I built the tool I couldn’t find

Years ago, I finished the Army’s one-year X-ray program and started bouncing between every test-prep site I could find, trying to figure out which one actually worked. I scored an 85 on one platform’s practice exam and a 72 on another, on the same material in the same week.

That inconsistency messed with my head. It made me feel like I was the problem, like I wasn’t studying hard enough, when the problem was the tests, not me.

At some point I got tired of chasing whatever site claimed to have the secret sauce. I went back to the actual ARRT® exam content specifications, pulled out my real textbooks, and made sure I personally covered every topic myself instead of trusting an app that hadn’t updated its site in ten years.

That was the turning point, and it wasn’t a better platform. It was going back to the source material and being honest about what I actually knew versus what I only thought I knew.

I came up through the military X-ray program, which matters here because of how it’s structured. The program is one year long and trains you to do the job, but it doesn’t require you to pass the national registry while you’re in.

The moment you leave, you can’t practice as a radiographer anywhere else without being registered. So a lot of veterans finish years of doing the job well and walk out without the credential that lets them keep doing it on the outside.

Only about 25% of Army X-ray techs ever end up registered, as far as I’ve seen. I’m grateful for what the military gave me, but that gap is real, and not enough people talk about it.

Between civilian and military backgrounds, everyone ends up in the same boat eventually: staring down an exam that decides whether you get to work in the field you already trained for, with a pile of prep resources that disagree with each other and all cost money.

That’s the reason I built StudyBucky: not because I had it all figured out, but because I was tired of the guessing game and wanted something built on the real exam blueprint, written against the source instead of thrown together.

I’ve spent countless hours reviewing questions and reworking everything to provide as much value as possible while keeping the price affordable. I’m constantly improving it, with a plan already in place for the 2027 ARRT® updates and high-quality video explanations of every hard-to-understand topic on the way.