Post by Alexis King
We all are familiar with what a podcast is today. From relationship advice to true-crime stories, you can be sure to find a podcast for any information you’re seeking. While all these other podcasts may satisfy a different sort of curiosity, what if there was a podcast that lent a hand to a group of college students? Specifically, pre-health students at the University of Wyoming? Look no further, the White Coat Cowboys Podcast is here! This podcast is going to provide pre-dental, pre-pharmacy, pre-nursing, and pre-med students with advice, tips, and tricks that they can use to find success in their undergraduate journey to a professional school.
This idea came to me when I realized that pre-health students, like myself, have some of the hardest curricula and requirements in college, and that you won’t get answers to/know what to do until you are late into your undergraduate career. This is what happened to me. I even made the mistake of searching for answers to my questions on the internet and from other professors early on in my undergraduate career only to find out that what I found wasn’t the best advice for my journey. This put me in a position where I didn’t have all the requirements that I needed for medical school at the time I desired originally. By speaking with my advisor, current professional students, and other pre-health students I found that a lot of other students share a similar issue. Therefore, I want to help future pre-health students by providing them with the valuable information that they will be able to apply in their journey, find success and avoid “code yellow” (aka disaster).
Now that I have this idea and you know the inspiration for it, it makes sense to ask the question “will a podcast help resolve some of my struggles in my undergraduate journey, provide clarity, or give me something that I can take away?”. The answer is yes and here is why. According to Armstrong, a good undergraduate education features encouragement of contact between students and faculty, development of reciprocity and cooperation among students, encouragement of active learning, prompt feedback, communication of high expectations, and respect for diverse talents and different ways of learning (Armstrong et al. pp 81).
All these aspects are ultimately the basis for The White Coat Cowboys. This is because students will get to interact with faculty (hearing their thoughts, advice, etc.) through the interviews, they also will have the chance to think about and submit questions that they can ask faculty members which can also be a form of active learning, the podcast will be able to give prompt feedback to their questions/concerns, help navigate those required high expectations and execute them with the information received from the interviews, and finally, it will respect diverse talents and ways of learning because it is receptive to all questions and the different ways in which people may learn/study/think (a benefit from interviewing different qualified individuals too). The journal article “A Qualitative Exploration of Pre-Health Students’ Perceptions of Academic Success and Persistence” also supports how influential this podcast can be because the article focused on upper-level pre-health students at a large university who wrote letters of advice to incoming freshmen, providing insight into their definitions of academic success and the “psychological and contextual factors they perceive as promoters of success” (Dumke et al.) In the end, these letters were shown to help students persevere in the challenging experiences of pre-health studies—an outcome my podcast will mirror.
The topics I will cover in the podcast are like another successful student project where they created a website for pre-health students that featured information about “pre-requisites, recommended courses, clinical experiences, volunteer work, extracurricular activities, research, standardized tests, the pre-professional file, centralized application services, and the application process, interviewing…, and helpful resources” (Close et al. pp 1). Students at the University of Wyoming will have access to all that information with my podcast but will be able to hear it from a primary, reliable source such as an advisor, knowledgeable professor, a professional in your desired field, and/or a current professional student. Therefore, it can be shown that this podcast will act as a guide, provide clarity, and lend support to pre-health students.
Overall, my goal for this project is to help future pre-health students by providing them with the valuable information that they will be able to apply in their journey, find success, and avoid “code yellow” (aka disaster). However, I won’t be able to do this without YOUR HELP! If you have any peers that you think will benefit from this or any advisors/instructors that will be interested in being interviewed, please share. Below this blog post, please provide any insight, suggestions, or opinions that you think will make for a better podcast (if you want to do this anonymously, click here). Finally, if you think this podcast is for you, please follow along, listen, and click here if you have any questions that my podcast can answer. Thank you!
Alexis King is a pre-medicine student at the University of Wyoming and creator of the White Coat Cowboys podcast. Connect more with her about the podcast, suggestions, or general comments here.
references
Close, Elizabeth Denby, and Larissa Nicole Gardner. “Pre-Health Students’ Guide to Success: A Student’s Perspective.” (2003).
Dumke, Erika K., et al. “A Qualitative Exploration of Pre-Health Students’ Perceptions of Academic Success and Persistence.” NACADA Journal, vol. 38, no. 2, 2018, pp. 5-19.
R. Armstrong, Gary, Joanne M. Tucker, and Victor J. Massad. “Interviewing the Experts: Student-Produced Podcast.” Journal of Information Technology Education. Innovations in Practice, vol. 8, 2009, pp. 79-90.
Engage Laramie Science 