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

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

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)!

Episodes

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

May 28, 2026 • 31 mins
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 therap...
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MD/PhD: The Long Game of Medicine and Research

May 21, 2026 • 62 mins
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 tal...
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Iowa City Haunts and Med School Hot Takes

May 14, 2026 • 70 mins
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 discov...
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Medical Students Judge Reddit’s Messiest Dilemmas (AITA)

May 11, 2026 • 44 mins
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 surprising...
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Their Last Free Summer: How Four M1s Are Spending It

May 7, 2026 • 44 mins
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-captu...
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The Doctor Doesn't Know Either: Inside the Diagnostic Crisis

April 30, 2026 • 70 mins
The feedback loop that would make doctors better diagnosticians doesn’t exist. Louise walked five minutes. Then her legs turned to stone. She stood at the side of the road, waiting for them to work again—and nobody figured out why for thirty years. 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 straigh...
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Blechardy Returns: Trivia, Wet Dog Beans, and Bad Guesses

April 23, 2026 • 53 mins
When the prize for a correct answer might be a poop-flavored jelly bean, getting it wrong is the best strategy. What if you answer a trivia question about 2,600-year-old cataract surgery correctly, and your reward is reaching into a box of jelly beans that might taste like dead fish — and you can’t lie about it? Ah, the question no one asked. Well, the answer is here! Blechardy is back, this time in Jelly Bean Mode ...
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"Ego Death?!" M4s Talk Audition Rotations

April 16, 2026 • 72 mins
How Away Rotations play into getting that dream residency Among all the strange things about medical school, there’s the so-called “away” or “audition” rotation. Recently matched 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 wou...
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What are Med Students Reading: Book Club!

April 9, 2026 • 54 mins
If reading makes better docs, these guys will be incredible. What if the cure for doctor-speak was actually just… reading more books? This week M1s Anna Royer, Sophia Hueser, Gwen Sewell, and Ellie Johnson have a genuinely great conversation about what it means to be a reader in med school. They dig into audiobooks vs reading brain research (turns out your brain basically doesn’t care, per a possibly unvetted Instagr...
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Medical Student Identity: What the White Coat Means

April 2, 2026 • 82 mins
The Hippocratic oath moment that turns anxious students into future physicians—even before they’ve treated a single patient You’re on stage at the “White Coat Ceremony,” putting on that short coat for the first time, and honestly? It feels kind of weird. Like you’re playing dress-up in someone else’s costume. That’s where M1s Jonah Albrecht, Anna Royer, Lillian Schmidt, and Lillie Lamont...
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From Fire Hose to Final Decision–How Med Students Choose Careers (Recess Rehash)

March 26, 2026 • 73 mins
[Last week was Spring Break here at Iowa. It was also Match Week, so this rerun from last year is worth a second look!] Picking a Career in Medicine is Insane. All of med school leads up to one moment: Match Day. But how do get there? Dave Etler sits down with graduating M4s Mallory Kallish (surgery), Matt Engelken (OB/gyn), Jacob Lamb (radiology), and Will Sai (famiy medicine) to unpack the uncertainty and pressure aro...
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Step Exams: Ready Or Not Here They Come

March 19, 2026 • 73 mins
Three exams that might drive you crazy. If you’re a pre-med, you may have heard about Step exams. But what are they? When the hell are you supposed to start studying? Should you be doing Anki cards in the womb? And are your scores actually going to determine your entire future? This episode is basically your reality check from people who’ve either survived these medical licensing exams or are currently drowning in pr...
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The Med School Traditions That Make Lifelong Bonds

March 12, 2026 • 55 mins
Building community through experiences Tradition is a big part of medical school–med students willingly tie themselves to comedy shows, charity 5Ks, and yearly ceremonies when they’re already drowning in anatomy and mechanisms of health and disease. This episode pulls back the curtain on the weird, wonderful, and occasionally dark traditions that make medical school way more than just textbooks and exams. M2s Riley D...
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Things You Can Do To Prepare for Med School (and One Thing You Shouldn’t!)

March 5, 2026 • 50 mins
Prioritize Fun! What should you do with the time between getting accepted to medical school and orientation week? Fallon Jung, Anna Royer, Jonah Albrecht, and Charis Edwards tell their stories about finding out they got in (including one bathroom cry session and a Colorado NICU celebration), what they actually did to prepare, and why you absolutely shouldn’t pre-study. If you’re headed to medical school next year, t...
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Choosing a Professional Identity: Beyond Medical School Classes

February 26, 2026 • 53 mins
How medical schools help students figure out what kind of doctor they’ll be. Looking at medical school and wondering what you’ll actually *do* with all that training? Like, you know you’ll doctor…but in what way? What will that look like for you? Luckily, most schools have something like the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine’s distinction tracks—formal project-based programs that le...
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Med Students on Long Distance Love: Does It Last?

February 19, 2026 • 59 mins
When medical school forces couples apart, students face tough realities Medical students dish on the messy, tender, and surprisingly philosophical reality of long-distance relationships during med school, from navigating five-hour drives and FaceTime rituals to deciding whether love can survive diverging lives on opposite sides of the world. Dave is joined by co-host M1s Cory Karasek and first-timers Elizabeth Meyer, Margaret Hu...
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Medical Students and Love: Do Their Spouses Really Know Them?

February 12, 2026 • 76 mins
The Heart Wants What It Wants. In this Valentine’s Day episode, four medical students sit down to play the ultimate compatibility game—answering questions their partners answered about them ahead of time. From whether they’re optimists or realists about med school (some hedging here), to what their dens would look like as animals (things got weird), these spouses and significant others prove they actually know their ...
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Med Students React: Social Media from Helpful to Hogwash

February 5, 2026 • 61 mins
Slather some beef tallow on it. On this episode, M3 Fallon Jung, M1s Isa Perez-Sandi 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 Dave smells 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 n...
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The Surprising Connection Between Hobbies and Medicine

January 29, 2026 • 66 mins
Don’t give up the outside activities that’ll make you a better doc As Dave has observed many times, medicine will take everything you have, if you allow it to. What this means is that you have to carve out time for your own interests, whether you’re a physician or a medical student. These are the things that not only keep you sane–an outlet for all the intensity that the study and practice of medicine has...
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Med Students Take the Hot Nugget Challenge

January 22, 2026 • 56 mins
[Content warning: Dave did his best to remove sniffles.] Spicy chicken nuggets, bad decisions, and what happens when medical students test their heat tolerance on mic What happens when medical students, extremely spicy chicken nuggets, and microphones collide? Regret. M1s Reed Adajaar, Trever Maiers, Ben Cooper, and Matt Taylor assigned themselves a Hot Ones–style challenge featuring progressively hotter sauces on chicke...
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