Holidays are over and it is time to get back to crunch time to study for the coming NMAT. Many of you are thorn between enrolling yourself to a review center or just do a self study - trust me when I say I know the feeling because I've been there. I'll give you some helpful factors to consider which option will work best for you.
I did both - enrolled myself to a review center and buried myself with self study materials, reviewers, resources, books and anything that I found will help me prepare for NMAT.
My thoughts about NMAT review centers depends on which review center will you enroll to. There are a lot of review centers available in the market in this day on but I believe not all review centers will help you achieve your goal %ile rank and sadly, some are just pure business. I know review centers can slash you a good amount of money so be careful to choose for a 'worth the price' sessions that you are looking for. If you have the resources to enroll yourself in review classes, go ahead but if not might as well hit your books as early as now to study for the NMAT. I am telling you, NMAT is no joke and it is not a piece of cake.
Review centers are good if you need a little push to study and be productive because they have specific time and day of classes that you need to attend to (though not mandatory) and several sample tests even take home tests to work on will be given. All of the review centers are in a classroom setting so if classroom setting works for you, a review center will definitely help you. Another good thing with some review centers is that they give tips on how to answer the questions and problems easier, faster and correctly which I will share with you guys on my blogs to follow for the NMAT series (so make sure to subscribe to my blog, you wouldn't want to miss it - trust me).
Be aware of review centers which will just give you incomplete/incompetent review materials, hold classes that will just answer the sample questions they provided and that's it, review done and you can bid your hard earned money good bye. It is a sad reality for review centers. Trust me, it happens. Aside from enrolling myself to a review center, what my friends and I did are share notes, review materials and techniques that the review centers taught us which really came in handy during the actual test. So if you're on a tight budget, it wouldn't hurt to ask your friends (who enrolled in a review center) for the review materials, sample exams and most especially the techniques in answering the NMAT questions (which is what I found most useful tool in acing the NMAT) they acquired from the review centers.
Doing self study will require a huge amount of efforts because you have to look for the right review materials, notes, and blogs that give out reviewers. Luckily, today there are lots of sources you can get the reviewers from, like some facebook page and groups such as the pinoy doctor, non-premed doctors/future doctors, Philippine NMAT: October 2018. These page/groups provide tips, review materials, sample questions that are really useful that you may think twice if you still want to pay for a review center that much money wherein you can just be motivated and use the available resources and save your money for other things when you're already in medical school. These groups can also be your support group because all of its members are aspiring doctors and always willing to help you with anything like answering a problem that you're not sure of and other NMAT and even medical schools related questions.
As I've mentioned earlier, I worked my hardest to self study and thank God, it worked for me. I spent all my vacant hours studying for NMAT everyday and have a strict schedule set just for studying - no phones, no other electronic devices that might distract me from studying. It takes discipline to do this. I even made my review materials posted in the walls of my room which I found very effective. You might want to consider doing this too - it may be a little 'extra' but whatever works, right?
I hope this blog post helped you decide which option is suitable for you and if you have questions, feel free to comment down or send me a message and I'll be glad to help you with it. Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment