The Short Coat: An Inside Look at Getting Into and Getting Through Medical School

From Bartending to Bedside: What Our Pre-Med Jobs Taught Us About Medicine (Recess Rehash) 13.08.2026 51min

If you're thinking of starting over and going to med school, you might wonder what your previous jobs have done to prepare you for it. Good news: your old jobs and activities might matter more than your GPA ever will. And we hear from a listener who wants to know if we were super studious in high school. We try to let him down gently.

Clown Shoes, Attending Feedback, and a Very Quiet Goose 06.08.2026 1h 4min

This week M3s Srishti Mathur and Zach Grissom are joined by CCOM admissions expert Rachel Shulista and the PA Program clinicals coordinator Andrew Dao. You might think they're here to offer their expertise in some informative way so that Short Coat Listeners can benefit. You'd be wrong, because Dave is making everyone rank things nobody should have to rank: how believable your excuse for missing sleep is, how harsh your last piece of attending feedback was, how likely you are to botch a procedure you've never done before. It's another round of our special version of That Escalated Quickly, the card game where the only rule committing to the rank.

Feedback, Filler Words, and Fights Over Naturopathic Medicine 30.07.2026 1h 12min

M2s Akshaj Joshi, Anna Royer, Charis Edwards, and Cory Karasek talk about giving and receiving feedback, what it's like reading a stack of evaluative comments about yourself, why "keep reading" is somehow a real evaluation, and whether attendings have started letting AI write their write-ups. Also, do quiet students get read more harshly than talkative ones, does anybody actually change their filler-word habit once someone points it out, and is your personality basically locked in since the day you were born (this one gets a full psychoanalysis of Joshi's baby years). Also, we visit reddit to help people. For instance, an AITA dilemma asks whether refusing hospital visitors after birth makes you the asshole, whether it's awful to end a ten-year relationship over a partner's decision to go to naturopathic school, and somebody's uncle wants a free diagnosis at the next family gathering, and gets read for it, ethically, legally, and personally.

Should Medical Students have Babies (spoiler: yeah, baby!) 23.07.2026 1h 2min

M2 Jack Klitgaard and M4 Fallon Jung are both expecting newborns in the coming months. M2 Regan Demaris has a couple toddlers already, and CCOM Registrar and Curriculum Director Carrie Bernat had her children while putting her husband through medical school two decades ago. In short, it's the perfect group to talk about the challenges and triumphs of cuddling kids while cramming the Krebs cycle. Fallon's challenge will be how to apply for residency positions with a new little one. Jack faces starting his clinical rotations while stepping into the role of father. Fortunately, both of their spouses are going to stay at home to be the primary caregiver. Regan's toddlers came into the world before medical school and as her husband was in the Navy, which presented its own moments of terror--like how to cope with a daycare disaster while he was incommunicado on a boat somewhere. And Carrie--well, 20 years ago she was working at another medical school and having babies while her husband navigated an MD/PhD program. They were handling it well until her second child was born with a chromosomal microdeletion, upending carefully laid plans.

Free Med School and a Mission: Is Military Medicine For You? 16.07.2026 58min

For pre-meds staring down six figures of debt, the military offers something rare: a fully funded path through medical school built around a mission bigger than the paycheck. Dave sits down with M3 Nick Lebezeder, M3 Lauren VandeKamp, and M2 Lydia Bemnister to walk through the menu of options — among others, the Health Professions Scholarship Program, National Guard and Reserve stipends, USUHS (the military's own medical school in Bethesda, which pays you a second lieutenant's salary while you train), and the Navy's Health Services Collegiate Program. Nick lays out how a three-year HPSP scholarship maps to three years of service after residency, and Lauren walks through the math on longer residencies so nobody signs blind. The commitment is real. So is what it buys: leadership experience from day one, a guaranteed specialty pipeline for the ones who plan ahead, and, for the right person, a sense of purpose civilian medicine doesn't always hand you.

These Iowa PA Students Are Riding 68 Miles for Cancer Prevention (BONUS EP) 14.07.2026 42min

Isabel Ahmann, Alex Fouts, and Nia Tanui, and Giana Michels just survived their first year of PA school alongside the MDs, and to celebrate they're riding 68 miles across Iowa. This year's Register's Annual Bike Ride Across Iowa features a day focused on Why I Ride--that day, July 22, the route runs from Boone to Marshalltown. These physician associate students are dedicating their day to funding cancer screening and prevention across Iowa, especially in the rural communities where the rates are climbing fastest. They're already over $1,000 in fundraising, with sponsors on the shirts, and every rider is committing a dollar per mile. Join the fundraising efforts! https://goldrush.uiowa.edu/miles-that-matter-cycling-to-combat-cancer-in-iowa

Roshan Sethi on Med School Simpering and Making It in Hollywood 09.07.2026 58min

Radiation oncologist and director Roshan Sethi: confidence in medicine is mostly performance. The book club is back, and M2s Anna Royer, Ellie Johnson, and Sofia Hueser, and M4 Alex Nigg all crowd around to grill an actual Hollywood director about his debut novel. Somewhere in Roshan Sethi‘s frontal lobe is a cyst, and it’s possibly why he is a reformed gunner, Hollywood writer/director, still radiation oncologist, and now novelist. Sethi is co-creator of Fox’s The Resident, and author of The Simp: A Novel Without a Hero, a new book built out of a viral job ad so horrifying nobody would claim authorship of it. What does it mean that Raj, the novel’s desperate, self-aware sycophant of a protagonist, reads less like a Hollywood assistant and more like a third-year on rotations? Sethi doesn’t dodge the comparison—he wrote most of Raj’s obliging, invisible, gunner-brained misery straight out of his own decade in medicine. Sethi describes himself, pre-Hollywood, as ruthless enough to publish 15 papers in a single year for a career he’s since walked mostly away from–he still practices 9 weeks a year–and he does the math on what staying in medicine actually cost him: when The Resident got greenlit for a sixth season and syndication, he’d already turned the show down to finish residency, a decision one producer later priced at $12 million. Sethi traces a lot of that old ambition back to being closeted through college and medical school; the striving, he says, was never really about medicine, and coming out took most of the edge off it. Also, what happens to a person’s personality over four years of medical school? Sethi’s answer: it gets slowly closeted right along with everything else, trained out of you until invisibility reads as professionalism. He tells the room the worst response to getting pimped isn’t “I don’t know”—it’s saying it apologetically, like you owe someone an explanation for not yet knowing something nobody expects you to know. Speaking of things that require confidence you don’t actually have: Sethi’s next film, The Surgeon, stars Michelle Yeoh as a retired surgeon taken hostage and forced to operate. Dave can’t wait. He even pitched Sethi on his own idea for a movie that’s not at all derivative, and though it will probably star Mark Ruffalo, Dave is available. On representation, Sethi draws a sharp line between his two industries. Medicine has become more female and more Indian, Asian, and Nigerian over time precisely because it runs on an objective, if imperfect, filter that values whoever scores highest on the MCAT. Hollywood, by his account, has no equivalent filter: roughly 90 percent of the highest-grossing films are still directed by men; minorities in the industry get treated as diversity projects rather than talent, and there’s nothing resembling medicine’s blunt, if flawed, meritocracy. Episode credits: Producer: Dave Etler Co-hosts: Anna Royer, Ellie Johnson, Alex Nigg, Sophia Hueser Guest: Roshan Sethi, MD Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Royer, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson The views and opinions expressed on this podcast belong solely to the individuals who share them. They do not represent the positions of the University of Iowa, the Carver College of Medicine, or the State of Iowa. All discussions are intended for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Nothing said on this podcast should be used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition. Always seek qualified professional guidance for personal decisions. We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS! We welcome your feedback, listener questions, and shower thoughts. Do you agree or disagree with something we said today? Did you hear something really helpful? Can we answer a question for you? Are we delivering a podcast you want to keep listening to? Let us know at https://theshortcoat.com/tellus and we’ll put your message in a future episode. Or email theshortcoats@gmail.com. We need to know more about you! https://surveys.blubrry.com/theshortcoat (email a screenshot of the confirmation screen to theshortcoats@gmail.com with your mailing address and Dave will mail you a thank you package!) The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast!  Thanks for listening! We do more things on… Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theshortcoat YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/theshortcoat You deserve to be happy and healthy. If you’re struggling with racism, harassment, hate, your mental health, or some other crisis, visit http://theshortcoat.com/help, and send additions to the resources there to theshortcoats@gmail.com. We love you. AI disclosure: Voices of host, co-hosts, and guests are human.  Some other voices–such as listener questions or questions/comments from the internet–may be AI generated.

Medicine is Changing. Step Up and Shape It 02.07.2026 1h 8min

As societies and governments wrestle with the rise of artificial intelligence, The Short coats sit down with Dr. Lindsey Knake, a CCOM alum neonatologist and associate chief health information officer, to map out where AI actually stands in medicine right now. M2s Mukund Viswanadha, Deeraj Manika, and Samee Jung sort through the muddle of chatbots, agents, and machine learning, then get specific about the tools already embedded in their days. Dr. Knake also lays out Iowa's new clinical informatics fellowship in detail — a two-year, post-residency program. There's a lot of optimism in this episode, along with some side-eye. If you want to know how AI will affect you as a medical student and future physician, this is the right episode for that!

The No-Guilt Summer: Med Students Finally Breathe 25.06.2026 1h 12min

It's freeform Friday on the pod, which means the Iowa City parking situation is excellent, the rising M2s are bored and slightly guilty about it, and absolutely willing to tell a full story about a stranded boat. As their first year in medical school recedes into their past, Ellie Johnson, Braiden DeSchryver, Sarvin Mousakhani, Regan DeMaris, and Alana Jones join Dave for an episode that reveals the specific texture of med student summer — the productivity guilt your PI has to prescribe against, the hobbies you've been saving since last August, and the strange peace of Iowa City when the academic calendar stops grinding for awhile.

Game of Med School — We Actually Made It 18.06.2026 1h 19min

Can The Short Coats make a card game that captures the twists and turns of medical school? Well, we've given it a try, and now we finally play it — the Game of Med School, a prototype card-based playthrough of the full medical school path, from premed clubs to residency match. Cyrus Barati, who helped build the game, takes on the Gunner identity and immediately gets routed to clinical years while still underwater on points. M4 Fallon Jung (pregnant, unbothered) draws the Resilient Student card and somehow converts a failed Step exam into a net positive. M3s Sarah Upton and Zach Grissom round out the cast, with Zach's Non-Traditional Student racking up an improbable collection of degrees, nursing licenses, and EMT certifications before anyone gets to medical school proper. The cards lead to real conversations: What's a post-bacc worth on an application? How do you handle a professionalism flag? What actually happens when your PI moves states mid-MD-PhD? How do you tell a patient bad news — and does a med student ever actually have to? Does your identity change any of that? The real question: would you play this game if we gave it away? Listener feedback is always welcome at https://theshortcoat.com/tellus!

Foreign Competition for Residency: The Data vs. The Rhetoric 11.06.2026 56min

The $100,000 H-1b visa fee landed in September 2025 like a fire alarm in the hallways of medicine—hospitals panicked, advocacy groups mobilized, and a lot of people predicted the international resident pipeline would collapse. Dr. Bryan Carmody, The Sheriff of Sodium rejoins co-hosts David Lee, Mukund Viswanadha, and Isa Perez-Sandi to ask the question nobody was asking: was the panic grounded in reality? More interesting to think about: why rural physician shortages are a compensation and incentive problem, not a numbers problem; why loan forgiveness alone probably isn't moving the needle; and what separates effective physician advocacy from "just expressing emotion and hoping facts do the work." Then graduating high-school listener Aditi asks whether community college is a viable launch pad for medicine.

Med School Stereotypes Shattered: What We’re Really Like Inside (Recess Rehash) 04.06.2026 1h 3min

We've all got that mental image of medical students – the type-A perfectionists grinding through textbooks even on the porcelain throne, right? Well, our first-year medical students at Iowa are about to blow up every assumption you've ever had. The people memorizing a zillion anatomical structures aren't exactly who you'd expect. M1s Chase McInville, Lillian Schmidt, Jonah Albrecht, and Abbie Townsend reveal why your pre-med study plans are probably useless, how a hockey ref's confidence translates to patient care, and why some medical students refuse to study on Saturdays. We explore the real traits that matter (spoiler: it's not being a genius), bust the myth about cutthroat competition, and discover why medical school might actually be more collaborative than you thought.

From EKG Meltdowns to OSCE Roller Coasters (or Treadmills): '25-26 Med School Vibes Recap 28.05.2026 31min

The Carver Carnival is the Carver College of Medicine's unofficial exhale — an end-of-year celebration where students who have been running on caffeine and anxiety for nine months can finally look up from their notes. In an unusual move, the Short Coat took its mic into the crowd and asked what these med students actually learned. The EKG crisis that resolved by Thursday, the anatomy confabulations that somehow pass, and the therapy dogs reveal a recurring theme: medical school is both harder and more fun than you might expect, the competition is a myth (at least, here), and the best thing you can do the hour before your next exam is probably go to the gym instead of studying. And the financial aid guy in the dunk tank sends memes at the end of bad-news emails.

MD/PhD: The Long Game of Medicine and Research 21.05.2026 1h 2min

Riley Behan-Bush found the MD/PhD program through a Google search. Hannah Van Ert had already started a career in nursing before a research lab changed her path completely. Eight years (!) of combined medical and scientist training later, they're in their final stretch — and it often didn't feel like a long slog of schooling. They sit down with MSTP faculty Darren Hoffman, PhD, and Martha Carvour, MD/PhD (CCOM Class of 2012) to talk about how it works, what this path actually costs, who gets access to it, and whether federal funding cuts are about to make it a lot harder to find out.

Iowa City Haunts and Med School Hot Takes 14.05.2026 1h 10min

For the full list of our favorite places, visit https://theshortcoat.com/haunts. Iowa City is small enough that you can bike from the hospital to a wood-fired pizza place and back before your study group notices you're gone — but it's also weird and big enough that you can spend your first semester missing half of what makes it worth being here. If you're heading to Iowa City this fall, this episode gives you six months of discovery in about an hour--visit https://theshortcoat.com/?p=23180 for the list! Then the group offers their hot takes on med school life: whether ceremonies are designed for students at all, whether shadowing requirements are an equity problem, and whether students who hit a wall should be able to master out (it's possible, but it's also not on the website).

Medical Students Judge Reddit’s Messiest Dilemmas (AITA) 11.05.2026 44min

Dave and his M1 co-hosts Lily Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Jonah Albrecht, and Anna Royer, take a field trip to Reddit's AITA sub— because self-reflection is not usually how people figure out if they're the problem. Four posts, four verdicts, and get genuinely sidetracked in the best way: there's a chlamydia anecdote Dave shares, a philosophical debate about whether watching movies at 2.5x speed makes you a bad partner, and a surprisingly earnest conversation about what med students actually owe their families when they become the designated "medical person" in the room. And (med school parents, take note) a doctor-mom posts about telling her struggling pre-med daughter she isn't cut out for medicine--and Reddit tears her a ne...helps her understand why that's not the best approach.

Their Last Free Summer: How Four M1s Are Spending It 07.05.2026 44min

Four medical students— Lily Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Jonah Albrecht, and Anna Royer— talk through how they landed on their "last free summer ever" plans: research fellowships, a genetics scholars program, global health immersion in Ecuador, Colorado fourteeners, and the lingering question of whether any of it actually matters for residency. Jonah is off to Ecuador in part to avoid a lab. Lily is in a clinic implementing joint-capture software partly because she can't do chart review without going sideways. Melia is doing genetics because she actually likes the patient population. Sure, they're all deciding to do something med school adjacent. But they are exercising the option to choose the focus of their attention in this last summer of life at the margins of medicine.

The Doctor Doesn't Know Either: Inside the Diagnostic Crisis 30.04.2026 1h 10min

Author and New York Times Health and Science Opinion Editor Alexandra Sifferlin has spent years as a journalist fielding emails from patients who couldn't get a straight answer from medicine—not because their doctors were incompetent, but because diagnosis is harder, messier, and more dependent on luck and geography than anyone wants to admit. Her book The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis traces the problem from rural Kentucky to the NIH's Undiagnosed Diseases Network, and her conversation with M4 Jeff Goddard, M1 Madelyn Klemmensen, and M2 Zach Goddard goes deep on the mechanics of how diagnostic errors actually happen: availability bias, the missing feedback loop, specialty tunnel vision, and the slow erosion of trust that pushes patients toward people selling them supplements.

Blechardy Returns: Trivia, Wet Dog Beans, and Bad Guesses 23.04.2026 53min

Blechardy is back, this time in Jelly Bean Mode — where every correct answer earns you a mystery BeanBoozled jelly bean that could be peach or could be barf. PA professor Jeremy Nelson and learning community manager Cody Pritchard team up against first-year Tyler Mills, second-year Alexis Baker, and PA student government president Megan Renner. The categories: ancient medical procedures, misunderstood body parts, legends of medicine, internet memes from 2010–2020, and general knowledge. The chaos starts immediately when nobody can figure out what ancient healers packed wounds with, and it only escalates from there.

"Ego Death?!" M4s Talk Audition Rotations 16.04.2026 1h 12min

Among all the strange things about medical school, there's the so-called "away" or "audition" rotation. M4s Aditi Katwala, Hend Al-Kaylani, Lena Volfson, and Kristin Davis talk about what it's like to leave CCOM for weeks at a time to visit another hospital. Maybe they want to experience some new things there they wouldn't have seen at Iowa. But also, it's often about showing off their med-student skills for a residency program they might match with in another part of the country.