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

A new group of co-hosts, all M1s, discuss what it’s been like to start medical school (in a pandemic). TL;DR We discuss what our new co-hosts, all M1s, learned about themselves and med school this year. Did they prepare or study before they started school in the fall? And very important: what flatulence schedule would they prefer? Steph Rodriguez, Zain Mehdi, Martin Goree, and Carl Skoog are...

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! TL;DR Should Victoria also get a law degree to facilitate a career in health policy? Shea sends feedback on our recent discussion of options for unmatched MD SeniorsWe practice answering patient questions with a straight face by visiting Yahoo! Answers for what might be the last time! The Big News in medical education is that a valuable resource for practicing patien...

You can have the best scores and grade, but personality counts TL;DR Affective presence is the lasting and stable impressions your interaction partners get from you. Your scores and grades only get you in the door. It’s your personality that makes you a medical student, and later, a doctor.  So make sure you’re giving off the right vibes! Listener Kalmen reminds us of a paths for...

COVID stressed healthcare but showed us a better future. TL;DR COVID revealed what’s broken in healthcare, and also offers a glimpse of how it can be fixedDistributed, decentralized and digital isn’t about technology, but about putting patients at the center of healthcare. Read Dr. Nundy’s book Care After Covid: What the Pandemic Revealed Is Broken in Healthcare and How to Reinve...

How did COVID affect the 2021 Match? This week's sponsor, Panacea Financial (Member FDIC) is giving away $500 to five students participating in the 2021 Match. Match Week is huge for senior medical students. It's the week they find out if they will continue their training (yikes!), and where in the country they will go to complete it...and this year's match was even more anxiety provoking than usu...

The Art of Compliments Photo by Ross Dunn Our sponsor, Panacea Financial, is having a giveaway! 5 students in the 2021 Match will get $500 in their Match Day Giveaway, so head on over to find out more! It must have been a bad week for someone, because Dave thought it’d be great to have a compliment festival. Of course, compliments have a huge role in learning, though Dave wasn’t sure t...

No school, employer, or profession is perfect; and lots of times, you have to step up to fix it. Photo by Georgie Pauwels This episode’s sponsor, Panacea Financial, is having a Match Day Giveaway! Med students in the 2021 Match can enter to be one of five students who will win $500! Enter at panaceafinancial.com/matchday. Long time SCP listener and CCOM M4 Austin Kazarian joins us on the sho...

This episode is sponsored by Panacea Financial, a Division of Sonabank, Member FDIC. Panacea is banking for medical students and doctors. Every once in a while, Dave likes to just get to know his med student co-hosts better. This time, in order to accomplish that goal, he invited each of them–M1s Rick Gardner, AJ Chowdhury, Alex Belzer, and M4 Tim Maxwell–to bring some converation star...

Opinions are like *ssholes. They're everywhere. But that doesn't mean that the advice you'll get is always useful. On today's show, Marisa Evers, Rick Gardner, Eric Boeshart, and Nicole Hines discuss the advice that co-hosts have gotten during their journey that didn't quite pan out as true. Plus the crew try to guess what's been censored out of stock photos Dave found--play along on our Instagram...

When should med students trust their school…and when should they push back? This episode is sponsored by Panacea Financial, a division of Sonabank, member FDIC. Panacea is banking for medical students, built by doctors. Med students sometimes find it difficult to trust their school will get them through this ordeal of learning medicine.  Sometimes you’re taught things that seem less th...

The medical student’s jobs may be less than sexy, but they’re important. Photo by Oregon State University Medical students are both learners and an important part of the teaching hospital labor pool. Recently, Dave realized he doesn’t actually know–what are their actual jobs? And how do they find out what they are? In general the job is to both learn medicine and be helpful...

Doing stuff outside of your coursework is fantastic…until it isn’t. Actual photograph of Gwyneth Paltrow’s “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle in use. Listener Tasneem Ahmed–a fourth-year medic at London’s King’s College–joins MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, M4 Holly Conger, and M1s AJ Chowdhury and Alex Belzer on the show. She wrote to us at &#x...

Which take on medicine is best for patients and provider mental health? Dave and the gang–including M1s AJ Chowdhury and Alex Belzer; M4 Holly Conger; and MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk–take a look at the prevalent idea that medicine is a “calling,” somewhat like religion is for many. That’s an imperfect analogy, but there are parallels. People talk, for instance, about...

How they can help, support, and understand what you’re doing here. “I’m afraid medical science has yet to find a cure for ‘Brown Owies,’ madam.” [We livestream our recording sessions most Fridays on our listeners Facebook group, The Short Coat Student Lounge. Join us to add your questions and comments to the show!] Families are a blessing (usually). A source of...

Are you an allopath or an osteopath? Photo by cogdogblog [Happy New Year! Did you know you can join The Short Coat Student Lounge on Facebook, and help us with the show? We livestream there every time we record, and if you’re there you can help us make sure we get all the angles.] A while back we got a somewhat provocative listener question: do osteopathic medicine students have a disadvanta...

Good intentions are everywhere. Good behavior...well, that's more complicated. Such is the case with microaggressions, the term coined by Harvard University psychiatrist Chester Pierce in 1970 to describe minor yet hurtful comments. Pierce's original definition encompassed statements aimed at African Americans, but of course one can accidentally or purposefully put down any minority individual--wo...

Doctors and medical students often have an identity based on perfection and infallibility.  Often it that identity comes from their own expectations of themselves, and sometimes it comes from external sources.  Whatever the source, it's both motivating and problematic to feel shame when mistakes are made or when knowledge is imperfect. Fourth-year student and future OB/Gyn doc Luci Howard visited...

Happy Holidays! As we recorded this show, vaccine doses were beginning to spread across the world–well, across the rich countries of the world, anyway. The poorer countries were left with the WHO’s risky donation-funded program to distribute doses, causing concern that the program might just collapse because some countries we could mention decided not to contribute. We’re looking...

[Last week’s show encountered some technical difficulties. So enjoy this rerun instead. We promise it’s cool.] “He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.” Photo by firepile Co-hosts Nathen Spitz, Brandon Bacalzo, Mariam Mansour, and Greta Becker rehash their recent microbiology exam which they say kicked their butts, and how they deal with that nasty feeling. Dave discu...

[This episode is sponsored by Panacea Financial, a Division of Sonabank, Member FDIC. Please support our sponsor by visiting https://panaceafinancial.com/] In mid-November, the American Medical Association declared racism to be a public health threat. With that declaration, they adopted policies to acknowledge and recognize racism as detrimental to the health and well-being of all of America&...

Hippocrates set a high bar. [Hope your Thanksgiving was excellent, safe, and happy! We didn’t record anything this week, so here’s a rerun for you.]Dr. Danielle Ofri–NYU professor of medicine, Bellevue Hospital internist, and author of great renown–joined us this time to talk about her new book, When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error.  Examining medical errors is a something...

[This episode is sponsored by Panacea Financial, a Division of Sonabank, Member FDIC. Please support our sponsor by visiting https://panaceafinancial.com/] The Short Coats have begun livestreaming their recordings in our Facebook group (most Fridays at noon central–join us and be a part of the show). Listeners Garrett and Isaac wrote in with questions about the clinical hours schools want fr...

Given how much med school costs, isn’t it best to go for your cheapest option? [This episode is sponsored by Panacea Financial, a Division of Sonabank, Member FDIC. Please support our sponsor by visiting https://panaceafinancial.com/] A listener we’re calling Victor Von Stateschool called us at 347-SHORT-CT to continue the recent spate of listener questions about choosing a medical sch...

Should Jenna broaden her horizons by moving away for medical school? Photo by merra marie [This episode is sponsored by Panacea Financial, a Division of Sonabank, Member FDIC. Please support our sponsor by visiting https://panaceafinancial.com/] Listener Jenna got into Carver College of Medicine! But she’s worried–should she go to a new place to study medicine instead, or should she st...

Name recognition is great, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. So Fancy! Listener Morgan wrote in to ask what we thought about Ivy League schools with high name recognition, and whether it should be an important factor in her decision on a school to attend. MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk and M2s Greta Becker, Mariam Mansour, and Brandon Bacalzo discuss what they’ve learned abou...