One of the things I want to do on this site is to provide more finished "products" for you, in addition to the subject/literature reviews, test preparation and study ideas, and book reviews. These will hopefully include charts, outlines, and other media that will help augment your studies. I am working on several book-length projects for the site as well, including a mnemonics-style cheat book and a "textbook" of ophthalmology, with the goal of bridging the gap between the traditional high-academic works of the highly reputable textbooks and shorter-length review books. Since those books are going to take me a considerable time to write and prepare (probably several years at the rate I'm going now), I plan to publish those for sale. However, I still want to make the bulk of the content free, so the articles won't be hidden behind a paywall.
Website Review: EyeGuru
I was recently approached by the founders of EyeGuru.org to introduce you to their online resource for beginning residents. Since we want to provide as many resources to you as possible to help you with learning and gaining proficiency in ophthalmology, I was delighted to learn about a new tool that might be helpful for many of you.
Article Review: 5 Resources To Get Ready For The 2016 OKAPs
I received this link in my AAO e-mail blast the other day: 5 Resources to Get Ready for the 2016 OKAPs.
It lists some important dates to know for the OKAP and provides links to several helpful resources for people who are trying to get more information about the OKAP and how to prepare for the exam, which is coming up in about a month and a half.
For those people who are wanting to get some nuts and bolts info about dates, test day FAQs, etc., you should definitely check out this article! I will eventually have some more specific-type information about my experiences taking the OKAP during residency, but in order to keep writing as many review articles as I can before the OKAP and written board exam, I may have to put that on the slate for the next academic year.
Article Review: Top Resources For OKAP And Board Review
Dr. James G. Chelnis contributed an article to the American Academy of Ophthalmology listing 9 very useful resources for OKAP and board exam review. His article can be found here (this may be member-only content).
I don't have any critiques of the resources he lists; from what I can tell, there is no specific order to his recommendations. If you used all 9 resources, I suspect you would do very well.
Out of that list, I personally used the following resources when I studied for the OKAP and board exams:
Another Approach To OKAP Study
When I started looking on Google for helpful guides for OKAP or board exam study, a thread on studentdoctor.net was listed towards the top.
In the thread, the original poster presented a very thorough and detailed plan of attack for studying ophthalmology in his (I apologize, I'm assuming that the user is a "he" due to the username) first year of residency (PGY-2), including a specific reading schedule, reviews of textbooks and question banks, with links to different articles for additional reading. In some ways, it sounds eerily like what I'm trying to put together on this site.