How Dr.Shiralee scored 929 in NEET PG 2018 without any coaching or classroom sessions!

Marrow is proud of Dr.Shiralee Runwal, who took up her NEET PG for the first time in 2018 and aced a score of 929 while pursuing her internship without any coaching classes or classroom sessions.

In our interview with her, she has explained how Marrow helped her familiarise herself to the new subject oriented questions of NEET 2018 and how a slow but steady prep phase is crucial for scoring.

1. Hello Dr.Shiralee. Please tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi. I am Dr.Shiralee Runwal. I did my under graduation from G.R Medical College, Gwalior. I topped the State Pre Medical Test in the year 2012. I joined college that year and have accumulated 37 gold medals till date, over the course of my 5 years in MBBS. I took NEET PG in 2018 and scored 929 out of 1200. I didn’t attend any regular coaching or classroom sessions and this is my first attempt at NEET. I just used the test series available online like Marrow for my preparation.

2. So how long was the duration of your PG prep? Were you happy with it or did you think you should have started earlier?

I started when I was in my final year. The first few years I focussed on my academics and then at the start of final year, I started preparing for NEET PG. I’m not much of a bookworm and I have always been good at grasping information. I used to make my own notes from multiple sources like online MCQ’s, several text books and question banks and that helped with my preparation.

3. Did you think the introduction of negative marking changed the flow of your preparation? If so, how?

It did not affect me much. I have been quite used to the concept of negative marking in the previous competitive exams, I have taken part in. And I personally feel, this is a move in the right direction as this would limit the incentive for guess work and stress more on understanding the concepts.

4. How many hours of prep did you go through per day? How often were you not able to achieve your daily estimate for study?

To be honest, I started with 8 hours of prep per day and it slowly decreased to 6 hours and then 4 hours. For me, I strongly felt the need to get initiated into the preparation strongly, catch on to the fundamentals, and gradually take it from there. As I was also doing my internship then, I was posted in departments like Medicine and Surgery and hence I wasn’t able to focus on preparation much during the months closer to the exam. So I cut down on my studies and then focussed on revision in the last 2 months.

5. On a scale of 1 to 10, how well do would you grade your level of preparation for NEET?

I would grade myself 9.

6. Where do you think was the lapse in your preparation? What do you wish, you could have done better to have been more prepared?

I had focussed more on MCQ’s towards the later part of preparation. But since this year, the focus was shifted to a standard of concept-based questions inspired from textbooks, I feel if I had focussed more on understanding the theory, I would have been able to score better.

7. NEET being a highly intense and competitive exam, it’s natural for students to have self-doubts and suffer dips in their confidence level. How did it affect your preparation?

Fortunately, I did not go through such a major crash phase during my prep. Though I did consider some days to be my cheat days from studying, where I’ll focus on hobbies like painting, writing poetry and such. I think the major cause of getting into that such phases of demotivation is the monotony of the prep phase. So I kept juggling between various activities and that usually helped me to start afresh when I sat down to study.

8. What would be your advice to students going through such a phase of self-doubt?

I think forming groups among friends while studying would help. When you see people around you going through a similar phase, I feel, you would be able to share your experiences and help each other out. I would suggest talking to fellow students, teachers if possible and get out of that phase as soon as possible. As a day wasted is something you would repent later. So it’s best to deal with problems as and when possible and move past it.

9. Were there any misleading practices regarding your prep that you that you eventually realised during the later phase of your preparation? How did you fix it?

Initially I was focussing more on standard textbooks like Harrison and trying to accumulate as many facts as possible. But then later I realised that focus on MCQ’s, question banks and quick facts would help more, as ultimately, our mind can hold only so much information and focussing on more details and theory which would be difficult to retain for longer durations. So focussing on smaller snippets of information and constant revision helped me.

10. Was the Marrow app useful for your preparation? If so how?

Of course. The questions offered by Marrow closely simulated the pattern of NEET PG exam and the answers are really authentic and I have not been able to point out a single mistake so far in the answers of the mock tests. The participation in the mocks by students is also really good as almost 68000 students took part and it helped me evaluate myself in a larger student pool and that gave as close as an experience to the actual NEET exam for me.

11. Did you feel the Marrow app offered you a strategic advantage, as compared to what your prep would have been without the app?

Yes. The constantly updated content, the question banks which have been set very well for the current negative marking environment and question sets like Image based questions are very unique to Marrow and I’m thankful that I had come across Marrow in the early days of preparation.

12. On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend Marrow to your fellow peers and colleagues?

I would give rate Marrow 8.5.

13. At what time period during preparation would you recommend they start using the materials available at Marrow?

I started my preparation at the start of my internship and kept going through the content like pearls and MCQ’s regularly and that helped me a lot. So I would suggest people use this app whenever they get the time during their internship or during their UG days and during their intense phase of preparation.

14. Do you have any other advice or suggestions for students who are currently preparing for NEET?

It’s very important to understand the subject-wise distribution of questions as sometimes, students tend to devote attention to some subjects that are not as frequently asked. The major P’s of medicine – Physiology, Paediatrics, PSM should be focussed well. Keeping oneself updated with the recent updates in medical field also would help. Also one should not get lost in studying theory and balance it with MCQ’s as that would help in the relatively short span that is available for preparation. All the best!

Fly to heights of success like a carefree sparrow 

Join today… the matchless modules of MARROW !

– Dr.Shiralee Runwal

We congratulate Dr.Shiralee and wish her the very best for her future endeavours!

 

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Neuroglia Health Private Limited.