First Look into: Student Doc 101: Your Guide to Thriving in Med School

Medical school advice is everywhere, but most of it is either too polished to trust or too bite-sized to use. We wanted something simpler and more honest, so we sat down with Michael Stanett, a medical education learning specialist at NYITCOM at Arkansas State University, to introduce Student Doc 101 and the idea behind it: let medical students explain, in their own words, how they actually thrive.

We talk about the realities that don’t show up in a brochure. Medical school is hard for academic reasons, sure, but it’s also hard because of relocation, loneliness, family responsibilities, parenting, money stress, and the nonstop mental load of performing at a high level. Michael shares why the show focuses on peer-to-peer wisdom, and how hearing multiple student journeys helps pre-med students and new med students build a plan that fits their real life, not someone else’s highlight reel.

We also dig into time management versus energy management, and why so many driven students hit a wall even when their calendar looks “optimized.” Michael calls out the social media algorithm trap that keeps people doom-scrolling for the perfect strategy, and he makes the case for long-form conversations as a kind of accessible mentorship. Then we zoom out to the bigger stakes: the physician shortage, the importance of primary care, and why osteopathic medicine’s whole-person approach matters for rural health in Arkansas and beyond.

If you’re aiming for med school, already in it, or supporting someone who is, this is your reminder to build habits that last. Subscribe for upcoming student interviews, share this with a friend chasing medicine, and leave a review with the question you want us to ask first.

Transcript

New Studio And Guest Welcome

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hey everyone, Parker Dotson here with podcastvideos.com. We are here for day two of our recordings in the new studio space. You'll obviously notice in this that the background is different than it was yesterday. Um, so especially just for Michael, since he was coming in. We'll rip it back down after this and go back to the old one, but we wanted to get a special one in for you. So do appreciate that, Parker. But yeah, Michael, thank you for taking the time to join me. Um, tell us a little bit more, just who you are, your history, where you're from, um, and then what you do now here at Arkansas

Michael’s Path Into Medical Education

SPEAKER_00 0:38

State.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Yeah, sure. Thanks so much first for letting me in the show and uh getting to see the new space. It's so wonderful. Uh I love being involved in that. Uh so I'm Michael Stanett. I am a medical education learning specialist now with the NYIT Com at Arkansas State University Medical School on this campus, but I did not start there. So I'm from Northeast Arkansas, Arkansas's home. I've uh essentially always lived in the foothills of the Ozarks and the Delta.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

And I got into education out of college. I was a uh high school teacher and taught speech and that. And I was also in like a pastoral role, so did church life. That that was my thing, education and church. And did that for a while, and then an opportunity came up six years ago, just before COVID shut everything down, for me to move into medical education. And I thought, well, I'll have a challenge. So let's get into a space where I know nothing. Yeah. And so that's what happened. I I took the role at NYIT Comet Arkansas State to work in academic affairs um and haven't looked back. You know, it's been a great experience. Uh, really enjoyed being on the campus of Arkansas State University, getting to utilize the resources, uh, facilities here and um work with medical students. Uh, it's been a great experience.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Yeah, and Casey told us a little bit yesterday just about all the great things that's happening within IT and Arkansas State here. So it's it's very encouraging. I know people will go out and listen to that. And he's got a couple of shows that we're doing for the freshman to

The Purpose Behind Student Doc 101

SPEAKER_00 2:10

physician program, and then you're leading kind of more of our peer conversation side. So tell us as we dive into student doc 101, your guide to thrive in medical school, tell us a little bit more about that. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

So I think one of the challenges is that uh people just assume that uh medical school is gonna be hard. Well, they're right. It is gonna be hard, but it's hard for a plethora of reasons, a variety of different things that people don't consider. And so one of the things that we're gonna be talking about on this show is we're gonna bring medical students in and we're gonna listen to those students talk about how they've been able to be successful, whether it was balancing family life, life with kids, uh, stuff like that, how did they do that? Uh, balancing the transition from living somewhere else to moving to a place where you don't know anyone, what that transition is like. Or we're gonna talk too about like what's it like growing up in the Delta of Arkansas and then being able to go to medical school and become the physician when maybe you were the first person to graduate high school in your family. Yeah. And now you're doing something that nobody ever thought you could do because you had someone at some point in time believe in you, actually, and and then you developed a belief in yourself. So we're gonna talk to medical students about their journey and about how they are thriving in medical school. Because, like, man, it's when you're stuck between survival or thrival, is that a word? It is now. It is now. I used to tell people if you can make it up and people understand it, I knew exactly what you meant, so we're good. So that's what we're gonna be doing, man. We're gonna dive in, we're gonna get student perspectives because who wants to hear from me? You know, I can tell you what I think, but that only goes so far.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Yeah. Yeah, we've had yesterday we were in here all day and had probably six or eight different students come through here and just they wanted to know what the space was. We actually had them sit down and talk, and the first four are pre-med students that are either in their sophomore freshman year. There'd been a couple of younger ones in there, and they were like, it's already this hard. They're like, let's talk about this test. And the other one was like, I really don't want to talk about that test because that was so hard. And they even mentioned to your credit, you know, when do we find time to eat? Because we're doing these things, and we may be studying and doing homework till 2 a.m. And you have not only the stress of what they're doing in their regular curriculum and courses, but then you jump into, okay, well, that's not the end of it whenever I finish those. I've got this whole other, you know, the path of residency and everything else that you have to get through. And so, you know, those undergrad students that are wanting to do that are already stressed about those things. And so I love the concept of what you're doing. You know, Casey's gonna be touching more on this is who we are and what we do, along with kind of this is how the back end works. But I love the approach that we're taking with your show, which is let's hear from the students because you know how it is. Like I have a little two-year-old, but not you know, he's not too old to really back talk to me yet, but he's starting to. Yeah. But you know how it is like when you were a kid, you know, your parents tell you something and you're you ignore it, you ignore it, you ignore it, and then a friend or somebody your age says it and you grab a hold of it. And they're like, I've been telling you that for years now, and you just refuse to listen to me. And students are you know still the same way today. When they hear it from other people that have lived the experience and can relate to it, then they will begin to either find a maybe a comfort in there

Real Student Stories And Transitions

SPEAKER_00 5:25

or advice and helpful advice that they can begin to follow. So um, I'm excited for the concept of what the show is. So, do you have some not necessarily specific people, so types of people picked out that you're gonna talk with?

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Yeah, so I I've got some emails sent out and people that I've uh kind of tapped early uh for this idea when I first heard that we might be doing this. Uh, I wanted to get experiences uh from a variety of different people, most of them from this area. But I've got a couple from uh large cities who have moved to this area because people need to know what it's gonna be like, what's the change like moving into a space where it's like mosquitoes are your best friend now? So you better learn to dig in. Yeah. But it's it's a whole different uh challenge uh coming to medical school from whatever you were doing. Uh, the time management, the energy management, because so many of us run out of energy before we run out of time. And so we've got to learn how to manage all of those things. Yeah. So I'm really excited about getting to discuss with some of the students who have done really, really well in everything that they've been in. We're gonna talk to students who started in a master's program before they got into the medical school program because they wanted to get a better understanding. Uh, just trying to get a kind of a broad uh picture because there's not like a clear path into medical school. And I'll say this, Parker, as I feel like maybe people who are watching this, um we get trapped by our algorithms in

Time And Energy Management Truths

SPEAKER_01 6:50

social media and on Reddit and stuff like that. Like our phones are listening all the time. If I wanted to talk about dog food right now, I'm gonna get a couple of ads for dog food, right? Yep. So when we get trapped by the algorithm, it is always someone trying to make money off me that is trying to get me to do something. Well, and then they've learned marketing, they understand those things, and so it looks pretty. And then I'll go into that space. What we're going to do is we're gonna talk to students so that we can hear their perspectives so that we can get outside the algorithm. And we can hear here's what I had to do in order to be successful, and here's what I had to do in order to discipline myself to make a path forward that is outside the algorithm.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

Yeah. Yeah, and that's the thing I love the most about podcast formats is you can consume a lot of content in 30 to 60 second snippets. But if you had some a student who's struggling, they're trying to really find their path of exactly how to do these things. If they had, if you want to call it even a mentor where they could hear somebody that's been through it sit down and talk with them for an hour, there's a lot of value they're going to take from that. And that's what I love about the podcasting style is you can achieve that. And it can reach all sorts of people, you know, in this area and beyond, because it's

Getting Outside The Social Algorithm

SPEAKER_00 8:10

a full-hour conversation. It's not designed to be overly flashy or what you're wanting to hear, or just grab your attention and suck you into this realm of, you know, whatever the algorithm's doing. It's hear these real honest conversations about what it is. And that's that's going to be important because not everyone's, you know, story and experience is going to be the same. And what resonates with someone, you know, whatever you may hear resonates with you may not resonate with me, and then vice versa. So I think having that range of people that can come in and talk about that, and we can actually get deep into those stories and conversations, not just a 15-minute meeting or a five-minute phone call. Right. We can actually have them come in and talk about it, and then the value that that can provide for, you know, what is evergreen content, which is great.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

Yeah. And and I'll just give a heads up to whoever listens to my show, watches my show. I'm a curious person. So I'm going to ask, I my goal is always to ask more questions than I give answers. Love it. And if I can ask the right questions, then people will hear an answer that really sticks with them. But I decided several years ago that I was not pursuing expertise, that I was pursuing a better way. And so I'm an experimenter by nature, and that's what we're going to be doing in here with these students. Love it. Is experts get afraid to try new things because they've nailed it. Well, what happens when a new, better way is comes along? Like, so we're going to be experimenting, we're going to be practicing these things. And uh, if someone's interested in med school and what that's like, uh, we're going to figure that out because I have former students when I was a teacher who are now pre-med students, they call me. Or I get emails over here in my office. I'll be sitting on my computer and I'll have an email pop up from a student that I had before. And I'm like, what? That's crazy. That's fantastic. That's cool. And so I'll talk to them. Um, I've got my uh son's girlfriend is a student here. She's pre-med. And so it's like, let's talk about the path. Yeah. This is exciting. That's cool. It's inspiring to me. And here's why. Uh massive

Why Long Conversations Mentor Better

SPEAKER_01 10:05

physi physician shortage. Yeah. Uh they project anywhere from 30,000 to 80,000 doctors short by 2035. Because that's that's nine years. Jeez. So we need students to be successful, yeah, so they can become physicians because our health depends on it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Casey and I were talking about that a little bit yesterday. The vast number that are going to be retiring, you know, and there's some from your normal hospitals and stuff, but it's those family practices that have been in these communities for years and decades on end are going to be retiring, and people don't always know what to do. They don't really have a somebody who's going to be coming in as a younger doctor and is already at the clinic and can take over for them. So it's being able to equip these students and what you guys do at NYIT is send these students to different parts of communities around Arkansas. And I think Casey wanna, I want to say Casey said the stat, and I could be totally wrong, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but is it 80% of osteopathic um medicine doctors go into usually serve smaller communities? Something along the family practice doctors.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Primary care.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

Primary care type role.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Uh that's probably close. Uh Casey will give you that number again. You'll hear it again on his shows. He'll probably say it every time. Oh, yeah, yeah. Uh because we're proud of that. Yeah. Here's here's why. Ready? This morning I was on the treadmill, 5 a.m. I hit the gym. Way to go. My wife does it. It's not because I'm a stud, okay? I don't want to. She goes, I gotta go.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

So dude next to me is a friend of mine, and so we're talking. And uh a few years ago, he uh

Physician Shortage And Primary Care

SPEAKER_01 11:35

blew a disc out of his back and it jumped into his sciatic nerve, and he had to go to urgent care. And he said they treated him like a guy who just wants pills because he didn't have primary care. He didn't have a regular physician. Now he does. Yeah, and he has taught his kids to have a primary care physician. Yeah. The reality is it's important that we train students who want to be primary care physicians. And that's one of the osteopathic tenets, is man, we're trying to care about the whole being. We want to dive into your routines, we want to dive into your sleep. We're gonna get up into your diet, like you might not like it, but you'll be healthier. Yeah, you'll live better.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

That's what Casey was saying yesterday. He was like, one of the first few questions you'll get asked when you go see him is what'd you have for breakfast this morning? How are you sleeping? Instead of, like you just said, a situation where it's what pill do you need to make you feel better versus okay, what is the actual cause of this and what's led to this? Because that's overall much better for our health, as we obviously know. And so getting those people trained up and into the communities, even you know, in the state of Arkansas, but even beyond is just an important as we continue to move forward. And, you know, what is Arkansas very lower end when it comes to healthcare state, you know, being able to train these students up and get them out there to provide the care that people need in our different areas. That's right. And when they're trained here, they practice here.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

Yeah. So that's why we do it. And that's why I love talking to students who have done it. A lot of our students will be those who uh grew up near Jonesboro or within a couple of hours of Jonesboro, went to school at Arkansas State University or another school in Arkansas. Not all of our students, but many of them will be. And it's it's gonna be exciting to hear their stories and to be able to connect the dots with the others who listen.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Yeah, and hear people have people understand exactly what's going on. And these students who are thinking about getting into this field or are currently trying to rapidly approach it, what are they experiencing? How can they take, you know, good, credible information away from that that can help them prepare them, help them ask the questions that they need, maybe internally to decide what's best for them. And um, it's gonna be a it's gonna be a fun format. I'm excited to see. And I know just the first couple of times talking with you, I was like, you know, do we have any questions on any of our hosts? And I was like, really not. The hosts that we have all the way across the board are are stellar. Um, but you know, there's a few whenever you look at them and it's like, I think Michael's gonna be all right. Like, you know, you just have that personality. You talk, you're you know, you're not a very shy person, which is nice. I I can talk. Yeah, yeah. So it's it's gonna be great. Um, if there's one last thing you can kind of tell people to look forward to with the show, um, and you know, I kind of know you kind of told them what to expect, but one last thing you want to leave them with before we start getting out of here and you start recording those full episodes.

Sleep, Seasons, And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Hmm. One last thing. Uh yeah, for anyone listening, uh you can't outperform bad sleep. And so, whatever you're doing right now, if you're a freshman at college, if you're a 47-year-old dad, if you're whatever you're doing, sleep well. If you want to if you want to live well, you have to sleep well. You just can't outrun bad sleep.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

I like that. And I did not sleep great last night, so now that's weighing heavy on me. So you got it. And I've got to drive back to Northwest Arkansas. Yes, it does. But now I'll be very confident and be like, well, Michael's gonna, he just told me that I needed to sleep better, so you gotta do it. And I I can attest to it. You know, you've had kids, so you know when you first have a child, sleep pretty much does not exist. And you do that for a few weeks on end, and you're like, I just don't feel good overall.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

You're in a different season, yeah. Right? But don't turn don't turn a temporary season into a permanent lifestyle. Yeah. Like that that becomes choice after choice after choice. I like that. And eventually that letting that temporary season become permanent often doesn't end in the way we want. So hey, there's a little nugget for you.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

I like that. That was done that. That was heavy.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Well, Michael, thank you so much for coming in and chatting with me. We're excited to get the full episodes up and going. And uh, whenever we get all this content rolling out, be sure you check out Student Doc 101, your guide to Thriving in Medical School. Be able to get it all over all the different social or uh social media channels through the media network, but all the distribution channels, Spotify, I heard, Amazon, across YouTube. You'll be able to search the show and listen to the episodes and hear from the students. All right, man. Sounds great. We're gonna be famous. Hey, we're gonna do our best to at least. All right, thanks, Michael. Like it, you bet. Thanks, Barker.