent calls, and find yourself left with little time to study in between. After weeks of this busy schedule on different surgery
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Best Shelf Exam Study Resources: A Comparison & Breakdown
Balancing your clinical responsibilities with studying for shelf exams can be daunting. What’s more, there are so many resources it can be equally intimidating to figure out how to study. However, your shelf exams are crucial for setting yourself up for success on Step 2 (especially important now that Step 1 is pass/fail), so it’s
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What’s the Best Med School Study Planner?
Matriculating into medical school is an exceptional feat, and all who manage it should feel an enormous sense of pride and accomplishment. Once you enter those hallowed halls of preclinical lectures, small group sessions, physical exam essentials, and patient interactions, many students wonder one thing: “How do I succeed on Step 1 and Step 2?”
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How to Study For Shelf Exams: A Tutor’s Guide
As you progress through medical school and the structure of your educational curriculum evolves, how you learn will also change. The most dramatic transition happens when you start your clinical rotations. In the process, you move from classroom-based or online learning with content developed by your medical school (e.g., lectures, online modules, and labs) to
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Day in the Life of a Medical Student: Clinicals
Congratulations on making it to clinicals! It’s been a challenging road thus far. You’ve endured hours of lectures, anatomy labs, and the colossal hurdle of Step 1. Now, you have the opportunity to take everything you’ve learned over the past two years and apply it to “the real world,” so to speak. I remember the
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Your MS3 Survival Guide: How to Ace Your Shelf Exams
Here’s how one successful med student created a study schedule to prepare for his Shelf exams. Note: In March 2020, we published another medical student’s recommendations for building shelf exam study schedules and succeeding in your third year of med school. Read the interview here. Third year is a long road of challenges, including Shelf exams,
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Cram Fighter Partners with BoardVitals to Provide Shelf Exam Resources
Learn how Cram Fighter and BoardVitals are teaming up to bring medical students early access to some new resources as they prepare for Shelf exams. We’re excited to announce our new collaboration with BoardVitals, a leader in online medical and healthcare specialty exams and continuing education. Through our collaboration, BoardVitals will provide benefits to Cram
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