How to Learn Through Sketchy Micro?

[greentealeaves]

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I've been going through some Sketchy micro videos and it seems to be a laundry list of facts rather than teaching me why some symptoms manifest or gaining a deep understanding of mechanisms of how things occur. I'm in a traditional curriculum and am going through it with my micro class (we take ID second year which covers a lot of what is on Sketchy) and I'm finding myself having to do extensive leg work to actually be able to comprehend the associated Zanki cards with each Sketchy video. Can anyone point me to any good resources to actually understand the why and how behind the facts presented in the Sketchy micro videos?

 

[Type2Fiber]

Wikipedia articles are my go to for more details. But micro is memorization, sketchy is all you need for 95% of what you'll see. I have yet to come across a micro question I wasn't able to figure out from Sketchy

 

[stickgirl390]

I usually watch the relevant Boards and Beyond videos for the deeper understanding.

I also found that sketchy tends to include multiple body system pathology in one organism video. Ex: The S. pyogenes video mentions carditis, cellulitis, and glomerulonephritis because the bug is linked to all those. That’s 3 distinct body systems and represents hours of pathology knowledge. Sketchy Micro might make more sense as you further your pathology knowledge.

 

[TakotsuboOkazaki]

My strategy was sketchy micro-video + relevant "lolnotacop" micro deck cards.

Keep up with reviews and work through 1-3 videos per day.

 

[Ho0v-man]

It’s just memorize sketchy micro. Every single word. The why and how comes in when you learn about things like how different antibiotics cover different stuff. Like metronidazole for anaerobes, macrolides/doxy covering intracellular stuff well, etc. But even that is mostly just brute force repetition. It’s not really until boards where you start going “this covers this bug and and this bug has a lot in common with that so maybe this will work here too”.

I personally just struggled through it in M1 and memorized the sketchy micro decks cold before M2 and just kept up with it until boards.

 

[greentealeaves]

I’m not sure that brute forcing is the most efficient way to learn things and the way to maximize your step score. The highest scorers seem to have a deep understanding of the material. Do you have a different viewpoint / experience?

 

[Ho0v-man]

I’m not sure that brute forcing is the most efficient way to learn things and the way to maximize your step score. The highest scorers seem to have a deep understanding of the material. Do you have a different viewpoint / experience?

with physiology you’re absolutely correct. But when it comes to bugs and drugs, you’re pretty much memorizing the phone book. That’s why sketchy pharm/micro are so loved on this forum. When I was in M1, I didn’t like doing it this way bc I felt like a buzzword machine that didn’t actually know anything. But when I came into M2 after having spent the summer memorizing all of sketchy micro/lolnotacop decks I just murdered micro the rest of the way through. The deep understanding comes from doing practice questions to apply the stuff you memorized.

I’m very glad I did it this way for boards bc I wasn’t scrambling during dedicated to memorize this stuff bc that’s a lot of what was required for the infectious disease section of uworld (which was incredibly hard).

Finally, even in third year, this has been extremely helpful. A good chunk of pimp questions will be on what bugs should we cover and what drugs cover it. That’s really when you start to go beyond sketchy and FA and use what you’ve memorized up to that point.