The Short Coat: An Inside Look at Getting Into and Getting Through Medical School

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 Your Personality Pick Your Medical Specialty? 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? 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.

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 at https://theshortcoat.com/applying!

M3 Jacob Thompson, M2s Charis Edwards and Cyrus Barati, and Dr. Katie Imborek talk about being LGBTQ+ in medicine: coming out over and over to preceptors and patients, going back in the closet on a rural rotation, what "safe" actually means for queer med students, and why doctors should ask every patient about sexual orientation and gender identity. Also, Iowa is not the potato place.

Thinking about medical school? Carver's admissions team is hosting a virtual info session Tuesday, October 6, 2026 at 6 p.m. Central. Register at https://theshortcoat.com/applying.

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.