Tag Archives: Mackenzie Walhof

Short Coat Podcast

Today’s Healthcare Careers are More Varied Than Ever. Explore Them Before You Risk Med School

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Schools want to know that you’ve looked at other careers, otherwise they won’t take a chance on you.

TL;DR

  • Listener Preston is weighing PharmD or MD school. How can he choose, and how his process of choosing make schools feel better about him?
  • Brylee didn’t get into med school this time around, is facing a tight turnaround for the next application season, and she hasn’t even got a compelling gap year job lined up yet. Is she risking another rejection by rushing things?
  • M4 Mackenzie Walhof and M1s Happy Kumar, Matt Engelken, and Jacob Hansen try to convey their passion for random, made-up gap year. Can they convince a skeptical interviewer?

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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!
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Short Coat Podcast

Recess Rehash: Life Hacks for Med Students

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Due to the Thanksgiving Holiday, we weren’t in the studio to record a new show last week. Instead, enjoy this rerun!

Med school life hacks are all about maximizing efficiency, minimizing friction.

TL;DR

  • Eliminate unnecessary friction to the completion of a task
  • Paying others to do other life tasks can be helpful
  • Saying no is as important as maximizing efficiency.

Today we explore the things that med students do to maximize their efficiency. These are the small steps they take to eliminate friction to completing chores, focusing attention where it’s needed instead of where your brain wants it to be, and eliminating those tasks that just aren’t that important to them. M4 Mackenzie Walhof, MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, M2 Nicole Hines, and M2 AJ Chowdhury explore with Dave their own personal life hacks.

Also, Dave ran famous doctors’ photos multiple times through an app that makes caricatures until they were no longer recognizable, then made videos of the progression. How fast can the crew identify them when the video is reversed? Play along at home on our Instagram.

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!

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Short Coat Podcast

Married Applicants: What Do Schools Think?

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Applying to med school together might be easier than couples think

TL;DR

  • Married couples applying to a school together are really a bonus for schools, all other factors being equal.
  • We discuss Niki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s testicles. Because that’s a thing we do now.
  • Wiki How has interesting illustrations–can we guess the article?

This episode is sponsored by Enso Rings, makers of soft, safe, attractive silicone rings. Listeners get 10% off rings at EnsoRings.com using promo code SHORT!

Taylor and his wife are going to apply to Ivy League med school Brown University together. But they’re worried that it’s a lot to expect that schools will accept both of them as a package deal. But we think it might not be as difficult for schools to do as Taylor might assume. MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, M2 Elvire Nguepnang, M1 Noah Wick, and M4 Mackenzie Walhof–along with our admissions director–have some encouraging thoughts for those looking to start their journey as a couple.

Also, we talk about Niki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s testicles, the CDC’s approval of booster shots for Pfizer (and it’s director’s unilateral decision to include frontline workers as eligible), and Dave quizzes the crew to see if they can figure out what the Wiki How article is based on some accompanying illustrations.

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!

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Short Coat Podcast

Awesome, More application Hoops!

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Get ready for new application requirements (and to pay more money?)

TL;DR

  • CASPer seeks to help schools understand applicants’ non-academic and people skills. It’s never been validated, but more and more schools are using it.
  • Some residency programs have begun using ‘supplemental questions’ as so-called objective measures like STEP 1 and STEP 2 CS fall away.
  • Are these new hurdles useful? Or do they add to the burden of becoming a doctor for no reason?

Dave had never heard of CASPer before (Iowa doesn’t currently use it), so he was surprised to hear that a bunch of schools–and more all the time–are using it to outsource their judgements of applicants’ so-called ‘soft’ skills like ethics and collaboration. However, there are reasons to doubt CASPer’s utility, including that it’s not clear it’s actually measuring these things. And while it costs students a small amount per school (‘small’ being a relative term, especially if the student is cash-strapped), what does it cost the schools who use it and how much of that gets passed on in tuition?

And in their never-ending quest to find the ‘best’ applicants, residency programs are finding new ways to evaluate them, such as requiring answers to ‘supplemental’ questions that sound an awful lot like a secondary application. And the part that includes signaling the applicant’s program preference seems a wee bit suspicious to Dave, MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, M2 Nicole Hines, M2 AJ Chowdhury, and M4 Mackenzie Walhof.

And is Britney Spears being subject to reproductive coercion by her conservators?

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!

Continue reading Awesome, More application Hoops! →
Short Coat Podcast

Life Hacks for Med Students

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Med school life hacks are all about maximizing efficiency, minimizing friction.

TL;DR

  • Eliminate unnecessary friction to the completion of a task
  • Paying others to do other life tasks can be helpful
  • Saying no is as important as maximizing efficiency.

Today we explore the things that med students do to maximize their efficiency. These are the small steps they take to eliminate friction to completing chores, focusing attention where it’s needed instead of where your brain wants it to be, and eliminating those tasks that just aren’t that important to them. M4 Mackenzie Walhof, MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, M2 Nicole Hines, and M2 AJ Chowdhury explore with Dave their own personal life hacks.

Also, Dave ran famous doctors’ photos multiple times through an app that makes caricatures until they were no longer recognizable, then made videos of the progression. How fast can the crew identify them when the video is reversed? Play along at home on our Instagram.

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!

Continue reading Life Hacks for Med Students →
Short Coat Podcast

HAVING BABIES IN MEDICAL SCHOOL

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Raising babies in med school is possible, with careful thought and lots of help

TL;DR

  • The choice to become pregnant in medical school is always a difficult one to make, considering the time constraints and the physical toll it can take.
  • Raising a kids in medical school is perhaps even harder, as even if things go well in the pregnancy, now you’ve got little humans to learn about, protect, and enjoy (and miss out on, sometimes).
  • In Part One of this three-parter, we’ll lay it all bare for you–what’s it really like to raise a family while learning to be a doctor.
baby photo
It’s a good thing they’re cute, cause they’re going to screw up your carefully constructed life.

Rising M4 Nick Lind is taking over for Dave this week for this special episode devoted to parenting in medical school. Nick is taking an elective dealing with that very subject, and he’s invited classmates Mackenzie Walhof and Chris Schanbacher as well as CCOM grad Dr. Michael Haugsdal to talk with him about the challenges students and residents face when they decide to grow their families despite already being engaged in one of the most difficult and time-consuming things a person can do.

This is part 1 of a multipart series that Nick is putting together for his elective project, and we’ll have more discussions on this topic in the weeks to come. In Part 2, The Short Coats will dsicuss how medical schools can and are supporting student parents; and in Part 3, we’ll hear from the spouses of medical students.

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!

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Short Coat Podcast

Recess Rehash: Choose a Specialty, Choose a Lifestyle: Factors We Consider

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writer photo[Happy Holidays!  Dave is on vacation, but here’s a re-run to tide you over.  We’ll be back with new episodes starting 1/16] 

Short Coat Scribbleson Wordsonpaper (not his real name) wrote a paper for one of his classes, and was told it’d be worth putting it out there for publication.  But where, and how?  So we asked Writing and Humanities Program Director (and SCP exec producer) Cate Dicharry to give some guidance.  Scribbleson’s second question, about the lifestyle factors that medical students weigh when making a specialty choice, was a great one for co-hosts Mackenzie Walhof, Miranda Schene, and Abby Fyfe to dig into.

And Dave puts on his ten-gallon perfesser hat, offering up a pop quiz on the 2019 Ig Nobel prize winners.

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!

This Week in Medical News

what happens when you want to study pregnancy and other women’s health issues?  Yeah, your research proposal gets rejected because you didn’t include men among your subjects.  And an Oregon doctor finds out that he has 17 kids he didn’t know about from his time in medical school.

We Want to Hear From You

What factors are you weighing to make your specialty choice? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Recess Rehash: Choose a Specialty, Choose a Lifestyle: Factors We Consider →

Short Coat Podcast

Choose a Specialty, Choose a Lifestyle: Factors We Consider

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05:04 — 89.4MB)

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writer photoShort Coat Scribbleson Wordsonpaper (not his real name) wrote a paper for one of his classes, and was told it’d be worth putting it out there for publication.  But where, and how?  So we asked Writing and Humanities Program Director (and SCP exec producer) Cate Dicharry to give some guidance.  Scribbleson’s second question, about the lifestyle factors that medical students weigh when making a specialty choice, was a great one for co-hosts Mackenzie Walhof, Miranda Schene, and Abby Fyfe to dig into.

And Dave puts on his ten-gallon perfesser hat, offering up a pop quiz on the 2019 Ig Nobel prize winners.

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!

This Week in Medical News

what happens when you want to study pregnancy and other women’s health issues?  Yeah, your research proposal gets rejected because you didn’t include men among your subjects.  And an Oregon doctor finds out that he has 17 kids he didn’t know about from his time in medical school.

We Want to Hear From You

What factors are you weighing to make your specialty choice? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Choose a Specialty, Choose a Lifestyle: Factors We Consider →

Short Coat Podcast

Getting there from here, a novel recipe, and future projects

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Drawing by Annie Rempel.

[We’re now available on Spotify and RadioPublic!]

Co-hosts Tim Maxwell, Aline Sandouk, Annie Rempel, and Mackenzie Walhof confront pictures of their younger selves and offer themselves the advice they should have gotten at the start of their med school journeys. Listener Darius asks us for the best options to progress from his current work as an EMT-B/paramedic to medical school–among our suggestions is to check out the AAMC’s list of post-baccalaureate programs, including Iowa State University’s excellent but reasonably-priced option.  Dave offers up his own Recipe for Med School Success–a concoction he’s pretty sure no-one has ever thought of, but which his skeptical co-hosts end up enjoying–and promises an e-book with them all!  Submit yours to be part of it and get it free!

Annie also tells us about her recent arts-and-medicine exhibit at The Examined Life Conference, called Snapshots.  A follow-up to her Stanford Honors in the Arts show, it’s a series of drawings and interviews offering “realistic glimpses into the inspirational life stories of those affected by Huntington’s Disease.”

We Want to Hear From You

What’s your favorite weird snack? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  Do all three!

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Reactions, Reagents, and Repose

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How much is lab medicine a part of medical school?

laboratory test tubes photoRemembering a recent episode in which we spoke briefly of colored test tubes, Adee writes in with a question for Hilary O’Brien, Erik Kneller, Mackenzie Walhof, and Rob Humble–what, if anything, do medical students learn about laboratory science? And we got a lot of feedback on our recent discussion of unwanted sexual attention from patients, all of it pretty good!  Which is nice…thank you, listeners!

We also see if the co-hosts have the skillz needed to translate patients’ chief complaints into…well, something that resembles a chief complaint.

This Week in Medical News

Oh, patients.  You lying liars.  But  one company in nearby Coralville thinks they have cracked the code, and will offer a test that they promise will determine not just whether you’re lying about alcohol and tobacco use, but how much you’re lying.  And an Australian euthanasia advocate wants to give people the option to go beyond the veil (if that’s their wish) in a futuristic pod.

We Want to Hear From You

We give free (useful?) advice! Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  Do all three!

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