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

Five Med Students on Thriving in Clerkships 17.09.2026 1sa 9dk

Dave sits down with a crew of M3s and one asterisked MSTP M4 — Riley Behan-Bush, Samantha Gardner, Srishti Mathur, Sahana Sarin, and Sarah Upton — to talk about the actual experience of clerkships: what the jump from three semesters of preclinical book-learning into surgery, psychiatry, emergency medicine, and family medicine really feels like, why the first two weeks can swing from "best of med school" to "worst of med school" depending entirely on the rotation you land, and how you're supposed to figure out your place on a team that changes every two weeks. Also, they answer a batch of questions submitted by their own preclinical classmates: how much free time you actually get (some), whether Des Moines versus Iowa City rotations matter (it depends what you want out of medicine), and what actually makes clerkship life easier — which turns out to be a year's supply of Costco garbage bags, a cellular hotspot, and, for at least one host, a husband who meal preps.

Med Students React: Social Media from Helpful to Hogwash (Recess Rehash) 10.09.2026 1sa 1dk

On this episode, M3 Fallon Jung, M1s Alexis Baker and Cory Karasek, and M2 Maria Schapfel let loose on the internet's wildest health content We react to AI-generated videos claiming cortisol is why we smell bad, Colonel Sanders warning you about non-biodegradable supermarket fruit, and those unhinged animations where a screaming spine demands you fix your posture. Some of it's nonsense, some of it's accurate, and all of it leads to tangents about fake vomit made from chunky soup, whether the triage nurse should tell you "good news, you're not dying," and the eternal question every clerkship student faces: "What specialty are you going into?"

Imposter Syndrome, Uncomfortable Fails, and Med School's Real Ups and Downs 03.09.2026 59dk

The Short Coat records in front of a live audience — a room full of brand-new medical students at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine during orientation week. Dave is joined by M3 Zach Grissom, M3 Sarah Upton, M2 Sophie Hueser, and first-time co-host M2 Sudeep Gadde, and together they map the ups and downs of med school across three fronts: the identity shift of becoming a doctor, the grind of the education system itself, and the way a personal life bends (but doesn’t break!) around all of it

DNP Doubts, Prepping for Patients, and Smarts Self-Doubt--listener questions answered! (Recess Rehash) 27.08.2026 1sa

Real answers for your real med school dilemmas. We’ve had some listener question stacking up like it’s the ER waiting room at shift change—and now we’re finally calling some names. This week, we’re clearing the board and giving straight talk on everything from whether Rainey might regret her choice of DNP over med school, Worried Traveler’s fears of surviving their first clinical rotations, and Zion’s untested study habits. You’ll hear why reputation beats job title, the art of asking questions without tanking the vibe, and some ideas on making the transition from an easier undergrad education to med school madness. M4s Hend Al-Kaylani, Maryam Ahmad, and Madeline Ungs confront the awkward task of making friends in med school and why it’s okay if you’re not instantly every resident/faculty favorite.

How A Neurologist Thinks about The Self, ft. Masud Husain 20.08.2026 59dk

Dave's got a brain — he's pretty sure, anyway, since the MRI never mentioned otherwise — and this week he, with M3 Gizzy Lundquist and M2s Akshaj Joshi and Isa Perez-Sandi sit down with University of Oxford neurologist Masud Husain to talk about what happens when that brain stops working the way it's supposed to. Husain's new book, Our Brains, Ourselves: What a Neurologist's Patients Taught Him About the Brain, walks through seven patients whose identities came apart when a single cognitive process — memory, language, attention, motivation — went sideways. If you've got any interest in how brains and neurologists work, his book is a great read.

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

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 1sa 4dk

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 1sa 12dk

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 1sa 2dk

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 58dk

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 42dk

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 58dk

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.

Medicine is Changing. Step Up and Shape It 02.07.2026 1sa 8dk

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 1sa 12dk

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 1sa 19dk

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 56dk

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 1sa 3dk

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 31dk

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 1sa 2dk

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 1sa 10dk

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).