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Short Coat Podcast

hypothetically Speaking

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What would you give up for $10 million?

Our planned show fell through, so Dave pivoted to hypotheticals with Esha Patel, Nikki Chang, Moesha, and a rotating cast of M1s (flexibility is a medical skill, allegedly): what changes if everyone wakes up six inches taller (more presence, fewer step stools, capris, heels, five extra minutes of sleep), who do you want when a flight attendant asks for a doctor (a 70-year-old psychiatrist, a dentist, or a veterinarian), and would you rewind to age ten or ten years with everything you know now? Also, which one sense would you let everyone perceive as terrible (sound, apparently, which led to a pretty good Dance Mom impression), what happens when your car becomes a human roommate for four years, and would you take $100,000 to have skin a color outside human variation (hot pink, traffic cone orange, glow-in-the-dark)? Also, $10 million to give up one ordinary human ability: embarrassment goes first, overthinking is a closer call. Also, Dave’s mother made him take down his political attack-ad parody.

02:12 — What would change if everyone woke up six inches taller?
18:14 — Which sense would you let people perceive terribly: look, sound, smell, taste, or feel?
30:41 — Dentist, veterinarian, or 70-year-old psychiatrist: who treats an in-flight medical emergency?
38:24 — Would you go back to age ten or ten years ago, knowing what you know now?
43:00 — Why do more women than men co-host, and why should boys be more cringe?
49:27 — Why did Dave’s mom make him take down a political satire ad?
53:55 — What would your car be like as a human roommate for four years?
63:10 — What color would you turn your skin for $100,000?
71:26 — What would you give up for $10 million: embarrassment, overthinking, or something else?

Episode credits:

  • Producer: Dave Etler
  • Co-hosts: Moesha Chhatlani, Esha Patel, Devanshee Patel, Nikki Chang
  • Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Royer, 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]

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!

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What’s Med Student Research For?

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And What’s Behind the Publication “Arms Race?

What does research actually do for a medical student, and who is it really for? The Short Coats–M2s Jonah Albrecht and Regan DeMaris, and M4 Radha Vellamuri–sit down with Donna Santillan, PhD and Mark Santillan, MD PhD to talk about the value of research in medical school (think quality, not quantity, heavily weighted toward quality). The Santillans (married, if it wasn’t clear) have mentored many aspiring researchers in their careers; Radha even took a class they taught when she was an undergrad.

We discuss the common perception that there is a research arms race when it comes to medical students trying to match into their specialties, a 13-fold increase in med student publications from 2014-2022. Some even want to ban medical student research, although it’s perhaps not surprising the Santillans don’t agree: from their perspective as scientists in obstetrics, you can’t fully understand what is good research and what isn’t unless you participate. The factors they blame: schools moving toward pass/fail grading and virtual residency interviews. The former makes it harder for students to distinguish themselves with grades, and the latter means more students applying to programs they don’t really care about. Both end up putting more pressure on students to increase the number of publications to stand out in the most competitive specialties.

Also discussed: shallow research contaminating AI training data, ERAS changes Radha’s had to navigate, and how students can sidestep the arms race. Also, we learn that Radha can beatbox, something she refuses to demonstrate unless Dave is interviewing her for a residency position. Huh.

Episode credits:

  • Producer: Isa Perez-Sandi
  • Co-hosts: Radha Vellamuri, Jonah Albrecht, Regan DeMaris
  • Guest: Mark Santillan, MD PhD; Donna Santillan, PhD.
  • Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Royer, 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]

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 What’s Med Student Research For? →
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Blechardy! The Trivia Game That No One Really Wins

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Staff from the Office of Student Affairs and Curriculum take on M2s, and the real opponent is a jelly bean.

It’s Blechardy, the trivia game with jelly beans, and it’s a total rip-off of other games that don’t have jelly beans. Dave Etler hosts, producers Winnie Gavin, and Evie Lee run the show, and the contestants are split into Team Beadle’Shea (Tom O’Shea, director of administrative and student services for the physician associate program, plus Abbie Beadle, Boulware Community and curriculum manager of the first semester of the M2 year, both from the Office of Student Affairs and Curriculum) and the Beanie Boys (first-year medical students Ben Fisher, Max Holmes, and Drew Szalat). The rules: pick a category and a point value, answer the question, then eat a jelly bean. Yummy, you keep the points. Gross, you get nothing. That is a life lesson, though Dave isn’t sure which one.

Does the bean matter more than the knowledge? The final tally says it does.

Episode credits:

  • Producers: Winnie Gavin, Evie Li
  • Co-hosts: Ben Fisher, Drew Szalat, Max Holmes, Abbie Beadle, Tom O’shea
  • 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 Blechardy! The Trivia Game That No One Really Wins →
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Does Your Personality Pick Your Medical Specialty?

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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 

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

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 Does Your Personality Pick Your Medical Specialty? →
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Back in the Closet on a Rural Rotation: Queer in Medicine

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Coming out isn’t a one-time event for LGBTQ+ medical students; it happens again with each new preceptor, patient, and small-talk question.

Thinking about medical school? Carver’s admissions team is hosting a virtual info session Tuesday, October 6, 2026 at 6 p.m. Central. Register here.

Dave is joined by M3 Jacob Thompson, M2s Charis Edwards and Cyrus Barati, and Dr. Katie Imborek. Imborek is a family medicine physician, clinical professor and vice chair of clinical operations at the University of Iowa who founded Carver’s LGBTQ+ student organization and helped launch the UI LGBTQ+ Clinic in 2011. Imborek came to Iowa from a small rural college in Indiana where the only gay person she knew of was Ellen DeGeneres, who came out and promptly got fired. She arrived at Carver in 2004, when the LGBTQ student club was called “the Group” so nobody reading over your shoulder in the MERF computer lab would know what the email was about. How did she get from being told to leave it off her personal statement to a professorship built on queer health scholarship? Jacob got the same personal statement advice years later and refused it. Why, he asked himself, would he want to go to a school that didn’t want him because he’s gay?

But, as in many situations, being queer in medicine means coming out over and over again, and it can feel unsafe. What does that mean for a queer medical student? Sometimes it means a preceptor who never invites you to the family dinner he hosts for other students. Sometimes it means worry about a negative evaluation. Imborek points out that everyone at the table is cisgender and can pass as cis, and that passing comes with safety others don’t have. For a trans woman of color on a rural rotation, for example, the question isn’t just about grades.

The group also talks about how their identities mesh with their care of patients. Should doctors ask every patient about sexual orientation, gender identity, pronouns, and partners, even the ones who came in for a rash? As emotionally charged as these ideas are in the early 21st century, Dr. Imborek asserts that these are medical questions, vital to establishing care and providing differential diagnoses.

Episode credits:

  • Producer: Cyrus Barati
  • Co-hosts: Charis Edwards, Jacob Thompson, Cyrus Barati
  • Guest: Dr. Katie Imborek
  • 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 Back in the Closet on a Rural Rotation: Queer in Medicine →
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Five Med Students on Thriving in Clerkships

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Five M3s explain what actually happens when preclinical learning meets real patients.

Dave sits down with a crew of M3s and one asterisked MSTP M4 — Riley Behan-Bush, Samantha Gardner, Srishti Mathur, Sahana Sarin, and Sarah Upton — to talk about the actual experience of clerkships: what the jump from three semesters of preclinical book-learning into surgery, psychiatry, emergency medicine, and family medicine really feels like, why the first two weeks can swing from “best of med school” to “worst of med school” depending entirely on the rotation you land, and how you’re supposed to figure out your place on a team that changes every two weeks. They dig into the actual mechanics of honoring a clerkship — shelf exam cutoffs that can sit at 90%+, evaluations that make up 70-80% of a grade, and the particular indignity of missing honors by a single point after doing everything right.

The group works through how to handle conflicting instructions from residents and attendings, how to ask questions without challenging the hierarchy (“for my own understanding, can you explain why you decided…”), and how to actually figure out a specialty when you love everything, including surgery where you’ll stand for hours. Sahana’s pros-and-cons journal after every rotation gets a real endorsement. Also, they answer a batch of questions submitted by their own preclinical classmates: how much free time you actually get (some), whether Des Moines versus Iowa City rotations matter (it depends what you want out of medicine), and what actually makes clerkship life easier — which turns out to be a year’s supply of Costco garbage bags, a cellular hotspot, and, for at least one host, a husband who meal preps.

Episode credits:

  • Producer: Isa Perez-Sandi
  • Co-hosts: Srishti Mathur, Sarah Upton, Samantha Gardner, Riley Behan Bush, Sahana Sarin
  • Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Royer, 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]

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 Five Med Students on Thriving in Clerkships →
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Med Students React: Social Media from Helpful to Hogwash (Recess Rehash)

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Slather some beef tallow on it.

On this episode, M3 Fallon Jung, M1s Isa Perez-Sandi and Cory Karasek, and M2 Maria Schapfel let loose on the internet’s wildest health content. We react to AI-generated videos claiming cortisol is why Dave smells bad, Colonel Sanders warning you about non-biodegradable supermarket fruit, and those unhinged animations where a screaming spine demands you fix your posture. Some of it’s nonsense, some of it’s accurate, and all of it leads to tangents about fake vomit made from chunky soup, whether the ER triage nurse should tell non-emergent patients “good news, you’re not dying,” and the eternal question every clinical student faces: “So what specialty are you going into?”

We talk about imposter syndrome, being “pluripotent,” the secret ER life hack nobody tells you about, and why Jeff Goldblum’s face should be used in all AI-generated health content. It’s an hour of medical students trying to make sense of what social media is feeding their future patients—and themselves.

Episode credits:

  • Producer: Dave Etler
  • Co-hosts: Fallon Jung, Alexis Baker, Cory Karasek, Maria Schapfel
  • Clips: alimentaryschool (Instagram), lifehacks (Facebook), nursestankk (Facebook), superzenlabs (, fullhealthmode (Instagram), meow._.22_1 (Instagram), doctor.binh (Instagram)

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 React: Social Media from Helpful to Hogwash (Recess Rehash) →
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Imposter Syndrome, Uncomfortable Fails, and Med School’s Real Ups and Downs

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New medical students hear the slings and arrows straight from second- and third-years

The Short Coat records in front of a live audience — a room full of brand-new medical students at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine during orientation week. Dave is joined by M3 Zach Grissom, M3 Sarah Upton, M2 Sophie Hueser, and first-time co-host M2 Sudeep Gadde, and together they map the ups and downs of med school across three fronts: the identity shift of becoming a doctor, the grind of the education system itself, and the way a personal life bends (but doesn’t break!) around all of it.

Isolation comes up first— Zach on rotations where he’s the only med student in the room with no classmates to lean on, Sophie on watching pre-med friends peel off into “big kid jobs” while she’s still logging into ICON, the hierarchy of attendings, senior residents, fellows, interns, and sub-Is that can make a clinical team feel like a stack of people keeping tabs on you. Also, failure gets its own segment: Zach walks through hitting 30% on his first neuro exam, and later on another rotation, intubating a patient’s esophagus instead of their trachea — followed minutes later by two clean IV sticks. Sophie’s biggest fail of the year? Forgetting her dad’s birthday, the day of an anatomy exam.

Speaking of anatomy, the crew gets into what it’s actually like in the lab — the respect built into how donors are covered and discussed, the new vocabulary that makes the whole subject click by the end of the semester, and why nobody in the room passed out (a low bar, gratefully cleared). Also covered: doom-scrolling defense strategies (several apps gets endorsements), the comparison trap of watching classmates race through UWorld while they’re treading water, and what it actually takes to be married, parent two kids, and still pass boards — Zach’s honest answer: some days you’re a mediocre student, a mediocre husband, and a mediocre dad, and that’s a win.

Episode credits:

  • Producer: Dave Etler
  • Co-hosts: Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Sophia Hueser, Sudeep Gadde
  • Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Royer, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson 

Timestamps

00:00 — Live audience special: Short Coat’s first-ever taping for orientation week
03:04 — Isolation vs. belonging on clinical rotations and in the MSTP track
09:49 — Medical hierarchy explained: attendings, residents, fellows, and sub-Is
16:33 — Imposter syndrome and the trap of comparing yourself to classmates
23:26 — Study motivation apps and beating doom-scrolling during exam week
31:16 — What anatomy lab is really like, from donor respect to dissection nerves
35:38 — Failure in med school: failed exams, a wrong-pipe intubation, and a forgotten birthday
48:07 — Balancing marriage, parenting, and medical school

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 Imposter Syndrome, Uncomfortable Fails, and Med School’s Real Ups and Downs →
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DNP Doubts, Prepping for Patients, and Smarts Self-Doubt–listener questions answered! (Recess Rehash)

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[Dave’s out of the office this week, so please enjoy this previously released episode!]

Real answers for your real med school dilemmas.

We’ve had some listener question stacking up like it’s the ER waiting room at shift change—and now we’re finally calling some names. This week, we’re clearing the board and giving straight talk on everything from whether Rainey might regret her choice of DNP over med school, Worried Traveler’s fears of surviving their first clinical rotations, and Zion’s untested study habits. You’ll hear why reputation beats job title, the art of asking questions without tanking the vibe, and some ideas on making the transition from an easier undergrad education to med school madness. M4s Hend Al-Kaylani, Maryam Ahmad, and Madeline Ungs confront the awkward task of making friends in med school and why it’s okay if you’re not instantly every resident/faculty favorite.

Bonus web feature! If you fear you never learned to study, visit our this episode’s webpage for a video series by Dave and friends–Zion, this one’s for you!

Episode credits:

  • Producer: Dave Etler
  • Co-hosts: Hind Al-Kaylani, Maryam Ahmed, Madeline Ungs\

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.

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

Continue reading DNP Doubts, Prepping for Patients, and Smarts Self-Doubt–listener questions answered! (Recess Rehash) →
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How A Neurologist Thinks about The Self, ft. Masud Husain

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Oxford neurologist reveals how small brain changes can rewrite who we are

Dave’s got a brain — he’s pretty sure, anyway, since the MRI never mentioned otherwise — and this week he, with M3 Gizzy Lundquist and M2s Akshaj Joshi and Isa Perez-Sandi sit down with University of Oxford neurologist Masud Husain to talk about what happens when that brain stops working the way it’s supposed to. Husain’s new book, Our Brains, Ourselves: What a Neurologist’s Patients Taught Him About the Brain, walks through seven patients whose identities came apart when a single cognitive process — memory, language, attention, motivation — went sideways, and the crew digs into David, a young finance guy with two tiny basal ganglia strokes who became so profoundly apathetic he couldn’t be bothered to shower, get his Social Security benefits, or put on the music he loved, until a Parkinson’s drug brought him back: new suit, new haircut, new job, new girlfriend, all from restoring one chemical pathway.

Husain almost named the book Outsiders, until his editor worried the parallel between “outsider through brain damage” and “outsider through migration” was too politically loaded to sell, but it’s a parallel that traces straight back to Husain’s own childhood, recording himself on his dad’s reel-to-reel to practice sounding more BBC and less like a kid who’d just moved from the Indian subcontinent. Isa and Akshaj push him on the biology of motivation itself: an Oxford scanner study found apathetic students show more basal ganglia and frontal lobe activity than motivated ones when weighing a reward, not less, because deciding whether something’s worth the effort turns out to be the expensive part. Husain is blunt about the dopamine-detox mythology built around doom scrolling. The evidence, he says, is thin; and he’s just as forthright about where psychiatry and neurology actually diverge: not by nature, but by which one currently has biomarkers, as illustrated by NMDA receptor encephalitis, a condition that looks exactly like schizophrenia until someone finds the tumor causing it.

Also, hemispatial neglect, Lewy body hallucinations, the Bayesian prediction machine your brain runs every time you mistake a shadow for your spouse, and Akshaj corners Husain on the hard problem of consciousness with a theory involving meditators and alpha-wave synchronization. None of them solve it. Good hour of trying, though.

Episode credits:

  • Producer: Dave Etler
  • Co-hosts: Isa Perez-Sandi, Akshaj Joshi, Gizzy Lundquist
  • Guest: Masud Husain
  • 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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