Speaker 1: How do I study for the NAPLEX exam? How do I pass my board exam on the first try? Hi everyone and welcome back to my YouTube channel. I'm Dr. Jessica Louie and I love helping burned out pharmacists and healthcare professionals clear the clutter from their lives, reset, and really start to own their time. Today we're talking about how to study for the NAPLEX exam, the National Pharmacy Board Licensure Exam. Now I want to remind you that I have no affiliation with the NAPLEX exam, the NABP. This is not endorsed and this is not sponsored. This is my firsthand personal experience as an associate professor at a school of pharmacy and as someone who passed my NAPLEX and CPJE board exams in 2013. Remember that you can always click these other resources and videos up here or down below so that you can get the help that you need as well as online courses and study guides for you to help pass the NAPLEX, CPJE, and PJE exams. The first step is planning to pass your NAPLEX exam and this means planning on a calendar and a timeline so you know what you need to do to reverse engineer how you're going to plan and study for this. So that means we ideally want to take the NAPLEX exam within 90 days of graduation. So let's say that you graduate at the end of April, early May. We want to take and pass this by the end of July at the very latest. I highly recommend you take the exam within 30 to 60 days of graduation and when we plan for this we're going to plan three to four weeks of studying into our calendars. We can take out a paper planner, paper calendar, the schedule and time for you to study each of these topics. That means that we can schedule in time to study for different pharmacotherapy, therapeutics, guidelines, disease states, chapters, whatever works best for you and I highly recommend that you are taking at least two days off each week during your studying. So that means you might be studying Monday through Friday and taking Saturday and Sunday off. It's important that you have at least two days off per week to rejuvenate, spend quality time with family, friends, making memories because your whole life is not studying and it's important that every single day we're keeping up our self-care and habits. Meaning that we're getting seven to eight hours of sleep each night, we're staying hydrated, we are going outside and giving movement in our bodies to better support them in our studying. The next step in passing the NAPLEX exam is accountability. Yes, anything in life we want accountability to move forward towards our goals and for some of us that accountability is going to come from your friends and your classmates holding you accountable in study groups. I highly recommend you're continuing to meet with your study group at least once a week if not multiple times a week during your studying process and that you're all on a similar time schedule of that four to eight weeks after graduation. You can also have accountability through your school of pharmacy or faculty members helping hold you accountable to your schedule and your timeline. It's important when you're having accountability that you have this on your calendar of when you want to check in with each other either in person or virtually and ask each other questions, see what's going well, what you might have questions on in your study group and getting those questions answered as soon as possible so that you feel confident in the knowledge that you're gaining through the studying process. The next step in passing your NAPLEX exam is using your resources wisely. So whether that means your school pharmacy has provided you resources for the preparation either through their custom design process or through an outside company like RxPrep, using those resources wisely is really important. I personally used some of my own study sheets and resources that I created. Some of those are linked below for you to check out and I used RxPrep. I think it's really important that you pick one primary textbook that might be that 300 to 500 page range and resource and reference to study from because if you're using multiple books that are 500-ish pages it can get really overwhelming to compare the references and the resources. So just pick one of them and then if you want an additional book for study questions, study assessments so that you can practice your knowledge you can also get a question and answer type of book to test yourself as well. Some of the resources I've used are linked below so that you can get these resources and customize them to what works best for your learning style. I personally created a ton of study sheets, study guides, summary sheets to condense a lot of high-level information into simple formats and simple diagrams which was much easier to digest and study from. Next step in passing your NAPLEX exam is creating an ideal environment to study in. Now many of you know that I follow a simplified lifestyle and I'm certified as a KonMari consultant so this doesn't come as a surprise to you that I would love for you to remove any clutter that is distracting you from your ideal study environment. A lot of times that's going to be very personal to our styles but we don't want any distractions when we're studying so that means setting up this ideal study environment that you enjoy going to each and every day during your four to eight week study process. It's inspiring to you, it's calm to you, it is somewhere that you enjoy going to because we never want to dread where we're studying. For many of us this means some type of home office setting that you can study in and then supplementing with local libraries or coffee shops or at your school or university so that you have a combination of places that you study best in. This also means setting up your ideal study environment where you're letting go of other distractions meaning maybe you turn off your wi-fi, maybe you put your phone on airplane mode, maybe your phone is not with you when you're studying, maybe the wi-fi is off so everything is downloaded to your computer so you're not going to get distracted by or tempted by opening internet browsers. This means removing not only physical clutter from that environment but that mental digital clutter as well that could be interfering with your studying techniques. If you would like more advice on how to declutter your digital world so you can better study you can get those workshops linked below as well. The next step in studying for your NAPLEX exam is practicing calculations. Practice, practice, practice. Many of you know that the NAPLEX exam has a lot of calculations, a lot of equations that you need to be able to be familiar with and be able to complete fairly fast on the exam. I personally would recommend 30 to 60 minutes of practice calculations every single day that you are studying. This is consistency over time and the more we practice the more we know how questions are asked, what examples and scenarios that could be asked, and you're getting good practicing of what calculator you're going to be using either online or in person. The more you practice the more comfortable you are going to be in different scenarios, different situations when different calculations arise. The practice also will accumulate over time so you get faster on these different types of questions so that you're on pace to finish the exam on time. Remember to use the same type of calculator that you're going to see on the exam. So whether that exam is going to be done on a computer and you're only going to get it a computer calculator or if you're going to be allowed to bring in a physical calculator, please make sure that you're using the same calculator that's provided on your specific board exam and you can look up that information on the NADP website. Today we talked about five ways to ace your NAPLEX exam. Planning and scheduling for it, taking accountability for it, using your study resources wisely and investing in ones that help your learning style, creating an ideal study environment without distractions and something that you're excited to study in, and practicing calculations. The more practice the better you're going to feel and the more confident you're going to feel. Remember you can get all of our resources on board preparation linked below so you can study effectively for this major exam in your life. I can't wait to welcome you into our profession as a licensed pharmacist. Keep up those good study habits for the NAPLEX exam and it'll be over before you know it and you'll be off celebrating and entering our profession as a licensed pharmacist in your state. Make sure you check out these videos on burnout, simplifying, and as a pharmacy professional. Until next time, spark joy.