Sketchy Spotlight: A "Sketchyfied" brain 🧠

This week, meet Bianca Yugar: MS2 student at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. Learn how she went from overwhelmed MS1 student to daily “cartoon” watcher with a permanently “sketchyfied” brain. 

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Q: How did you learn about Sketchy? 

Bianca: I came across Sketchy last year during my first year of medical school. I was looking at Microbiology, I was going through my pages of first aid and there was so much detail to learn and I was getting really overwhelmed. A lot of students above me and who were older than me suggested Sketchy, and it was on Reddit. Everyone said that Sketchy was like the gold standard for Micro.

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Q: What has your experience been like using Sketchy?

Bianca: I started watching Sketchy and I immediately fell in love. It was so easy to get the memory hooks and to get all the little details really quickly. And it was funny. I didn't expect to be laughing throughout the videos and it made studying for Micro actually enjoyable. I looked forward to studying it, which I never in a million years would have thought that. ‍

After Micro, I figured out that they had Sketchy Path and that's when I started using it pretty much every day. Whichever organ system I was learning, I would always watch lectures and then watch Sketchy or watch Sketchy first and then watch lectures. So it's very much a daily occurrence for me to be “watching my cartoons” as my boyfriend calls it. I definitely wake up in the morning and “watch my cartoons.” 

I really enjoy that you guys added Anatomy. I use that a lot for Neurology—I thought it was really good for the cranial nerves. And I started watching it for Physiology now that I'm in dedicated. I honestly use like every aspect of Sketchy. I feel like my brain is “sketchyfied” now—that's what I call it in my head—I can only learn using Sketchy. So yeah, it's pretty much one of the main resources that I use. 

‍Bianca’s favorite Sketchy lessons: Small Vessel Vasculitides and all of the heart murmur lessons.

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Q: How would you describe Sketchy to a new student?

Bianca: It's like an animated comic book series that uses really specific vignettes to create these memory hooks for both really big picture concepts and really small nitty gritty details using symbols that Sketchy kind of repeats in all of their vignettes about different topics, like Pathophysiology or Anatomy. It just uses really easy symbols throughout the videos using visual storytelling. 

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Q: What advice would you give your pre-med self?

Bianca: I think Sketchy would have been helpful in undergrad, especially with Microbiology classes or Biochemistry classes that have a lot of really nitty gritty details that can be easily mastered through Sketchy. I definitely wish that I had Sketchy MCAT when I was studying. 

I would tell myself to just invest into a really good resource. When I was studying for MCAT, I just used the free UWorld and I was struggling every single day. It was not a good time. I really wish I had something to kind of solidify the details like I had with Sketchy. If I could have just dedicated a big chunk of my study time to Sketchy with MCAT, I think I would have done really, really well. 

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Watch the full interview.