Sophia Hueser Archives | The Short Coat

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.

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 →

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.