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

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Free Med School and a Mission: Is Military Medicine For You? Jul 16, 2026

Show notes

For pre-meds staring down six figures of debt, the military offers something rare: a fully funded path through medical school built around a mission bigger than the paycheck. Dave sits down with M3 Nick Lebezeder, M3 Lauren VandeKamp, and M2 Lydia Bemnister to walk through the menu of options — among others, the Health Professions Scholarship Program, National Guard and Reserve stipends, USUHS (the military's own medical school in Bethesda, which pays you a second lieutenant's salary while you train), and the Navy's Health Services Collegiate Program. Nick lays out how a three-year HPSP scholarship maps to three years of service after residency, and Lauren walks through the math on longer residencies so nobody signs blind. The commitment is real. So is what it buys: leadership experience from day one, a guaranteed specialty pipeline for the ones who plan ahead, and, for the right person, a sense of purpose civilian medicine doesn't always hand you.

These Iowa PA Students Are Riding 68 Miles for Cancer Prevention (BONUS EP) Jul 14, 2026

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Isabel Ahmann, Alex Fouts, and Nia Tanui, and Giana Michels just survived their first year of PA school alongside the MDs, and to celebrate they're riding 68 miles across Iowa. This year's Register's Annual Bike Ride Across Iowa features a day focused on Why I Ride--that day, July 22, the route runs from Boone to Marshalltown. These physician associate students are dedicating their day to funding cancer screening and prevention across Iowa, especially in the rural communities where the rates are climbing fastest. They're already over $1,000 in fundraising, with sponsors on the shirts, and every rider is committing a dollar per mile. Join the fundraising efforts! https://goldrush.uiowa.edu/miles-that-matter-cycling-to-combat-cancer-in-iowa

Roshan Sethi on Med School Simpering and Making It in Hollywood Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

The book club is back, and M2s Anna Royer, Ellie Johnson, and Sofia Hueser, and M4 Alex Nigg all crowd around to grill an actual Hollywood director about his debut novel. Somewhere in Roshan Sethi's frontal lobe is a cyst, and it's possibly why he is a reformed gunner, Hollywood writer/director, still radiation oncologist, and now novelist. Sethi is co-creator of Fox's The Resident, and author of The Simp: A Novel Without a Hero, a new book built out of a viral job ad so horrifying nobody would claim authorship of it. What does it mean that Raj, the novel's desperate, self-aware sycophant of a protagonist, reads less like a Hollywood assistant and more like a third-year on rotations? Sethi doesn't dodge the comparison—he wrote most of Raj's obliging, invisible, gunner-brained misery straight out of his own decade in medicine.

Medicine is Changing. Step Up and Shape It Jul 02, 2026

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As societies and governments wrestle with the rise of artificial intelligence, The Short coats sit down with Dr. Lindsey Knake, a CCOM alum neonatologist and associate chief health information officer, to map out where AI actually stands in medicine right now. M2s Mukund Viswanadha, Deeraj Manika, and Samee Jung sort through the muddle of chatbots, agents, and machine learning, then get specific about the tools already embedded in their days. Dr. Knake also lays out Iowa's new clinical informatics fellowship in detail — a two-year, post-residency program. There's a lot of optimism in this episode, along with some side-eye. If you want to know how AI will affect you as a medical student and future physician, this is the right episode for that!

The No-Guilt Summer: Med Students Finally Breathe Jun 25, 2026

Show notes

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.

Game of Med School — We Actually Made It Jun 18, 2026

Show notes

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!

Foreign Competition for Residency: The Data vs. The Rhetoric Jun 11, 2026

Show notes

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.

Med School Stereotypes Shattered: What We’re Really Like Inside (Recess Rehash) Jun 04, 2026

Show notes

We've all got that mental image of medical students – the type-A perfectionists grinding through textbooks even on the porcelain throne, right? Well, our first-year medical students at Iowa are about to blow up every assumption you've ever had. The people memorizing a zillion anatomical structures aren't exactly who you'd expect.

M1s Chase McInville, Lillian Schmidt, Jonah Albrecht, and Abbie Townsend reveal why your pre-med study plans are probably useless, how a hockey ref's confidence translates to patient care, and why some medical students refuse to study on Saturdays. We explore the real traits that matter (spoiler: it's not being a genius), bust the myth about cutthroat competition, and discover why medical school might actually be more collaborative than you thought.

From EKG Meltdowns to OSCE Roller Coasters (or Treadmills): '25-26 Med School Vibes Recap May 28, 2026

Show notes

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.

MD/PhD: The Long Game of Medicine and Research May 21, 2026

Show notes

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.

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