Meet Aaron Shea, a happy DAT Bootcamp customer who recently conquered the DAT. I’ve asked Aaron to share his DAT experience with us as the featured student of February.

What is one piece of advice you would give to another student preparing to take the DAT?

It’s almost funny to look back on it now because it seems so long ago, but I think that almost everyone who takes the DAT will have their own Day 1 when they sit down to start studying for the exam, and think to themselves, “My gosh! How am I ever going to get through all this material?”

But the thing that I think most people eventually realize is that the material being tested on the DAT isn’t particularly hard – it’s just that the task can seem daunting at first if you don’t have a plan to tackle everything that’s covered. That being said, I think it’s really important in the beginning to religiously follow a study schedule that will let you get through all the material at least once by the midpoint of your study period, so that you can have time to do practice problems while re-reading all the material two to three times during the second half. For me, I really tried to prioritize being able to review all of my notes multiple times, because I find that revisiting the material lets you catch details or principles that you might have glossed over or just completely misunderstood the first time around. If you have a friend who is studying for the DAT around the same time as you, it might also be helpful to study together, because I find that if you take time to discuss questions with someone else, those things tend to stick in your head a lot longer because you’ve reasoned it out.

I think what’s common between the two strategies I’ve mentioned above is the importance of gaining an understanding of the principles of what you’re studying, rather than trying to figure out tricks to answering questions. I mention this because I sometimes find myself reading a textbook and thinking, “Uh huh, this makes total sense, I’ll have no problem answering because it’s MC!” only to find out later that I hadn’t actually absorbed it enough to reproduce it on a question. It’s so important to take a step back once in a while when you’re studying and ask yourself if you’ve actually understood why one statement follows another in a text.

How did you use DAT Bootcamp to prepare for the DAT?

I gave myself 10 weeks to study for the exam. For the first five weeks, I followed DAT Bootcamp’s study guide basically to the tee, using Cliff’s Notes for Bio and Chad’s Videos for Gen Chem and Orgo. After I finished reviewing everything for the first time, I continued following Bootcamp’s study guide, though I did compress the schedule a bit by doing about two or three days worth of Bootcamp questions at a time, because I wanted to dedicate time to re-reading all the material again.

I thought that DAT Bootcamp was really great because the science sections were very similar in style to the actual questions that I got on the exam. I also cannot stress this enough –it was the reason I got in contact with Ari in the first place- I think the PAT practice on Bootcamp is the absolute best for practicing the PAT section. I believe that other PAT prep programs are nice in their own ways but none come close to the preparation that Bootcamp gives you in this section. Bootcamp had really great explanations and reasoning for why certain answers were right or wrong, and it really gave me the confidence to get through the PAT, which can otherwise feel overwhelming in how outright random it is at times.

What would you do differently to prepare for the DAT?

I am really grateful for my scores, but looking back, I feel that I should have dedicated more time to what I felt were my strong suits before the exam. During my study period, I did pretty well on Orgo and Quant practice sets – so I felt that these would be what pulled up scores up in case I didn’t do as well on another section as I had hoped. I was so confident that I basically stopped looking at the two subjects the week before my DAT because I was so focused on reviewing what I felt were my weak points. I ended up scoring the lowest on those two sections. I think the takeaway is that no matter how good you feel about subject, it’s always worth it to do more review, because you don’t ever want to walk away from a test with that feeling that you lost points you didn’t need to lose!

If you have any questions, you can contact me at my account on SDN. My username is aph2107.

• Biology25
• General Chemistry27
• Organic Chemistry23
• Reading Comprehension25
• Perceptual Ability26
• Quantitative Reasoning23
• Academic Average25

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