

Overview of the Book
Will medical school make or break you? Whether you’ve just gotten your acceptance or are already in the cadaver lab, you can get through (relatively) unscathed by learning from those who’ve already survived and thrived. Herein, we provide you with the hard-won tips, tools, and insights that helped us to excel during those four grueling years. Beyond providing study tips, we draw on inspiration from fields like psychology, neuroscience, education, business, and even self-help to assemble a complete guide to accelerate your development as a medical student and future physician. You’ll even get our personal recommendations for outside resources, such as specific websites and apps, that gave us a leg-up during medical school. NO OTHER book offers this much information, assembled together in one place, and without the fluff.
Key Topics
- Study tips to help you sail through classes
- Test-taking strategies to help you ace the USMLE and/or COMLEX board exams
- Accelerated learning techniques like speed reading, memory palaces and concept maps
- Time-management and productivity hacks
- Tools for self-assessment to track your development
- Advice on wellness, work-life balance, and burnout prevention
We’ve been down this road before, and we can show you the best paths to travel, which ones to avoid, and which can take you all the way to the top.
Meet the Authors

Chase DiMarco
Chase is an MS, MBA-HA and MD/Ph.D-candidate. He is the Founder and educator at FreeMedEd, which he began in 2014 to consolidate free educational resources for his classmates. He also hosts the Medical Mnemonist Podcast, Rounds to Residency podcast, and is CEO of FindARotation clinical rotations service. He has explored many facets of medical education, the psychology of learning, and accelerated learning techniques.

Theodore X. O’Connell
Ted is a family physician, educator, and author of many popular books, including the Crush Step series and the USMLE Step Secrets series. He is the founding director of the Family Medicine residency training program at Kaiser Permanente Napa-Solano and is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine. Dr. O’Connell is passionate about helping the next generation of physicians become successful, both as clinicians and as future professionals who can confidently navigate medical culture. He hopes his collective works will help cultivate outstanding physicians.

Gregory Rodden
Greg is a pediatrics resident in Austin, TX, and founder of the Med School Phys podcast. Now he is hosting a new podcast called Physiology by Physeo, which is one of the newest collaborations powered by InsideTheBoards. When he’s not being a doctor for kids, he tries to stay happy and healthy by plugging in his headphones while at the gym, or by leisurely dining with his wife. Greg is dedicated to providing high-quality, free medical education to anyone who is willing to learn.