FAQs

Is your main issue that you know the content, but are bad at taking standardized boards-style tests? The STATMed Boards Workshop is what you’re looking for. You might be someone who says things like “Every time I go to score my practice questions, half of my misses are ones I should have gotten right,” or “I’m the one who teaches the concept to my study group, but then they get better scores than I do.”

Is your main issue that there is too much information to learn too quickly, and you don’t know how to effectively and efficiently make it stick in long-term memory? If so, you are looking for The STATMed Class. You might be the person who says, “My old study methods worked fine before, but there’s just too much material and it’s all so dense that I don’t know what to do with it,” or “There just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to study enough to be successful.”

Maybe you’re still not sure which of these better describes you—all you know is that you’re not getting the results you want. That’s ok—just give us a call and we’ll help figure it out!

When you sign up for one of our platforms, you are buying our time, expertise, course content, and personalized insight into your specific needs. We can guarantee that we will provide you with expert instruction in specific, actionable tools that hundreds of students and medical professionals have used to improve their academic and board performances.

But we can never guarantee test scores or other specific academic outcomes because each person is different, each with their own constellation of strengths and weaknesses. Med school and boards are hard. Our goal is to provide our students with tools that give them the best chance to succeed. And we have built these tools to the best of our ability. But we can never guarantee success. That falls onto the shoulders of our students.

Our med students and physicians come to us because they want to benefit from our expertise, which is based on these three foundations:

Knowing the design and demand of med school curricula and board exams
Identifying the pitfalls where smart, motivated med students and physicians stumble
Teaching our strategies to unlock our clients’ abilities so that they can excel in the classroom or on boards

No one comes to us to learn facts about biochem or the differences between hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism. If you need help understanding a concept, you should go see a tutor.

People come to us because they’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information they need to know, or they need better tools for long-term encoding and retrieving information, or their test-taking is letting them down. Our methods will then allow them to master biochem—or ANY content in ANY format, or help them show what they know about hyperthyroidism on board exams.

We have each spent more than twenty years racking up our “10,000 hours” of professional development teaching complex skills to smart people. When you come to us for help, we’ve probably seen your issues before, have systems already built to accelerate your skill acquisition, and we know exactly how to help you bring strategies on board that match your own wiring and the demands of your curriculum or board exam. Your success is always our goal since we are only as successful as our students.

The STATMed Class is a nine-day online class scheduled periodically throughout the year (although we’ve been known to add sessions if the demand is high enough, so don’t hesitate to ask!). Click here for upcoming classes.

The STATMed Boards Workshop is scheduled around your calendar. When you contact us, we’ll ask about your availability and get you started as soon as possible. Sometimes this is within days, but other times it may be a week or two out. Because our clients are busy people, we do our best to accommodate your intense schedules and will sometimes meet on weekends and evenings if need be.

Tutors typically specialize in explaining and teaching concepts you need help with. They help identify and teach you WHAT you need to know; on the other hand, we teach you HOW to study and more effectively take tests. We are not content experts; rather, we are experts in helping medical professionals learn more efficiently and effectively. Our toolset applies to almost any form of medical education content, and we know how to help bad test-takers become good test-takers by addressing the way they read, process, and interface with boards-style questions.

If working with your schools’ specialist works for you, then that is great; you should definitely use that first. We do not see ourselves as being in competition with on-site learning specialists; rather, we are a resource for students (and specialists) who feel like more help is needed than can be provided by on-site services.

Here is a simple analogy: If the on-site learning resource specialist is like a pediatrician, who is great at handling most issues kids experience, then we are like the neuromuscular or cardiology specialist, who only a small percentage of kids need to see, but when warranted, these specialists make all of the difference in the world.

On-site specialists are often dealing with the following factors: high caseloads, limited time, and students who are currently enrolled in classes. On the other hand, we deal with a small number of clients at a time, we dedicate a lot of time to each student, and we work with them when they are NOT enrolled (on breaks of some sort). So, the canoe analogy works here: Whereas the on-site specialist is trying to plug small holes in the canoe as it goes down the river, we take the canoe out of the river, take it apart, and rebuild it before going back in the water. Both roles are critical when canoeing down a river; it just depends on the needs of the given canoe!

We like to hear your story, answer any questions you might have, and make sure you and STATMed are a good fit. We are not a factory where we march students through a blind assembly line. Those educational models have their value, but that is not how we are built. Both of our STATMed platforms are very personal, very intense experiences, and we want to make sure we’re all on the same page. Interviews only take five to fifteen minutes, so, while they are not the most efficient gateway to usher in new clients, it is worth it to use because our main goal at this phase is making sure we are all starting out on the same page.

Yes, you can! We love giving support and feedback. Every single module and tool we have built at STATMed has come from feedback and troubleshooting and helping former students. We are building STATMed to be the best service in the world to help med students and physicians become better at studying, managing their time, and showing what they know on tests…and that means constantly getting feedback on what is working, what is not working, and how the landscape of med school and boards is evolving. We will always give an hour of pro bono feedback and support and, if we have the time, we will give more. If needed, students can purchase extra hours of support, but this is very rarely needed due to the quality of the way the Workshop and Class are designed.

STATMed Learning was designed to teach med students, physicians, and those in related fields better ways to study and take boards-style exams. Our students come to us because they are tired of ineffective advice, outdated study tips, or an inability to unlock their abilities on their own. STATMed Learning was designed for the following:

MED STUDENTS: Entering, rising, or repeating in the classroom, prepping for boards, or in clinical rotations

PHYSICIANS: Ranging from residents and in-services to initial certifications to con-cert exams

RELATED MEDICAL & HEALTH FIELDS: Veterinarians, Pharm Ds, PAs, etc.

Our platforms are intended for students and physicians to use pro-actively or after they have begun to struggle.

STAT speaks to the idea of providing important help to someone immediately, so I knew I wanted that as part of the name when I was creating the company back in 2012. I also liked how it could be an acronym for the three main aspects we would use to help our med students and physicians:

S: Study
T: Timing
A: and
T: Testing

Then I wanted “med” in the title to communicate the scope of who we help, which is anyone in the medical field, ranging from med students to physicians to those in related fields where both the instructional design (dense amounts of medical information required to be learned in tremendous volume under limited time) and testing design (standardized, single-choice multiple choice clinical vignettes).

And finally, “LEARNING” conveys the arena we occupy, where we focus on teaching HOW to learn medicine under the ridiculous demands of medical education and medical board exams.

Old study methods are no longer effective: Could include issues with an over-reliance on low-yield methods (re-reading, re-copying, passive review, etc.), flawed goals (studying for familiarity), spending too much time organizing, constantly changing methods with no feedback on what works and doesn’t, etc.
They have no idea how to study in medical school or for boards: No one teaches smart students how to study, so this happens frequently.
Issues with reading, retention, attention, or time management: Weaknesses were never exposed before due to relative load they were tasked with learning; these weaknesses are only relevant once the speed, volume, and density capsize their inherent abilities.
They simply cannot manage the speed + volume + density equation: Nothing can prepare you for the load of med school, and we might not know who will be overwhelmed until they are in it.
They struggle with boards-style multiple-choice exams: Bad test-taking is a very real thing, and the design of medical boards-style questions are a unique construct that can require unique strategies for certain people. These patterns are predictable and, therefore, fixable.
CRAMMING or OVERCOMPENSATING no longer works: Cramming ceases to be viable due to volume, and overcompensating by spending more time than your peers ceases to be an option since there is no extra time.
Issues with ADHD exposed: One easy pattern to pigeonhole is ADHD, which is really about issues with working memory and certain conceptual organizational issues under the broad “executive functioning” umbrella. If someone tells me they have ADHD and are struggling with classroom lectures or with showing what they know on boards, I am confident that 90% of the time I can tell them how this is manifesting and how to fix it.
Issues with re-studying for boards: Some people come to us because they unfortunately have to re-take boards, which is a similar yet different kind of problem. Some of these folks are just bad test-takes, but some need to fix their knowledge, and the challenge here is they don’t know what they know and don’t know; they don’t know what they concretely know versus what they are familiar with; and they do not know how to find and fix the holes in their knowledge. Test-taking issue can be fixed in the WORKSHOP, and learning methods to fix the learning-based issues can be addressed by the CLASS.