Tag Archives: Nicole Lacina

Did Match Day Implode?

Share

How did COVID affect the 2021 Match?

This week’s sponsor, Panacea Financial (Member FDIC) is giving away $500 to five students participating in the 2021 Match. Check it out!

Match Week is huge for senior medical students. It’s the week they find out if they will continue their training (yikes!), and where in the country they will go to complete it…and this year’s match was even more-than-usually anxiety provoking due to COVID.

Were our fears–of large numbers of unmatched applicants, programs with many unfilled positions, and students unfairly penalized by virtual interviews–realized? We try to figure it out with the stats available to us just an hour before recording.

This Week in Medical News

Some Grand Rapids, Michigan residents were very bad on Instagram. Hey, future and current students–keep other peoples resected organs off social media, and while you’re at it, you really aren’t supposed to take pictures in the OR without consent. M’kay?

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

“Preference Signaling” –the Future of Applications?

Share

Preference Signaling Tokens may be a way to combat over-applying for residencies, but the schemes have a ways to go yet before they’re ready for prime time.

Dear Residency Program: I love you. Do you love me? Check YES or NO!!!

Dave noticed something he’d never heard of before: a company offering ‘tokens’ (for a fee) that could be used by residency program applicants to signal their love for particular programs.  The general idea is to combat the common applicant strategy of applying to as many residency programs as possible to be sure  the applicant gets a match.  While this strategy is quite reasonable from the individual applicant’s perspective, it causes problems for both programs and the general body of applicants because those extra applications flood programs with candidates that may not actually be interested. 

Then he found out that the Otolaryngology Program
Directors Organization will be doing something similar, and Aline Sandouk, Eric Boeshart, Emma Barr, and Nicole Lacina explore a analysis of who wins and who looses in such a scheme.  

Plus Dave creates an educational game to help students plan how they’ll react to common odd situations.  And by educational, he clearly meant “educational.”

We Want to Hear From You

Do you think Preference Signalling is a good idea? What if medical schools adopts the idea?  Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a kick to hear from you!

Cracking Open the Firehose

Share

A select group of students is introduced to med ed

bait photo
Photo by digitizedchaos

For those who have been out of the student game for a while, or who feel they need a little extra time to get acclimated to the fast pace of medical education, there are programs like our Intro to Medical Education at Iowa. Whatever an individual school calls it, these programs can act as a bridge between your life before med school to the rigours of learning medicine.  On this episode that Dave forgot to release a while back because he went on vacation, we meet pre-M1s in our program,  Nicole Lacina, Timothy Morris, and Alec James.  They and their teaching assistant, regular co-host Jacob Chrestensen are here to have some fun and describe what it’s like to crack the firehose with this program instead of taking it full in the face.

Plus, Dave’s unreasonable susceptibility to clickbait leads him to make up a new game.  Can the co-hosts get him to click on their article with their crazy headlines?  Yes.   Yes, they can.


Buy Our Merch and Give At The Same Time

You care about others, or you wouldn’t be into this medicine thing. Our #merchforgood program lets you to give to our charity of the semester and get something for yourself at the same time!

We Want to Hear From You

Are you starting med school this fall? What did you do to prepare yourself? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  Do all three!

Continue reading Cracking Open the Firehose