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. 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.

On this episode, M3 Fallon Jung, M1s Alexis Baker 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 we smell 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 triage nurse should tell you "good news, you're not dying," and the eternal question every clerkship student faces: "What specialty are you going into?"

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

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.

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. If you've got any interest in how brains and neurologists work, his book is a great read.

If you're thinking of starting over and going to med school, you might wonder what your previous jobs have done to prepare you for it. Good news: your old jobs and activities might matter more than your GPA ever will. And we hear from a listener who wants to know if we were super studious in high school. We try to let him down gently.

This week M3s Srishti Mathur and Zach Grissom are joined by CCOM admissions expert Rachel Shulista and the PA Program clinicals coordinator Andrew Dao. You might think they're here to offer their expertise in some informative way so that Short Coat Listeners can benefit. You'd be wrong, because Dave is making everyone rank things nobody should have to rank: how believable your excuse for missing sleep is, how harsh your last piece of attending feedback was, how likely you are to botch a procedure you've never done before. It's another round of our special version of That Escalated Quickly, the card game where the only rule committing to the rank.

M2s Akshaj Joshi, Anna Royer, Charis Edwards, and Cory Karasek talk about giving and receiving feedback, what it's like reading a stack of evaluative comments about yourself, why "keep reading" is somehow a real evaluation, and whether attendings have started letting AI write their write-ups. Also, do quiet students get read more harshly than talkative ones, does anybody actually change their filler-word habit once someone points it out, and is your personality basically locked in since the day you were born (this one gets a full psychoanalysis of Joshi's baby years). Also, we visit reddit to help people. For instance, an AITA dilemma asks whether refusing hospital visitors after birth makes you the asshole, whether it's awful to end a ten-year relationship over a partner's decision to go to naturopathic school, and somebody's uncle wants a free diagnosis at the next family gathering, and gets read for it, ethically, legally, and personally.

M2 Jack Klitgaard and M4 Fallon Jung are both expecting newborns in the coming months. M2 Regan Demaris has a couple toddlers already, and CCOM Registrar and Curriculum Director Carrie Bernat had her children while putting her husband through medical school two decades ago. In short, it's the perfect group to talk about the challenges and triumphs of cuddling kids while cramming the Krebs cycle.

Fallon's challenge will be how to apply for residency positions with a new little one. Jack faces starting his clinical rotations while stepping into the role of father. Fortunately, both of their spouses are going to stay at home to be the primary caregiver. Regan's toddlers came into the world before medical school and as her husband was in the Navy, which presented its own moments of terror--like how to cope with a daycare disaster while he was incommunicado on a boat somewhere. And Carrie--well, 20 years ago she was working at another medical school and having babies while her husband navigated an MD/PhD program. They were handling it well until her second child was born with a chromosomal microdeletion, upending carefully laid plans.

For pre-meds staring down six figures of debt, the military offers something rare: a fully funded path through medical school built around a mission bigger than the paycheck. Dave sits down with M3 Nick Lebezeder, M3 Lauren VandeKamp, and M2 Lydia Bemnister to walk through the menu of options — among others, the Health Professions Scholarship Program, National Guard and Reserve stipends, USUHS (the military's own medical school in Bethesda, which pays you a second lieutenant's salary while you train), and the Navy's Health Services Collegiate Program. Nick lays out how a three-year HPSP scholarship maps to three years of service after residency, and Lauren walks through the math on longer residencies so nobody signs blind. The commitment is real. So is what it buys: leadership experience from day one, a guaranteed specialty pipeline for the ones who plan ahead, and, for the right person, a sense of purpose civilian medicine doesn't always hand you.