The CK

For Step 1, the fear of the test was born out of the fact that although it seemed like an infinite amount of information, it was learnable. If you memorized one more fact, you could hopefully get one more question correct. Therefore the amount and hours of studying was directly related to your score.

Step 2 CK, however, was a whole new beast. It was a test on management and treatment of patients. These topics are why it is called the "art of medicine." You can't memorize the answers to these scenarios. You have to pull from your entire wealth of knowledge, and combining it with a mix of intuition and discretion. This made studying painful. You can't learn clinical decision making in a book. That random fact about gangrene doesn't put you any closer to getting an answer right.

But, despite all this. It's over. I took it. It was the longest, most demeaning test of my life. I have never left an exam feeling less confident. Guess I better get used to it; that's probably how I'll feel my entire intern year.