It's been almost two weeks since I've started (serious) studying for boards and I'm only about 2/3 done through all the material I need to cover (for the 1st time through)...and I am going through the material as quickly as I can too, with 6-8 hours of solid review every day. Pretty soon that 6-8 hours is going to be 8-10 hours per day (sigh). But that's what you have to do since there's just waaaay too much material to cover. I was just talking to my classmates about high yield topics, but quite frankly it's hard to figure out since (1) the exam has been revamped and (2) the breadth of material is so vast, that all the material is spread pretty thin. In other words, if you divide up the topics in a pie chart, you'll have hundreds of pieces of pie, and the pieces are either small, really small, or tiny slivers. Here's the content matrix and outline of NBEO part I:

Matrix: http://www.optometry.org/part_abs_matrix.cfm
Outline: http://www.optometry.org/pdf/matrix/part_abs_matrix.pdf

Even though you see what seems to be a good countable number of topics, each topic is extremely broad so that's what I mean by the small pieces of pie.

As daunting as this seems, there are still two things that keep me motivated: thousands before me have passed it, and I don't want to fail and start all over again!!! So hopefully all goes well...wish me luck!

I just got finished with my last final today, and I'm sure glad it's over!!! I am only months away from finally getting done with didactic instruction and off to just pure clinical rotations...but again, I still have to complete the mother of all optometry boards, NBEO Part I. Thank goodness SCCO gives a whole month away from classes before the boards - I hear that other schools give as little as a couple of days off before they take NBEO I. I'll basically just be doing my clinic time which is 12-16 hours a week. And in March, I FINALLY get Saturdays off (I've been having full days of clinic on Saturdays for the last two quarters, which pretty much ruins my weekends, especially since my fiancee is off work on Saturdays). So yeah, basically for the next month I'll be buried in optometry textbooks, so not much else going on but I'll update when I can.