The Pre-Med Playbook

Medical school debt dictates the future of too many young physicians. With tuition costs climbing and federal loan programs shifting, finding alternative funding paths is an immediate priority for incoming medical students. Student Dr. John Brown, Student Dr. Isabella Managbanag, and Dr. Amanda Deal join the show to explain how the military’s Health Professions Scholarship Program funds medical education in exchange for servi...

Burnout is a silent career killer for first-year medical students. With orientation season wrapping up and the academic pressure cooker officially turning on, aspiring physicians need to know exactly what they are walking into before the workload becomes unmanageable. Casey Pearce sits down with veteran NYITCOM students Meghana Kumaran, Amaya Britton, and Nicholas Loudermilk to unpack the intense realities and practical strategies ...

The shift from undergraduate studies to medical school will quickly punish anyone relying on last-minute cramming. With incoming classes preparing to step onto campus and pre-meds planning their future applications, understanding the daily realities of professional education is critical to avoiding early burnout. We sit down with incoming student Jenna Brown and second-year medical students Larry Turner and Gracie Folks to unpack w...

You are going to be that age anyway, so you might as well be that age with a medical degree. The fear of being the "old" student in the lecture hall stops too many capable people from pursuing a career in medicine, but non-traditional applicants actually have a massive hidden advantage. T.J. Moore and Dakota Roberts, two non-traditional medical students at NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine, share how they pivoted from establishe...

You can be the “smart kid” your whole life and still get humbled fast by the first year of medical school. Right after finishing their last exam, three NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine students sit down with me to unpack what the transition really feels like, from the relief of being “25% doctors” to the stress of never feeling fully ready for a test.

We dig into imposter syndrome and the practica...

Med school dreams don’t always follow a straight line, and that doesn’t make them any less real. We sit down with three NYITCOM students who took a post-bacc Master of Biomedical Sciences (BMS) route before starting a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO) program, and they get honest about what pushed them there: waitlists, shaky confidence, big life detours, and the stress of the MCAT. If you’ve ever wondered wheth...

The number that freaks people out is easy to say and hard to picture: $300,000. We wanted to slow that down and make it real, so we sat with Dr. Shane Speights, Dean of NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State, and Dr. Vicki Walker, our associate director of financial aid and registration, to talk plainly about the true cost of medical school and how students actually pay for it.

We start where every plan shoul...

Most people think choosing a medical specialty is a single decision you make near the end of med school. We see it as a long chain of moments: the first patient you connect with, the rotation that surprises you, the mentor who challenges you, and the day you realize you actually want to come back and do this work for decades.

We sit down with Dr. Adam Hurst, an outpatient pediatrician and NYITCOM Arkansas faculty member, and...

The MCAT can feel like a gatekeeper, and a “perfect” timeline can feel like the only timeline. We sit down with three NYITCOM Arkansas medical students who prove that neither is true. Their stories include a strategic gap year for MCAT prep and clinical hours, a nontraditional route that includes a biomedical sciences master’s program, and five gap years shaped by burnout, patient care work, and the realities of C...

The medical school admissions process feels confusing for a reason: it is part academics, part storytelling, and part long-term planning. We sit down with our NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine team at Arkansas State University, plus a current second-year medical student, to give you a clear map of what matters and what doesn’t as you move from premed to medical student.

We talk about the biggest misconceptions we he...

Arkansas doesn’t just have a healthcare challenge; it has a pipeline challenge. A third of the physician workforce is 60 or older, and the state ranks near the bottom in doctors per capita and key health outcomes. So, how do you build more doctors who actually train here and stay here?

I sit down with Casey Pearce, Director of External Relations and Marketing for NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State (...