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

Before she arrived at CCOM, M1 Moesha Chhatlani thought there'd only be one type of person going to med school. She's since realized that was not true, so she surveyed her first-year classmates and sorted them into archetypes, and classmates Avery Hand, Megan Funk, Braedon Kirkpatrick, and Dave go through the results: who is the Anki warrior, who is the pop-up med student, who is the ortho bro, and why is the most common type the one who disappears for days and then walks away with an 87%? (No confidence intervals were harmed. It is not evidence based.) What do M1s eat for lunch? Whatever the interest groups leave out, and Dave admits he hunts for it too. Also, what gets students dinged in Objective Structured Clinical Examination feedback, and why is the top answer saying “awesome” about a family history of diabetes? Then the index cards come out and everyone has to argue an opinion they may not hold: more residency slots as the cure for physician burnout, whether residents should use artificial intelligence for charting, whether Step 1 should stay pass/fail, a longer gross anatomy course, stray cats, and Halloween on the last Saturday of October. Also, Dave is colorblind and has feelings about your charts.

Content warning: this episode contains frank discussions of male anatomy exams]

It’s 12:15, the exam is at 3:30, and one student is deciding which fingernails will be sacrificed. The M2s are just hours away from their Penis, Scrotum, and Rectum teaching sessions. Lillian Schmidt, Asmi Patel, Melia Patrick, and Mukund Viswanadha join Dave and last-minute guest Audra King to discuss this important (but a bit awkward) lesson involving paid patient instructors who bare it all in the service of our students' learning this important physical exam skill. Also, the other things we're still learning, like left verses right, brown is really dark orange, American Sign Language--a class Audra started for the med students--and our poorly-led and played game of Imposter.

Housekeeping note: the video version of the show is now available on Apple Podcasts! Check it out: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-short-coat-video-an-inside-look-at-getting/id6825080386

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.

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.

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.