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

As societies and governments wrestle with the rise of artificial intelligence, The Short coats sit down with Dr. Lindsey Knake, a CCOM alum neonatologist and associate chief health information officer, to map out where AI actually stands in medicine right now. M2s Mukund Viswanadha, Deeraj Manika, and Samee Jung sort through the muddle of chatbots, agents, and machine learning, then get specific about the tools already embedded in their days. Dr. Knake also lays out Iowa's new clinical informatics fellowship in detail — a two-year, post-residency program. There's a lot of optimism in this episode, along with some side-eye. If you want to know how AI will affect you as a medical student and future physician, this is the right episode for that!

It's freeform Friday on the pod, which means the Iowa City parking situation is excellent, the rising M2s are bored and slightly guilty about it, and absolutely willing to tell a full story about a stranded boat. As their first year in medical school recedes into their past, Ellie Johnson, Braiden DeSchryver, Sarvin Mousakhani, Regan DeMaris, and Alana Jones join Dave for an episode that reveals the specific texture of med student summer — the productivity guilt your PI has to prescribe against, the hobbies you've been saving since last August, and the strange peace of Iowa City when the academic calendar stops grinding for awhile.

Can The Short Coats make a card game that captures the twists and turns of medical school? Well, we've given it a try, and now we finally play it — the Game of Med School, a prototype card-based playthrough of the full medical school path, from premed clubs to residency match. Cyrus Barati, who helped build the game, takes on the Gunner identity and immediately gets routed to clinical years while still underwater on points. M4 Fallon Jung (pregnant, unbothered) draws the Resilient Student card and somehow converts a failed Step exam into a net positive. M3s Sarah Upton and Zach Grissom round out the cast, with Zach's Non-Traditional Student racking up an improbable collection of degrees, nursing licenses, and EMT certifications before anyone gets to medical school proper.

The cards lead to real conversations: What's a post-bacc worth on an application? How do you handle a professionalism flag? What actually happens when your PI moves states mid-MD-PhD? How do you tell a patient bad news — and does a med student ever actually have to? Does your identity change any of that?

The real question: would you play this game if we gave it away? Listener feedback is always welcome at https://theshortcoat.com/tellus!

The $100,000 H-1b visa fee landed in September 2025 like a fire alarm in the hallways of medicine—hospitals panicked, advocacy groups mobilized, and a lot of people predicted the international resident pipeline would collapse. Dr. Bryan Carmody, The Sheriff of Sodium rejoins co-hosts David Lee, Mukund Viswanadha, and Isa Perez-Sandi to ask the question nobody was asking: was the panic grounded in reality? More interesting to think about: why rural physician shortages are a compensation and incentive problem, not a numbers problem; why loan forgiveness alone probably isn't moving the needle; and what separates effective physician advocacy from "just expressing emotion and hoping facts do the work." Then graduating high-school listener Aditi asks whether community college is a viable launch pad for medicine.

We've all got that mental image of medical students – the type-A perfectionists grinding through textbooks even on the porcelain throne, right? Well, our first-year medical students at Iowa are about to blow up every assumption you've ever had. The people memorizing a zillion anatomical structures aren't exactly who you'd expect.

M1s Chase McInville, Lillian Schmidt, Jonah Albrecht, and Abbie Townsend reveal why your pre-med study plans are probably useless, how a hockey ref's confidence translates to patient care, and why some medical students refuse to study on Saturdays. We explore the real traits that matter (spoiler: it's not being a genius), bust the myth about cutthroat competition, and discover why medical school might actually be more collaborative than you thought.