Sketchy Spotlight: How One Student Ditched An MCAT Prep Bootcamp For Sketchy

Meet Preston

Preston graduated in 2022 from Bowling Green State University and is currently on his gap year working as a clinical research coordinator and studying for the MCAT. He has been using Sketchy for about five months and saw a significant score increase in his practice exams. 

First started on a path as an aviation major in college, he learned that his eyesight wasn’t good enough to be a pilot. “I have something called amblyopia, which is lazy eye, so my right eye doesn’t see as well as my left.”

Switching gears and having to care for some family members - Preston worked in an Alzheimer's and Dementia Unit and fell in love with his job. He then started working in the ER where he met a lot of doctors and enjoyed how they helped their patients. This journey influenced him to shoot for the stars and become a physician. The first step would be to tackle the MCAT.

Q: What resources did you use for MCAT prep before Sketchy?

Preston: I wish I found Sketchy a lot earlier [in my MCAT prep], but that wasn't the case. What the winter bootcamp does is like an online Zoom class. It would be a lecture on the viral or eukaryotic cells like the membrane brown cells like nucleus. You go to the class, you learn about it, and then there's about 15 practice passages on that material. It was a bootcamp so you had two, three hour classes a day with 15 passages after each class. Then you would take a practice exam on that Sunday. It went on for about a month.

I heard about Sketchy for medical school. I didn't even know Sketchy had an MCAT [program]. So I went to the Sketchy site and you had free videos and I watched it and once the video was over, I purchased it because it was incredible.

Q: What do you like about Sketchy MCAT?

Preston: I'd kind of be lost. I wouldn't know what to do because at the time before Sketchy, I was doing Anki cards and they were kind of helping with psych/soc. But when it came to the harder section biochemistry, you got to learn all the pathways, all the rate limiting rate determining steps, rate limiting steps, how much ATP, how much NADPH, all these chemicals you got to know. It was just overwhelming. But when you go to Sketchy, you kind of develop the fundamentals. I could see it like the TCA cycle is like a cup, like the spinning cups, you see a carnival, you know, so it's like you see it and you can see the bird flying across.

It can be overwhelming at times because you see one, two, three, four, five of the categories and you’ve watched zero of 17 videos, but once you click in and you see that these are videos like six to eight minutes long, well, you know, my lunch break at work’s 30 minutes, I can crank out three to four videos, go back and do the questions real quick on my next break. So when I had downtime at work, I’d go create a quiz.

Sketchy gives you the foundation, the answer to what's called the free standing questions they're very similar to the free standing questions that you see on the MCAT,  so if you can get the easy free standing question points, you're in.

Q: How do you study for the MCAT with Sketchy?

Preston: I had the Sketchy pictures on my iPad. I would write on top of it in black pen to get my knowledge down. I look at their outfit, I remember what the video said and then move on. And then that really stuck in my head because it's repetitive learning so it really engraves in your learning a lot faster.