mentor

5 Tips for Finding and Working With a Mentor

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Do you know anyone who raves about their mentor? A mentor can offer you expertise and motivation as you work toward your goal of entering medical school and becoming a doctor. A medical student, professor, physician, or anyone with experience and knowledge in the medical field who is able listen, relate, and help invest in your future can be a mentor. For example, finding a mentor who is a physician can provide you with the perspective of someone currently in the profession. Whereas a medical student can give you the first hand perspective of someone who has recently gone through the application process and is currently working toward their degree.

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Things I Didn't Realize About Medicine Until I Became a Physician

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became a physician

Recently SDN member medinquirer noted that it’s common for premed students to learn about medicine through shadowing, volunteering, working in related fields, etc. But surely, said medinquirer in his post, there are things you don’t realize about medicine until after you become a full-fledged, practicing physician. What are those things? Here are some of them of them, as shared by members of the SDN community:
SurfingDoc:
No one teaches you about billing, prior authorizations, etc. until to have to do them. There is no real “education” in those endeavors, but they are part of the system and a requirement of the job.

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Physician Burnout: What It Is and Its Impact on Future Doctors

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Physician burnout is a widely discussed topic among practicing physicians and public health researchers. Many studies have been done showing the implications of burnout on patient satisfaction, career satisfaction, and care outcomes. A few studies even try to measure the dollar cost of burnout to society. However, very few articles appear to address the impact of physician burnout on one very important demographic in medicine: future physicians. Future physicians, such as residents and medical students, are molded by the doctors who come before them. The prevalence of physician burnout is likely to affect the outlook future physicians have regarding their own careers and the possibility of them experiencing their own burnout as well.
Background
Physician burnout in the United States is becoming more common. According to one recent study, roughly 45% of physicians reported feeling signs of burnout, an increase from 39% in a study conducted in 2013. Put another way, nearly 1 out of every 2 physicians has experienced burnout or will in the future.

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Spring Break: Should You Spend It On The Beach Or At The Bench?

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spring break

For most researchers, working in the lab over a holiday break is somewhat different from working in the lab during the rest of the year. For example, if an experiment has flexibly, it can be started or stopped when it’s convenient for the researcher instead of planned around seminars, classes, and campus parking issues. In addition, some researchers take a vacation, adopt unconventional work hours, or hide in their office to work on a manuscript and only visit the lab to search for inspiration, a snack, or a temporary distraction.
I regularly direct several undergrad projects at the same time, work with other members of my lab team, and pursue my own research projects. And even though I enjoy mentoring my students, the researcher in me wants to take full advantage of holiday breaks. For me, a holiday break is an opportunity to set my work schedule as I please or conquer a particularly difficult experiment without being interrupted much. Alternatively, I might start an experiment, or run out to do errands and share a meal with friends, only to return to the lab when it’s convenient for me. I also want to spend some time relaxing—perhaps on my couch playing Halo—because I benefit from taking a break from directing other’s projects and thinking about how to solve a labmate’s bench woe.

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How To Overcome Adversity in Professional School

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overcome adversity in professional school

After coming home from a long day at the library studying for my cardiology exam, I get a phone call from my sister. “Hey,” she said. “Grandmother is in the hospital. Can you come home this weekend?” Great, I thought. Not this again.
I was barely beginning to cope with the loss of my dad over eight years ago, and barely staying afloat in medical school because of it. I had failed my first medical course, anatomy, during my first year and just spent a tough summer trying to remediate it, as my other friends went off traveling or spending time at home with their families. Now, my grandmother was a piece of my childhood that I was about to lose and I had no idea how to prepare for it.

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Searching for Your Dumbledore: Finding a Mentor

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Where would Harry be without Dumbledore? We all need mentors, and they can be critical throughout your career development. Whether you are an undergraduate thinking about applying to graduate or professional school, a medical student wading through residency options or a post-doc looking for faculty positions, the relationships you develop with your mentors can be invaluable. Mentors can give advice, provide encouragement or a reality check, offer insight from their experience, and expand your network by connecting you with their own friends and colleagues. The ideal mentoring relationship is one that evolves over time where the mentor takes a genuine interest in the success of the mentee. We all recognize that mentors are important. But how do you find them? And, once you have, how do you nurture the relationship so it can thrive?

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