Category Archives: Short Coat Podcast

All episodes of the Short Coat Podcast.

The No-Guilt Summer: Med Students Finally Breathe

Audio June 25, 2026 Dave Etler Leave a comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:12:07 — 105.3MB)

“Do nothing” is a legitimate prescription when you’ve been grinding since orientation.

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.

The episode goes deep on things that actually matter when you’re thinking about the long game: how you pick a specialty when everything in medicine is genuinely interesting, why choosing based on the attendings you love is both right and risky, and the fact that being a parent who’s in med school might make you a better student. Plus: a boat disaster at Voyageurs, a ketchup ranking conducted with scientific rigor, and a brief but sincere pitch to get Jesus on the podcast.

Episode credits:

Producer: Dave Etler
Co-hosts: Ellie Johnson, Braiden DeSchryver, Sarvin Mousakhani, Regan DeMaris, Alana Jones
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Roger, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast belong solely to the individuals who share them. They do not represent the positions of the University of Iowa, the Carver College of Medicine, or the State of Iowa. All discussions are intended for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Nothing said on this podcast should be used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition. Always seek qualified professional guidance for personal decisions.

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

We welcome your feedback, listener questions, and shower thoughts. Do you agree or disagree with something we said today? Did you hear something really helpful? Can we answer a question for you? Are we delivering a podcast you want to keep listening to? Let us know at https://theshortcoat.com/tellus and we’ll put your message in a future episode. Or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

We need to know more about you! https://surveys.blubrry.com/theshortcoat (email a screenshot of the confirmation screen to theshortcoats@gmail.com with your mailing address and Dave will mail you a thank you package!)

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

Continue reading →

Short Coat Podcast

Game of Med School — We Actually Made It

Audio June 18, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:19:32 — 117.7MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

We road-test a card game to show pre-meds what medical school actually feels like

You draw a card: “You are assigned a 28-hour call shift.” Is that plus four points or minus four? It depends entirely on who you are — and that’s kind of the point. The Short Coats (Well, Dave) has been talking about this idea for a while–can we 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? Sure, the game has bugs (too many negative cards, the routing logic skips too much), and the crew catches them all in real time. But there’s also laughs and insights, so that’s fine.

By the end, everyone graduated (naturally), the points got bumped to 2x, and Dave admitted the whole thing will need another iteration. Would you play this game? Listener feedback is always welcome at theshortcoat.com/tellus!

Episode credits:

Producer: Cyrus Barati, Dave Etler
Co-hosts: Cyrus Barati, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Fallon Jung
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Roger, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson

[URL template for episode https://media.blubrry.com/theshortcoat/podcast.uiowa.edu/com/osa/CHANGETHIS.mp3]

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

Continue reading →

Short Coat Podcast

Foreign Competition for Residency: The Data vs. The Rhetoric

Audio June 11, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:08 — 78.8MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

If rural physician shortages are a distribution problem, why does everyone keep proposing the wrong fix?

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, who did the original deep-dive on this issue when it dropped, rejoins co-hosts David Lee, Mukund Viswanadha, and Isa Perez-Sandi to ask the question nobody was asking: was the panic grounded in reality?

The back half of the conversation gets into territory that’s harder to fix and 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, and the panel gives her the honest version: it’s possible, but it could actually cost rather than save if you’re not careful, and you should call med school admissions offices directly—they’ll actually talk to you.

Episode credits:

Producer: Dave Etler
Co-hosts: Isa Perez-Sandi, David Lee, Mukund Viswanadha
Guest: Bryan Carmody, MD
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Roger, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

Continue reading →

Short Coat Podcast

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

Audio June 4, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:03:57 — 87.8MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Turns out medical students are regular humans who happen to need to memorize the Krebs cycle

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.

Plus, we settle the burning question every pre-med wants answered: can you actually prepare for medical school, or should you just go backpacking in Europe instead? These Short Coats share what non-medical experiences shaped them most, from building houses with Habitat for Humanity to working political campaigns to reffing hockey games to farming vegetables with zero agricultural background.

The episode ends with the Short Coats working together to hash out the vibes of med student life. Hint: there should really only be five nerves.

Episode credits:

Producer: Jonah Albrecht
Co-hosts: Abbie Townsend, Chase McInville, Lillian Schmidt, Jonah Albrecht

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

Continue reading →

Short Coat Podcast

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

Audio May 28, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:25 — 43.3MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

From therapy dogs to the dunk tank, Carver’s end-of-year carnival is basically a debrief session with balls.

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 (aside from tubes and tissues). Like, what frustrated them, what surprised them, what they’d do differently, and (obvs.) which organ would win in a fight. Rising M2s Anna Royer and Mikund Viswanadha and rising M4 Mahliah Ingersoll bring us along for a fun look at the vibes of year one. 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. That helps, apparently.

Episode credits:

Producer: Zach Grissom
Co-hosts: Anna Royer, Mikund Viswanadha, Mahliah Ingersoll
Guests: The M1 Class
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Royer, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

Continue reading →

Short Coat Podcast

MD/PhD: The Long Game of Medicine and Research

Audio May 21, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02:17 — 43.8MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Physician scientists live at the intersection of clinic and lab

There are so many kinds of physicians. This time, we take a closer look at one type that, from the outside, might seem incredibly difficult to achieve–the MD/PhD. Eight years (!) of combined medical and scientist training seems like a lot. But consider the paths of MD/PhD students Riley Behan-Bush and Hannah Van Ert. Riley found the program through a Google search about whether to pick med school or grad school, and Hannah had already started a career in nursing before a research lab changed her path completely. To them, the eight years between starting and finishing ended up being the right move, and in the end, it often didn’t feel like a long slog of schooling (even if everyone outside the program still calls it school). Now in their final stretch, Hannah and Riley sit with Darren Hoffmann, PhD, and Martha Carvour, MD/PhD (CCOM Class of 2012) who now helps run Iowa’s Medical Scientist Training Program to shed light on this more meandering path to physician-hood.

The conversation doesn’t stay comfortable for long. The crew discusses recent federal funding cuts, the “sacrifices” MD/PhDs make for the path, NIH grant uncertainty, and the question of who gets to become a physician scientist when the money starts moving around in unpredictable ways. Darren puts it plainly: those who control the money don’t have the imagination needed to make the changes scientists envision; grant-writing done well is the bridge for that gap. Hannah speaks of her fright when cuts led some MSTP programs to worry they wouldn’t be able to accept students. She’s also thinking about what the pipeline looks like in fifteen years and whether it defaults back to “wealthier white men.” Riley’s optimistic that physician scientists, because they talk to patients every single day, are better positioned than anyone to rebuild public trust in science, a view Hannah is less convinced of. Martha thinks historically scientists have often been too concerned with their own niche interests, when they should spend more time showing up in their communities.

Episode credits:

Producer: Isa Perez-Sandi
Co-hosts: Riley Behan-Bush, Hannah Van Ert
Guest: Martha Carvour, MD/PhD; Darren Hoffmann, PhD
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Roger, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

Continue reading →

Short Coat Podcast

Iowa City Haunts and Med School Hot Takes

Audio May 14, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:10:43 — 51.3MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Med students’ fav hangouts and spicy opinions

Where are med students’ best hangouts in Iowa City when they need to breathe? To shop? To relax? 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 specific enough that you can spend your first semester missing half of what makes it worth being here. This episode is the cheat code. M4 Shana Liu (just weeks from leaving for a med-psych combined residency at Tulane) and M1s Madison Seda, Ellie Johnson, and M1 Sophia Heuser give a tour of Iowa City’s best coffee shops, restaurants, bars, antique stores, thrift spots, and outdoor escapes — organized, inevitably, around parking anxiety and available outlets. The list runs from Press and DayDrink to Sidekick’s one outlet, from Gabe’s open-mic nights to Sunset Salsa on the Ped Mall, from random architectural lighting finds to Kalona Creamery twenty-five minutes down the road. If you’re heading to Iowa City this fall, this episode gives you six months of discovery in about an hour.

Then things get spicier. The group offers their hot takes: whether med school ceremonies are designed for students or for the offices that plan them, whether shadowing requirements are an equity problem dressed up as a qualification standard, and whether students who hit a wall should be able to master out and sit for the PA exam rather than slogging through two more expensive years they don’t want. Dave notes — quietly, because CCOM doesn’t advertise it — that there is actually a committee process at Iowa that can award a master’s degree to students who can’t finish. Nobody knew. That’s the kind of thing you learn in hour two of a podcast conversation, not during orientation.

Continue reading →

Short Coat Podcast

Medical Students Judge Reddit’s Messiest Dilemmas (AITA)

Audio May 11, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:06 — 31.2MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

From post-surgical family drama to a lidocaine injections without warning — where is the line, exactly?

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.

The fourth story (med school parents take note!): a doctor-mom posts about telling her struggling pre-med daughter she isn’t cut out for medicine — and then the updates keep coming. A spiral. A traumatic freshman year. A complete reversal. The crew picks it apart with the kind of clinical-meets-human instinct they’re in med school to develop: what happens when a parent mistakes performance for potential, and how does one know if something is a moral failing or a cry for help?

Episode credits:

Producer: Zach Grissom/Dave Etler
Co-hosts: Anna Royer, Jonah Albrecht, Melia Patrick, Lillian Schmidt
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Roger, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

Continue reading →

Short Coat Podcast

Their Last Free Summer: How Four M1s Are Spending It

Audio May 7, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:24 — 31.3MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

The summer between first and second year of med school freedom hits differently when you actually know it’s the last time you’ll truly get to do as you like. Four M1s — Lily Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Jonah Albrecht, and Anna Royer— talk through how they landed on their summer 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. Spoiler: it matters, but probably not in the way you think.

What makes this conversation more useful than the typical med school advice content is how honest everyone is about the pressure to do research whether or not it fits. 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, even if memorizing chromosome deletions makes her want to give up. If it sounds like–despite the talk of freedom–they’re all deciding to do something med school adjacent, you’re right. But they are exercising the option to choose the focus of their attention in this last summer of life at the margins of medicine.

Episode credits:

Producer: Anna Royer
Co-hosts: Melia Patrick, Lillian Schmidt, Jonah Albrecht
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Roger, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

Continue reading →

Short Coat Podcast

The Doctor Doesn’t Know Either: Inside the Diagnostic Crisis, with Alexandra Sifferlin

Audio April 30, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:10:21 — 50.5MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

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 straight answer from medicine—not because their doctors were incompetent, but because diagnosis is harder, messier, and more difficult to do in 15 minutes than anyone wants to admit. Her book The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis traces the problem from rural Kentucky to the NIH’s Undiagnosed Diseases Network, and her conversation with M4 Jeff Goddard, M1 Madelyn Klemmensen, and M2 Zach Goddard goes deep on the mechanics of how diagnostic errors actually happen: availability bias, the missing feedback loop, specialty tunnel vision, and the slow erosion of trust that pushes patients toward people selling them supplements.

The students here aren’t just asking sympathetic questions, although Jeff is literally a character in the book, something Dave found out in real time on this episode. They push on the hard stuff: when is a placeholder diagnosis ethical, whether AI will save us or become a crutch, and what do you actually do about a healthcare system where the patient bounces between docs who don’t have answers. What they keep landing on is uncomfortable—medicine doesn’t have great solutions to this, but the relationship between patient and physician might matter more than the technology of medicine. Solving the diagnostic crisis might mean uncomfortable, expensive changes.

Episode credits:

Producer: Jeff Goddard
Co-hosts: Zach Grissom, Madelyn Klemmensen
Guest: Alexandra Sifferlin, https://www.alexandrasifferlin.com/
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Roger, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

Continue reading →

“Do nothing” is a legitimate prescription when you’ve been grinding since orientation.

Episode credits:

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

We road-test a card game to show pre-meds what medical school actually feels like

Episode credits:

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

If rural physician shortages are a distribution problem, why does everyone keep proposing the wrong fix?

Episode credits:

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

Turns out medical students are regular humans who happen to need to memorize the Krebs cycle

Episode credits:

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

From therapy dogs to the dunk tank, Carver’s end-of-year carnival is basically a debrief session with balls.

Episode credits:

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

Physician scientists live at the intersection of clinic and lab

Episode credits:

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

Med students’ fav hangouts and spicy opinions

From post-surgical family drama to a lidocaine injections without warning — where is the line, exactly?

Episode credits:

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

Episode credits:

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

The feedback loop that would make doctors better diagnosticians doesn’t exist.

Episode credits:

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

Medical School Podcast: What They Don't Tell You | The Short Coat