AANP FNP PASSED!

2 Posts

Hey everyone,

I have never posted a topic on here before, but I felt compelled to having just passed by AANP-FNP boards today. Woohoo!

First of all, the obligatory "how I studied":

Fitzegerald book: I bought this book first and literally read the whole thing. I made index cards as I went and other supplementary notes. Looking back, I absolutely would not have made the index cards as it really was a huge waste of time, although I think reading the book gave me basic understanding of most topics. The questions are not necessarily like the questions on the exam, but they're really great for assessing your knowledge. I did each section of questions as I read along, and then yesterday, I went through the book and re-did all the questions from topics I needed help with.

Leik: This was my go-to. After Ftizgerald, I was really overwhelmed, and while I knew vague concepts on some of the diseases, I wanted to get a better summation. This book was great! Last night before going to bed I had a bit of a panic attack about the impending exam, and this was the book that I was able to flip through and review every topic one last time in a pretty short amount of time. The questions in the back of this book I did not find to be very challenging, although they were great review material. I did them all.

Fizgerald CDs: One of my friends bought her CDs a few years ago when she took boards, so she lent them to me. It was the 2012 edition and although it was a few years old, I found it didn't really make much of a difference when it came to most of the topics. The biggest issue with her CDs was her monotonous, self-righteous tone, that made listening to them nearly unbearable. I listened to a few topics I had problems with, but that was about all I could stand.

APEA CDs: Again, one of my friends gave me the 2012 edition of these CDs. These were AMAZING!! If you only get one set of CDs, get hers. She makes the topics interesting, has a great attitude, and is incredibly smart. More importantly, I found that she covered (and went into specifics about) a lot of the topics I found on the exam. Again though, I only listened to a few of the topics that I thought I needed help on; I didn't listen to her whole series.

AANP-FNP "exam edge" questions: I bought a bundle of 10, and only ended up doing 6. These questions were not very helpful, and kept giving a lot of questions that I would associate more with the ANCC exam. Not to mention there were TONS of typos and a lot of times, the wording of the questions didn't necessarily make sense. It was a waste of money, and wouldn't really recommend buying these questions.

In total, I "studied" for 2.5 months, but I would say only 1 month of that was actual, everyday studying. The most challenging part for me was reading through Fitzgerald that first time, but once I did that, I went into more of a review mode. That first month, I studied about 4 hours a day, then after that I would study maybe 1-2 hours a day, a few times a week and listen to the review CDs in the car.

The exam was CHALLENGING. Be prepared to have questions with terminology you aren't familiar with, or have question after question on a topic you don't necessarily think is basic NP knowledge. Also, a ton of the questions I saw on the exam didn't ask what I thought they would ask about a particular topic, but rather, the question asked for a much more obscure fact of information about that particular topic, if that makes sense.

Now, the good news, all of that being said...I passed! Did I know everything? No! But I passed, AND SO WILL YOU. :)

Don't compare your studying to others and realize that there is absolutely NO WAY you are going to know everything. If you have limited time I wouldn't bother doing review questions. None of them were really comparable to the type of questions on boards, and your time would be much better served learning information. Just make sure you cover every topic at least once, review again what you don't understand, and then go in there and rock the test! You can do it!!