Tag Archives: Melia Patrick

Does Your Personality Pick Your Medical Specialty?

Audio October 1, 2026 Dave Etler

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How Do Your Traits Help or Hurt You?

Carver College of Medicine admissions is running free virtual sessions for anyone thinking about becoming a physician. Get your questions answered! The next one is Tuesday, October 6th at 6 p.m. Register here!

The guy who discovered handwashing prevented deaths after childbirth was kind of a jerk, calling everyone who didn’t believe him “murderers.” Did his personality prevent the adoption of one of the most important innovations in medicine ever, or was he just frustrated? New co-hosts Olivia Masterson and Caroline Van Bell, along with returning co-hosts Lilly Schmidt and Melia Patrick, talk with Dave about personality. Or at least, the pop-psych version.

Listener Elizabeth asked for a personality episode, so we get to it. Now, most tests–including the Enneagram, which we all took–have no published validation data. The Enneagram concept started life in mysticism before some people decided it was psychology and some other people decided it was a business. But the real questions: would your mom describe you the way the test does? Why is it so hard to tell whether a test result is who you are or who you want to be? Somewhere in there we get to the fundamental attribution error, the halo effect, and the two non-psychologists who built Myers-Briggs to help women find jobs in post-war America.

What about the personalities of famous people from medicine and science? Walter Freeman turning the lobotomy into a road show, William Osler published a hoax about a disease that doesn’t exist to piss off a colleague (which then spent decades in a textbook), Oliver Sacks was painfully shy and unable to recognize faces while writing about how brains make selves, Richard Feynman cracked safes at Los Alamos for fun and to prove security there was a joke. Was Ignaz Semmelweis an abrasive jerk or a reasonable man watching patients die from a problem he knew how to fix? Rosalind Franklin was called prickly largely by the men who used her data. Werner Forssmann threaded a catheter into his own heart in 1929, walked to radiology to X-ray it, and got fired.

But, personality is a weak signal in medicine. What few studies are out there suggest that effects on things like specialty choice or admissions success are significant but small. Mostly, it’s about diligence (and neuroticism), although it can be helpful to pretend to be an extravert in interviews–people like to know if you’re cool to work with.

Episode credits:

Producer: Dave Etler
Co-hosts: Olivia Masterson, Lillian Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Caroline Van Bell
Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Royer, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson

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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!

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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)

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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 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 →

From the Archives:

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)

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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 Royer, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson