Should you use Sketchy Micro, and if so, how?

You might have heard and/or seen a lot about Sketchy Micro, and still have no idea what it is. Or maybe you have never heard of it at all (in which case, you’re in luck, because your studies will have changed forever after reading this!). So here’s a brief overview of what Sketchy Micro is, and then I’ll go a bit into how I used it to study, and how (and why) you could too.

The reason I wanted to make this post is because Sketchy is quite a huge investment, and it takes a lot of time to get through the material Sketch-style. So you might be wondering if it’s worth your while – well, the aim of this post is to help you answer that question.

[I’d like to begin by saying that Sketchy is truly a big time investment – you probably need to plan ahead, to make sure to leave yourself enough time to cover all of Sketchy the right way. It’s really not an overnight-type of thing: you will need to put in the time.]

Before we get started, check out my other posts on the USMLE and the resources I’m using here, the free checklist that I use to track my progress here and my IG Live video where I discuss all these things in detail (perhaps too much detail), here.

I will be talking primarily about Sketchy Micro because that’s the one I have the most experience with and it is (in my humble opinion) the best one by far! For my opinion on Sketchy Pharm and Path, scroll all the way to the end!

So what is Sketchy Micro?

Sketchy Micro is part of Sketchy Medical, which is a video course that encompasses three major subjects in medicine: microbiology (Sketchy Micro), pharmacology (Sketchy Pharm) and pathology (Sketchy Path). [Recently I think there’s an Internal Medicine course, but I haven’t seen any of those yet.]

Sketchy Micro is exactly what it sounds like: sketches that depict microbes. It sounds really silly, and I’m sure people who saw me watching cartoons while studying in the library thought it was, but I assure you: it’s phenomenal. Microbiology is made up of a ton of small and often random details that are really difficult to remember, so Sketchy takes all these seemingly unrelated tidbits and puts it into a neat little story.

Usually the sketches or scenes are associated with something that sounds like the name of the microbe, and the creators of the course use colors, stories and recurring symbols to help us remember the small details.

In the first Sketchy, we are introduced to some of the “language” of the course; a quick example to explain what I mean:

many microbes are catalase (+), meaning they have a certain virulence factor, so for the entirety of the course, the Sketchy symbol for
catalase (+) is the Catalase Cat, which appears in every appropriate sketch

Simple, right? It really is. If you’re a visual learner, then you would probably benefit a lot from this. Here’s a picture of one of the Sketchy images with my annotations (made on the iPad).

Let’s go into more detail about what made Sketchy really indispensable for me.

Reasons why Sketchy Micro was really worth my while:

• the visual mnemonics are INCREDIBLY powerful and LONGTERM memory hooks; I found myself answering micro questions right the year after we took micro and I could seriously attribute it all to Sketchy
  • When someone says the words ‘C. difficile,’ I unwittingly see the Sketchy picture in front of my eyes and am often able to recall even tiny details
• it doesn’t just regurgitate First Aid; I think it incorporates UWorld, which is phenomenal, and perhaps other high yield sources too? So it has a lot of information that I wouldn’t have gotten from elsewhere before my first round of UWorld.
• Did you know: some microbes don’t have their own section in First Aid?! For instance, Pasteurella multocida is mentioned throughout FA in a few different places (a quick ctrl+f proved that), but there’s no paragraph covering P. multocida. But Sketchy actually took these separate details and compiled them all into its own video (while adding in key UWorld tidbits, as well)
• Furthermore, the viruses in FA are really barebones. That is, the part of FA that covers viruses is mainly a couple of tables and some high-yield keywords. It’s very hard to just read a chart and memorize it without any auxiliary information, but Sketchy fixed this by separating the viruses into their own separate sketches and adding the necessary information to make them digestible.
• I should absolutely add that it’s fun: honestly, it was really enjoyable to just sit down and watch the Sketch and learn in a “relaxed” way. The short videos (usually 8-10 minutes) were a nice break from the dry textbook learning that I was otherwise doing, and I really enjoyed watching all of Sketchy Micro. Especially because the payoff was SO great.

So far, only good things to say about Sketchy Micro. And what it really comes down to is this:

There are a number of UWorld questions that I get right only because of a sketch that I did, even if it was 2 years ago. THAT’S how powerful some of those mnemonics are.

Today’s example was, “What is the treatment for an S. epidermidis endocarditis?” and anyone who remembers the van parked outside would know the answer is “vancomycin.” Really simple question, actually. As it turned out though, only 46% of people knew… but for Sketchy-people out there, the question wasn’t really a tricky one!

How I Used It for My Med School Classes

In my 6-year medical program, we have micro and pathology 3rd year and pharmacology 4th year. Don’t ask, no one really understands it. But that’s how it was.

So I discovered Sketchy Micro in my third year, and I used it throughout the year. Here’s how I used Sketchy:

1. I started with S. aureus: I took a screencapture of the image at the end, then watched the corresponding video. I annotated it as I went along, pausing and rewinding as needed. It took a really long time.

And then I knew it inside and out.

Just kidding. That’s the important thing about Sketchy: you can’t just watch it once and expect to know it.  You HAVE to keep studying the images so that the mnemonics solidify in your brain.

How To Actually Use Sketchy To Learn Micro

This can be done in a few different ways, depending on how your brain works:

• you can keep rewatching the video – I have friends who just watched it multiple times, never really taking notes.
• you can take notes while watching it once, then review your notes – this is what I did; after my initial watch, I only ever studied the notes. I DID rewatch a select few videos, but that was rare; I relied mainly on my notes
• you can take notes AND rewatch
• you can watch and do flashcards (scroll to the end for some free flashcards) and take notes and…honestly, whatever works for you.

Just make sure you don’t expect to watch it once and remember it forever, because that is likely not the case.

When taking notes, you can do it on paper (printed) or on an iPad with Apple Pencil. The benefit of the iPad is that you retain the colors, which are actually really helpful for certain sketches. Check out my pictures to see what I mean. I used mainly Notability (the app), sometimes GoodNotes (but there were a few glitchy months there so I switched it all back to Notability).

There’s also a Sketchy Micro workbook that I wish I knew about before doing the course, because it’s got all the images printed in color and probably costs less than printing color yourself. The link for it is here.

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SO, for my uni micro class, we had a lot of details that weren’t in Sketchy. They weren’t high yield, but my European school isn’t too concerned about what’s high yield for the USMLE (surprising, right?). So what I did was go through the sketches and ADD IN my uni details. I doodled them in, highlighting them in a different color so I knew what was ‘uni’ and what was ‘Sketchy.’

It was great. I loved micro, my knowledge was excellent, and a lot of what I learned, I retained. If I had to do third year micro again, I would do it no differently, because it worked REALLY well.

[That’s not entirely true, I would change one thing: I would make my notes in the official Sketchy order, instead of changing the order to suit the way we covered the microbes in class. Because now I’m doing a lot of frantic flipping back and forth, looking for microbes that aren’t where they should be.]

How about Sketchy Pharm?

If you read my Resource Masterpost from last year, you’ll see that I was not a big fan. Well, that’s changed. (P.S. You can find all my favorite reasons for most of my med school classes here.)

The reasons I didn’t like Pharm was:

• my uni required WAY more detail than what the Sketchy Pharm videos covered; whereas for micro I could annotate those few tidbits that my professor wanted me to know into my Sketchy Micro notes, for pharm it was the other way around: I had to annotate the few Sketchy Pharm details into my uni notes, because the discrepancy was massive
• the videos were VERY long. Very VERY long. They were tedious to watch, and (in my opinion), the jokes and little distractors were inappropriately long. So watching Sketchy Pharma was much more of a chore than Sketchy Micro
• the mnemonics didn’t feel as strong as they had for Sketchy Micro, and the review of physiology that most videos included felt useless

However, I would like to amend my previous beliefs and say that, looking back, Sketchy Pharm was definitely worthwhile.

I would say that for anyone taking the USMLE, if Sketchy Micro worked for you, then Sketchy Pharm is worth the investment. The reasons are similar — the videos cover a lot of what’s in FA and help you remember the small details related to pharma, even the physiology of certain processes.

So I’m really happy that I DID use pharma during my 4th year, because it’s making preparing for the USMLE all the easier now. It was a HUGE time commitment, but it’s paying off, slowly but surely.

I did do ONE thing different for Sketchy Pharm though –> I used flashcards.

Sketchy…Flashcards?

I didn’t learn Sketchy Pharm as well as I had micro, simply because I didn’t put in the time needed to learn it. So the knowledge of it is a lot less good, but I’m working on improving that by doing flashcards.

I use Anki. I love Anki, and I highly recommend that you invest the time to learn it. If you’re not sure WHY you should bother with Anki, maybe this video I made will help you out! 🙂

That being said, I used flashcards I found on this incredible website, called medschoolanki.com (poof, there’s ANOTHER reason to learn Anki: so you can make use of these free decks.)

Some lovely people called Pepper and Zanki made Anki decks to follow along with the Sketchy videos, and I used their decks to really drive the points home. It helped a lot for my final, and I’ll use them for the USMLE too!

I hope that was helpful. Please leave comments and questions and suggestions below!