Their Last Free Summer: How Four M1s Are Spending It

Four medical students— Lily Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Jonah Albrecht, and Anna Royer— talk through how they landed on their "last free summer ever" plans: research fellowships, a genetics scholars program, global health immersion in Ecuador, Colorado fourteeners, and the lingering question of whether any of it actually matters for residency. Jonah is off to Ecuador in part to avoid a lab. Lily is in a clinic implementing joint-capture software partly because she can't do chart review without going sideways. Melia is doing genetics because she actually likes the patient population. Sure, they're all deciding to do something med school adjacent. But they are exercising the option to choose the focus of their attention in this last summer of life at the margins of medicine.

You can listen to Their Last Free Summer: How Four M1s Are Spending It online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Their Last Free Summer: How Four M1s Are Spending It is an episode from The Short Coat Podcast by The Students of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.

This episode is 44:24 long.

This episode was published on May 7, 2026.

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