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

The Students of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine
  • 4.7 (309)
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The HONEST guide to medical school, featuring real students from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine–skip this show if you’d rather not know (and hate laughter)!

  1. 3d ago

    The No-Guilt Summer: Med Students Finally Breathe

    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.

    1h 12m

  2. Jun 18

    Game of Med School — We Actually Made It

    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!

    1h 20m

  3. Jun 11

    Foreign Competition for Residency: The Data vs. The Rhetoric

    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.

    56 min

  4. May 28

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

    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.

    31 min

  5. May 21

    MD/PhD: The Long Game of Medicine and Research

    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.

    1h 2m

  6. May 14

    Haunts and Hot Takes

    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).

    1h 11m

  7. May 11

    Medical Students Judge Reddit’s Messiest Dilemmas (AITA)

    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.

    44 min

  8. May 7

    Their Last Free Summer: How Four M1s Are Spending It

    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.

    44 min
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The HONEST guide to medical school, featuring real students from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine–skip this show if you’d rather not know (and hate laughter)!

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