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

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...

Your future could include video conference interviews. Avoid (at all costs) giving interviewers a reason to say no. Photo by hang_in_there This episode is brought to you by Pattern. We hope you’ll check out their disability insurance offerings for docs at http://patternlife.com/partner/shortcoat. Are Zoom interviews the future? They could be, if some sort of magic doesn’t intervene in...

Moving to a new place can be daunting–but it’s an amazing opportunity! This episode is brought to you by Pattern. We hope you’ll check out their disability insurance offerings for docs at http://patternlife.com/partner/shortcoat. Photo by ~jar{} Listener Noodles (not her real name) is planning to go to med school in a new state, perhaps. What’s it like, she wondered, moving...

Photo by greyloch Policy is not sexy. I mean, it’s not saving lives, or curing disease, or making groundbreaking discoveries. But it isn’t a stretch to say that policy is as important as any of these, because politicians are making decisions about health and healthcare that affect millions of patients and their physicians. The laws they come up with determine what you can do for your p...

Photo by herlitz_pbs [Due to one thing or another, we didn’t record last week.  So here’s a re-run.  Hey, if Radiolab can do it, so can we.  Enjoy!] Med school may be a trying experience, but it’s made so much better by the lifelong friends you meet.  That’s the case for today’s co-hosts, Kylie Miller, Olivia Pittman, Danielle Schilling, and Erin P...

Dave wants to help his co-hosts--M1s Nathan Spitz, Cody West, and newbs Chris Halbur and Eli Schmidt--in their journey to physician-hood, so he puts on his medical educator hat and visits Yahoo! Answers.  He also discovers that when discussing his complaint with the doctor, he wants to be the crudest possible kind of patient. Senorina Espanole (not her real name) writes in to tell us what she's do...

Photo by Martin Lindstrom Dave asked listeners what they’re doing to help out in the time of COVID-19 and got some responses back to talk about.  These things, whether big or small, directly related or tangential to this public health crisis–even if it means staying at home–are all part of an unusual effort among the people of the world to contribute to a greater purpose.&nb...

(For the first time ever, we did the show with all five hosts in different places,  and it shows.  Forgive the scratchy audio in some places. We're working on it, and hope you can look past it this time.) In this time of social distancing, The Short Coats reluctantly step back from their education and research.   New co-hosts M1s Ananya Munjal and Claire Carmichael, along with MD/PhD students Alin...

There's no doubt that the global pandemic of COVID-19 has caused much human suffering.  And for those people around the world who are the worst affected, know that you have our deepest sympathies.  No one should have to go through this.   Nevertheless, something compelled Dave to think about the ways that society might change as a result of the pandemic...in some ways, perhaps for the better; in o...

Photo by herlitz_pbs Med school may be a trying experience, but it’s made so much better by the lifelong friends you meet.  That’s the case for today’s co-hosts, Kylie Miller, Olivia Pittman, Danielle Schilling, and Erin Pazaski, all M4s.  Their experience turns out to be a good thing for listener Coleman who wants to know if he should already know what his specialty wi...

Emotions are difficult to ignore. Especially when those emotions are telling us to ACT NOW! That's what listener Jordan from Texas is fighting as he happily gets an acceptance from his backup, with no word from his dream school. Should he commit now? Should he sit tight? Co-hosts Brandon Bacalzo, Michael Gardeau, Jessica De Haan, and Cody West (All M1s) share their experiences and advice for Jorda...

Academic medicine--in which a physician works at a university and may have research and/or teaching duties in addition to patient care--is but one of the fulfilling options available to medical students. What's that lifestyle like? That's the question an anonymous listener (who we'll call Dr. Piledhigh Erandeeper) wanted our help answering. Fortunately we have Miranda Schene and Sahaana Arumugam (...

The news that the USMLE changed the all-important Step 1 exam--which many residency programs have been using improperly to stratify applicants and which can affect one's specialty choice--to pass/fail starting in 2022-ish caused quite a bit of shock and consternation last week. Sure, some celebrated the change as a victory, but there's just one liiiiiittle problem: the more competitive residency p...

Turkish listener Ali would like to come to the US for residency and to practice medicine someday, so he wrote to us to ask us what we knew about how that works.  Co-host Nadia Wahba happened to visit Turkey a while back and blew our minds by letting us in on a little secret: that in the city she visited, there are public parks full of well-cared-for pets you can visit and play with. Also, Dav...

What does Rosanne Cash have to do with science or medicine? Sure, the American pop, folk, country, and roots rock legend isn’t technically a scientist.  But it was surprising for us to learn that Rosanne Cash has the soul of one within her, with its arms spread comfortably around her musician and poet souls.  When the University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium reached out to the College o...

Listener Salutes McGee (not her real name) is planning on med school after her tour of duty. What hard-won skills, she wonders, will transfer to medicine? And Krystal writes in with her med school debt worries. Will she need to plan to pay off $600,000 all in? No need to fear, Krystal and Salutes, because M4s Liza Mann, Derek Bradley, Jessie White, and M2 Abby Fife are here to soothe your fears an...

Listener Joseph starts medical school soon, and wants to know how to manage his new life as an M1. Luckily Kylie Miller, Kalyn Campbell, Marissa Evers, and Erica Henderson (all veteran med students) can help, Joseph--bottom line, studying is paramount, but there are keys to success you need to remember. Plus, we visit Yahoo Answers for some real-life health questions, including a couple that got D...

When listener Celebi Jigglypuff (yes, that's a pseudonym) reached out to ask whether we felt taking Step 1 after a year of clinical rotations (as some schools require) was a good idea or not, we were prepared to sink our teeth into that and have a normal show, too. But then, University of Iowa College of Education PhD student Andrea Ash happened to reach out to us because she's been looking at Ste...

Research takes time, so what's a realistic outcome for the summer research student? Pipette LeGogettuer (not her real name) wrote in to ask for our input on her summer research plans. Not only is she struggling to come up with a project idea but she has very specific hopes for her outcome--first authorship. Is that realistic? How can she find a project and someone who will sponsor her in their lab...

On a previous episode, Mason LaMarche discussed a college friend who had a habit of sketching his bowel movements. On this episode, his friend defends his artistic endeavor, while another LaMarche friend writes in with a question about mind over matter. And the gang--Mason, and M2s Emma Barr, Nick Lind, and Sahaana Arumugam--tastes some treats from another land. What does that have to do with med...

[Happy Holidays! Dave is on vacation, but here's a re-run to tide you over. We'll be back with new episodes starting 1/16] We on The Short Coat Podcast like to encourage people to follow their med school dreams in spite of whatever apparent obstacles stand in the way. So when we found out that Jessica McCabe, host of the popular YouTube channel How to ADHD, was coming to the University of Iowa, we...

[Happy Holidays! Dave is on vacation, but here's a re-run to tide you over. We'll be back with new episodes starting 1/16] Short Coat Scribbleson Wordsonpaper (not his real name) wrote a paper for one of his classes, and was told it'd be worth putting it out there for publication. But where, and how? So we asked Writing and Humanities Program Director (and SCP exec producer) Cate Dicharry to give...

This episode comes out the day after Christmas, and is recorded the week before, so we're exploring what some describe as "the most wonderful time of the year," and what others describe as Thursday. Given that recording date, in a bit of time travel Hillary O'Brien, Laura Quast, Jenna Johnson, and LJ Agostinelli share what they want to will have gotten (because time travel is confusing for grammar...

On this bonus episode of The Short Coat, we hear from Dr. John Mrachek. Dr. Mrachek is an anesthesiologist of 17 years who reached out to us at Iowa because he'd long felt a wedge being driven between doctors and their patients. He said that wedge, made of mouse clicks, political meddling, insurance middlemen, patient satisfaction surveys, and annoying electronic health records--was disconnecting...

The amazing Dr. Ryan Gray, host of quite a few of the pre-med focused podcasts over at mededmedia.com (of which we, of course, are a member), joins Maddie Mix, Hillary O'Brien, Nick Lind, and Kyle Kinder as guest co-host! Which is good, because we start with a rather difficult topic: should the parents of a profoundly disabled child--who will never be able to care for herself in even the most basi...