6th year

Page created on January 17, 2023. Last updated on February 1, 2023 at 17:26

6th year is a very tiring year for many, me included. If you take all/most of your practices at POTE you’ll be bored a lot of the time, have a lot of free time, and not learn much in your practices. If you take practices abroad, you’ll have much less free time, but you’ll likely learn more. In either case, you also have your thesis to finish.

Due to its nature, 6th year must necessarily be differently organised for each student, making it difficult for me to come up with specific recommendations. I’d be done with the biggest and worst exams early, so one doesn’t have to worry about them later. I think you should put aside most time to study surgery and paediatrics, as those are the subjects with the most topics and which are the most unfamilliar to most students.

Also, mine was the last year not to have blood transfusion in 6th year, so I don’t know anything about that.

As always, no matter how much you study, be prepared that you probably will be asked something you’ve never studied, although that’s not a deal-breaker. Also, for many of these exams, keep in mind that just because it feels like you don’t know anything/enough, it doesn’t mean that it’s true. You might’ve caught on to this by now, having studied 5+ years at POTE, but please keep it in mind.

Internal medicine

Internal medicine should be the biggest exam of 6th year, but in practice it isn’t. The exam varies wildly depending on whether you have it in the 1st or 2nd department of internal medicine. In the 2nd department, one is almost exclusively asked diabetology, nephrology, and some superficial cardiology, while the exam at 1st department covers more of the internal medicine curriculum.

I’ve made notes for the most important topics for internal medicine exam. If your exam is at 1st dep., you may read through it all. I’ve added a small note here with what topics are most important. If your exam is at 2nd dep., you probably only have to read through nephrology, diabetology, and cardiology. There also exists a list of commonly asked questions at 2nd department.

Surgery – traumatology

This was one of the most difficult exams for me. I was never any good in either of the two subjects, mainly because the education in them was poor, and there are so many topics and so few good sources. Luckily for you, I wrote notes (spent a lot of time on those). The surgery notes are good, the trauma notes are okay. There also exists a “Michelle’s notes” in trauma which are good.

As always, be prepared for unprepared questions.

Obstetrics and gynaecology

I hate the concept of final exams (which test you in curriculum you’ve been tested in on previous exams), but when they must exist, all should be like ob/gyn. The 6th year ob/gyn exam contains the topics of ob/gyn 1 and 2 put together with no modifications, so you know you’ve covered the same material before. The exam is the same as well.

Paediatrics

This is another source of anxiety for 6th year students. There are way too many topics, covering so many disorders, it’s honestly frightening and one feels like it’s impossible to cover them all to a sufficient degree. I’ve made notes for most topics, but not all. Other notes exist to cover the missing topics.

The exam itself is nice, they rarely fail people. But I can’t convince you of that upfront, you’ll just have to attend the exam yourself and see. I was super stressed for it myself but it was fine.

Psychiatry

Psychiatry exam is the same as in 5th year. Nothing new to add.

Neurology

Neurology was also scary for me, because I was never any good at it, and I dreaded having to neurologically exam a patient. However, the patients usually nice, and you usually examine patients with a fellow student in the room. The theoretical exam is nice too. My notes cover all topics (I think? Can’t recall.)

My schedule

I organised my schedule in a neat excel file. My schedule was this:

I had to make many last-minute changes to exam dates and practice weeks, due to force majeure, as is often necessary, so this was not my planned schedule going into 6th year. But things always work out.

As you can see from my schedule, I had some weeks to spare at the end, which was nice, but one could also use those to have more time to study for exams or more vacation during the year (I only had those two red weeks off during the whole year).

If you’re interested, I’ve shared the excel here. The dates are obviously wrong and must be corrected.

Written state exam

The written state is literally just memorising questions from the question bank. You can find them on finalexam.hu, just make a free user and you can see all the questions.

You can browse the questions online, but you can’t print them from the webpage or download them as a pdf. That’s why I wrote a small program to collect them from the webpage into a pdf (and later into Anki cards). Some copy shops also sell a printed booklet with all the questions.

I don’t know whether the questions change from year to year. If they don’t, you could reuse the pdf and Anki I made.

Some people prefer learning from the booklet, I preferred to use only Anki. It’s up to you. There are a lot of questions. I believe I started studying them two or three weeks before the exam, which was more than enough.

You can find more information in my blog post here.

Oral state exam

I’ve been asked how to study for the oral state exam. My answer is: you don’t. The reason for that is that most people will be asked one of two kinds of questions on the oral state. Questions will either be 1: about something easy you already know (and wouldn’t have to study for) or 2: about something really difficult or specific that you wouldn’t know even if you studied for five years.

However, many can’t bear not to study either, as the dread of failing because one couldn’t answer something one could’ve studied is too great. I tried to study initially, but 1: I was too stressed to focus, and 2: when I started to read the notes I felt that I knew most of what I tried to study anyway. So I didn’t study for it.

But I was terrified of the exam, before and during. I didn’t realistically think I would fail, but I was still absolutely terrified. And when they announced my grade, I literally ugly cried of relief.

Whether you study for it or not, you’ll be fine. I’ve never heard of anyone actually failing the oral state.