Tag Archives: Ellie Johnson

Roshan Sethi on Med School Simpering and Making It in Hollywood

Audio July 9, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:57 — 81.7MB)

Radiation oncologist and director Roshan Sethi: confidence in medicine is mostly performance.

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.

Sethi describes himself, pre-Hollywood, as ruthless enough to publish 15 papers in a single year for a career he’s since walked mostly away from–he still practices 9 weeks a year–and he does the math on what staying in medicine actually cost him: when The Resident got greenlit for a sixth season and syndication, he’d already turned the show down to finish residency, a decision one producer later priced at $12 million. Sethi traces a lot of that old ambition back to being closeted through college and medical school; the striving, he says, was never really about medicine, and coming out took most of the edge off it.

Also, what happens to a person’s personality over four years of medical school? Sethi’s answer: it gets slowly closeted right along with everything else, trained out of you until invisibility reads as professionalism. He tells the room the worst response to getting pimped isn’t “I don’t know”—it’s saying it apologetically, like you owe someone an explanation for not yet knowing something nobody expects you to know. Speaking of things that require confidence you don’t actually have: Sethi’s next film, The Surgeon, stars Michelle Yeoh as a retired surgeon taken hostage and forced to operate. Dave can’t wait. He even pitched Sethi on his own idea for a movie that’s not at all derivative, and though it will probably star Mark Ruffalo, Dave is available.

On representation, Sethi draws a sharp line between his two industries. Medicine has become more female and more Indian, Asian, and Nigerian over time precisely because it runs on an objective, if imperfect, filter that values whoever scores highest on the MCAT. Hollywood, by his account, has no equivalent filter: roughly 90 percent of the highest-grossing films are still directed by men; minorities in the industry get treated as diversity projects rather than talent, and there’s nothing resembling medicine’s blunt, if flawed, meritocracy.

Episode credits:

Producer: Dave Etler
Co-hosts: Anna Royer, Ellie Johnson, Alex Nigg, Sophia Hueser
Guest: Roshan Sethi, MD
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Royer, 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.

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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)

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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.

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Short Coat Podcast

What are Med Students Reading: Book Club!

Audio April 9, 2026 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:56 — 76.5MB)

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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 Instagram-posted study that may or may not have been published in JAMA), why narrative medicine is big in medical education, and how the habit of losing yourself in someone else’s story might be the best training you can get for actually understanding their patients. If you’re a pre-med or pre-PA student wondering whether your English minor or your tattered copy of When Breath Becomes Air has any business being on your application, this episode will make you feel very seen.

The crew also gets into something that doesn’t come up nearly enough in medical education: the real stakes of clinical documentation language and substance use disorder stigma. For example, writing “patient denies alcohol use” versus “patient reports no alcohol use” is not a small stylistic choice — it’s the kind of thing that shapes how the next provider sees a real human being, and now that patients can read their own notes, the pressure is on in a whole new way. Plus the group shares their full reading lists across good books, fun books, and smart books, and makes a genuinely compelling case for why reading and empathy in medicine aren’t soft skills — they’re the whole job. Grab your books for medical students TBR list and hit play.