Hello.
Long time no see my friends. I started writing this while in the middle of my second test for my MOD (mechanisms of disease) course. But then lost my drive to write so I’m picking it up during summer lol.
It’s been a wild ride. And I’m definitely looking forward to a much needed break this summer. But let’s see if I can find my groove again with blogging!
What Is Mechanisms of Disease?
This course is basically a preview of how the second year will be and recaps several themes that you’ve seen in your first year. The biggest thing that seems to recur so far is immunology. It is in a much more general sense than our immunology block was and for next year’s class, you guys won’t actually have a true immuno block. They will just piece it in wherever they feel you should learn some of it in your other systems courses. Honestly, I think that’ll make it harder on you guys but who knows, maybe your class will do better that way with it.
MOD and most of your second year will be based off the book “Robbins and Cotran Pathologic Basis of Disease” by Kumar, Abbas, and Aster. Don’t worry, it is in your online book of textbooks that the library has. I don’t remember if it has a link for you to freely get to it online, but this might be one that you actually want a paper copy of. You will be reading a lot out of it.
IT IS MASSIVE.
It’s a great arm workout though. Just make sure you occasionally switch arms that you are holding it in so you don’t get that weird one sided bulk over the other one.
But all in all, this class is supposed to tie in more “doctor” type stuff in how they approach things. So it is a blend of literally all the different courses you’ve had like other blocks. Previously, each lecture would be labeled “histo” or “physiology” or whatever. In MOD, it’s all just thrown in there.
HOw Does this course run?
At the end of the day, they test you based off of the information in the Robbins book. They did try to restructure the course a bit so that more students came to class and they presented more high yield information to help narrow it down. Some professors did a really great job at this. Some professors still struggle with changing this.
You need to decide which professors' lectures you feel it is worth to go to or watch their lectures, and which ones you feel the book helps you out more. I will give you which ones I feel did a good job for my personal learning style, and which professors I felt I needed the book for a little later on. Again, you need to make the decision on what works for you. Who knows, maybe they will switch it up again for next year.
Most of your lectures for this course will be 2 hours a lecture topic. Some large chapters have been broken up into two 2 hour lectures just because they are massive. And let me tell you, those days are definitely rough to get through.
So you will have a lecture(s) in the morning and usually the rest of the afternoon to study; provided you don’t have any other courses or scheduling things left. At the beginning of MOD, we were finishing up OS and PCM so our schedules were a little bit more packed. After those classes ended, all we had was MOD which was nice.
Majority of your learning will again be either the lectures that are given or book reading. But honestly, most of it was book reading.
You will then usually have CIS lectures. This is mostly question-based and given by the professors. It is a second chance for you to see the material. They do have some important high yield slides or things they highlight. IN GENERAL, you should not technically be seeing any new material. It should be review from the lecture already given. Although honestly, I usually go and notice that I didn’t grasp a chunk of the material presented the first time. So it is great to see what they focus on.
For each lecture given, it should have either it’s own CIS or one lumped in with another lecture. Sometimes they have 2 CIS’s for one lecture. It just depends. I highly recommend going to the first one for each professor. If you find it helpful, continue to go. If you don’t, don’t worry about it. It is free questions and some professors structure it in a case type of way where it progresses through a case but hits multiple key lecture points. It can really help tie concepts together. As you progress through MOD and you find that some professor’s CISes don’t jive with you, then don’t go. I would show up for the first 30 minutes and decide if it was worth it or not.
Others won’t tie it in as nicely, but they are still questions for you to see which topics they seem to like. And don’t be upset if you don’t get a chunk of them right. I usually get most of them wrong. Not to mention they sometimes pick topics that aren’t the big overall picture or that you may not be tested on because well, they can. But it definitely helps me focus or tailor my studying more!
What do i need for this class?
- I recommend obviously getting Robbins. Because this is what they test you out of…
You could also get “baby Robbins” which is just a high yield, smaller book of the material. It is better for review and seeing the topics in a more condensed way. I don’t recommend getting this as your sole Robbins reading though. You will miss several details with this.
There is apparently a “medium-sized Robbins” too. Dr. Martin on Joplin’s campus can help you find it because it specifically is a bit harder to find. She also has a copy of it if you decide you want to test it out. She recommends this book if Robbins is too much for you but and you want to cut some of the detail out, without missing the more major details. I didn’t take advantage of this, but maybe it’ll help you.
- Get a book stand. No seriously. Get one. You are about to do so. much. reading. This is the one I got Reodoeer Bamboo Reading Rest and it is big and sturdy enough to hold big Robbins and lightweight enough to put in my backpack.
- Your normal ipad/computer/note-taking system.
- Oh, and get your book unbound. You’ll thank me later (unless you like carrying the heavy thing everywhere with you).
Really that’s it. You don’t need a ton of things for this course. It is just time consuming given the reading and needing to do multiple passes because of the shear amount of volume.
I used Eagle Eye Printing off of 32nd street. A lot of students complained that other places that do re-binding of textbooks would refused to take the cover off for you. So you would need to remove the cover before going. This place will remove the cover, save it for you if you ask, and rebind/break up your book for pretty cheap. AND apparently: if you have a group they will discount it!
Resources:
- Robbins. Read. Take notes. Do group study sessions to cover the materials if you learn better that way.
- Pre-made Anki decks. There are some decks from previous years available.
- Zanki decks. I mentioned this under “How I took notes (3rd exam)”. Particularly helpful from that set will be the one associated with Sketchy if you use Sketchy.
- Gasper’s notes. Ask a second year or your big. There are basically outlines of the Robbins book available that either a fellow or a previous student did. If you would prefer to look at the outlines instead of read, this could be a better study tool for you. I didn’t find it as helpful because it wasn’t super organized within each chapter.
- Sketchy for micro if you are more of a visual learner. To each their own. Our class grouped together to get a discount. See if someone in your class is willing to start this up or if a second year/fellow can help ya’ll out with this. But it is much cheaper to get a group discount if you plan on using this at all. ( I was too overwhelmed first year in MOD to use this well, BUT it was very helpful second year and for boards as well).
- Pathoma. If you use this, do not solely rely on this as your main source. This is technically a review book that can be helpful. Your main source is Robbins. Pathoma should be to assist you in clarifying what you have questions on. I have not put money towards this yet because I’m not sure if I want to use this or a different resource for boards later on.
- If you don’t like Pathoma, use SketchyPath. If you already have a Sketchy account for Micro (highly recommend), you should also have access to pharm and path. If you are a better visual learner, use the SketchyPath to help you with topics.
As always, with anything additional outside of class, try it first before buying it to see if it is helpful or not for you. No point in wasting your money just to jump on the bandwagon if it won’t help you!
How I took notes (1st and 2nd exam):
Like everything, I was all over the place. For the first exam I used the LO’s. Which is not everyone’s style and that’s okay. When you all first start MOD, absolutely all, and I mean all of you will be freaking out because it is a different type of learning. Which means you have to change your study style a bit. You will all be bothering the professors like we did and asking all the second years how they studied and asking each other what they hell everyone’s doing.
The problem with LO’s however is there are usually no less than 30 per lecture. Sometimes there was upwards of 70. So clearly, I couldn’t do all of them all the time. But for a handful of lectures I did LO’s in the beginning. But to be honest, this year each LO was a heading in the book. So you basically had to read the whole chapter anyways to fill out the LO’s.
For both the first and second exam I would also read and then underline or write in the margins of my book of high yield information. I would then go back and type it out. Yes, this was time consuming and probably not the best way to learn. However, I learn better by writing and re-exposure. And the awful part was, even though I would understand it while reading it, when I came back to it to type out the notes I had completely forgotten all of that information…
Before both those exams I would review either the LO’s or the notes that I had typed up. The longer the chapter or the more new information in the chapter, the more I had to review.
How I took notes (3rd exam):
Your 3rd exam is not really out of Robbins. Dr. Putthoff will have sections of the book that he points to in there. But mainly he will teach out of “Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple” by Gladwin, Trattler, and Mahan.
Ugh. This course. This used to be a longer course for the class above me. We got 2 weeks to learn this entire 400 page book which is actually a review book. So, I’m very salty about this.
He will test out of this book and honestly not much else. Some students noted that the information in CMMRS contradicted what was in Robbins. Some people used Sketchy. I did a mix but honestly was so checked out that I didn’t care.
I really only learned bacteria and viruses. I punted fungi, parasites, and antibiotics. I know. Crazy. But I ended up with a 68% on that exam which is only 1 point away from getting a “passing” score. Which means it was close enough with the curve that I wouldn’t have a problem.
There were questions that were straight out of CMMRS on the exam. Things like “what are the 3 strains that cause neonatal meningitis?” which wasn’t quite in that format but that’s what he was getting at. That was mentioned no less than 3 times in the book, but not necessarily mentioned in other micro resources. Same thing with “which bacterial strains cause otitis media?” There are several like that in the book which showed up on our exam.
As for Sketchy. I think Sketchy can be a really great tool in helping you try to remember what organisms are what. However, it would be more helpful if you didn’t have to do the entire micro course in 2 weeks and then get tested on it. It is a memory/picture device and on a handful of the videos I could recall almost the entire picture. On others I couldn’t. The problem is you will end up watching god knows how many videos and then trying to keep them separate is a nightmare. Hopefully they give you all more time. I had to watch each video more than once to try to absorb it.
If you do the Sketchy videos, you should also do the Pepper Anki cards from zanki. You can download them from Medschool + Anki’s website. There are other pre-made Anki cards as well here. The problem is, even though these are comprehensive, they are massive decks. But, the Pepper one follows the Sketchy videos only. I think the new version may have some information from First Aid in it as well.
EDITED NOTES:
So after completing 2 years, MOD is your first introduction to path right? Your entire second year will be pathology. Since drowning all second year, I have noticed some helpful hints that they like to test on:
- The charts they mention? Look at them. There will likely be a question or two on them.
- REVIEW THE MORPHOLOGY BOXES. Putthoff and Dobson will pull questions out of the text itself, but you need to know these. They are the ‘high yield’ points for the diseases. Bolded = know.
- If you go to KCU and use Alex’s Anki cards; they are pretty spot on. They were fairly good for 2nd year as well seeing as they were made specifically for KCU classes. You may have to rearrange them though given their exam content was split differently in 2018 than in my year or your year.
- If you like Zanki, this is in depth as well (it goes off of First Aid) but it is not specific to your KCU course/class. It is good content to know in general for boards, but not always applicable/nit-picky enough for your class exam. Pick ONE flash card deck to do; either Alex’s or Zanki. Don’t do both.
- And just like with anything else in medical school= you need to review it MULTIPLE TIMES. Path is not something that you can just learn in one go. Read the morphology boxes, use Pathoma, use sketchy path if you need to, use the Anki cards/any flash cards. Path isn’t a subject that you can talk through like physiology; you need to just know the facts cold.
PRofessors:
Dr. Singh: I really liked her teaching style. For the most part you didn’t need to read and she would point you to the exact pages that she thought the book explained better in her slides. In general, you could learn just from her slides and be fine.
Dr. Martin: She got stuck with some not great chapters, honestly. But, when she has the time she will teach well. In general, she will usually mark high yield concept slides. You don’t necessarily have to read the book from her slides because she adds everything, but she does use shorthand and doesn’t always have a key for her shorthand. If you can get her notes version of the slides, it will have what she talks about in lecture that isn’t on the slide and usually her shorthand notes. Some of my classmates didn’t feel they needed to read the textbook for her lectures given she usually puts most of the information on there. If you have trouble with her shorthand or with a few missing words, you will need the textbook.
Dr. Dobson: I didn’t really like his teaching style at first. It could have just been that he was the first professor who taught in this course and I was trying to get used to the different learning style and not actually him. But, I ended up liking him a bit later on. He tends to use a lot of pictures in his slides and not necessarily super easy to learn off of all the time. He started having us follow along in the book with his lectures to see where he was hitting so you could go back and re-look at those sections if you needed clarification. That was much easier for me. Helpful hint: Use Alex’s cards or look at Gasper’s notes. They have tidbits in there to help you focus on where he likes to test. He can also take test exam questions from description boxes of pictures. It will be difficult to try to memorize everything possible, so use a guide to help tailor some places in your studying. But who knows, maybe you’ll understand it better than I did!
Dr. Puttoff: Ah. I think I disliked his teaching style the most. I try my hardest on this blog to give helpful, honest, and useful advice without bashing people. But I do have to say, I really really disliked the way he taught. I personally did not learn a thing from his lectures. I didn’t find his slides helpful. He states not to read the book, but you do have to read to get any information. Don’t worry, I stated all of this on my course evaluation in hopes that maybe he would at least put more information on his lecture slides for our second year. His notes are a hot mess and he just expects you to know all the information, but on the plus side, his test questions air on the easier side compared to Dr. Dobson’s or Dr. Martin’s. Know the stupid genetics crap. He likes cancer genes and cancer questions in general.
And I think that is all I can remember from MOD. Like I said, I was pretty checked out for this course. I scraped by and passed and that was really all I cared to do. Hopefully you all will have more motivation than I did and finish your year strong!
Cheers!
