Search for tag: "mentor"

Isn't it strange how you can still feel like a failure even after you've achieved your dream of getting into medical school? It's such a strange dynamic to be in. You know, on one hand, everybody in society or your family is praising you, and here I was sitting in my classroom, sitting among my peers and thinking, "I am the dumbest person here. I do not deserve to be here." And the amount of negative thoughts started building and building up in my head. And eventually, I started to spiral and I thought, "Who are you kidding? You're not going to be a doctor. You don't deserve to do this. You faked your way into medical school. You are not anywhere near the brilliance to be able to make it and become a physician who can take care of people."

And I remember sitting in Dr. Baumann's office. He's our academic advisor in medical school. And I'm telling him these things, and I'm telling him, I said, "I'm too dumb for this. Look, I'm too . . ." you know, "Look at my grade here. Look at my grade there." And I remember him saying, "Stop. You need to start changing the way you think. For every instance you start thinking, 'I can't do it, you need to start saying, 'I can do it.'" And I thought that's not going to do anything.

And I'm sitting in the classroom waiting for an exam to start. And the anxiety is just building and building in me. And I thought there's nothing else to lose now, might as well just say it, just say, "I can do this." And so I started to say that, and, you know, before every exam, it became like this crazy obsessive ritual. I would sit there and I would say, "I can do this. I can do this." And slowly over time, this "I can do it" phrase started seeping into various aspects of my medical school life. Before every patient interaction, "I can do this." Before I go and present to an attending, I would say, "I can do this."

Words never were powerful to me, but at the same time, the words that were doubtful were very powerful to me. So why can't the words that are positive also be equally powerful?

Slowly, these changes were happening, but I didn't really notice it until I was a fourth-year med student. I have been traveling across the nation for these away rotations. I'm living in different states for a month at a time, working at different EDs, working with different doctors and physicians and, you know, seeing how everybody thinks differently, and I'm thinking I'm actually doing this. And then I submit my application to go into emergency medicine I thought, "Oh my God, I did this." It became more apparent that my success comes from my ability to pull myself up rather than my ability to compare to others. And I started doing way more better in clinical settings.

It hit me how much self-doubt can block so much of your learning, so much of your growth, and that it hinders your path to success. It's so important to be able to see that positivity within yourself, that resilience within yourself and acknowledge when you're about to self-doubt and be able to beat it at the spot and recognize that it comes from a place of fear rather than a place of capability.

So, as cheesy as it sounds probably the most important lesson I learned out of medical school was that you have to believe in yourself first. Believing yourself is going to lead you to open your mind in order to be successful in the environment that you're so passionate about.

Since the day I decided I wanted to do emergency medicine, the amount of negative feedback I got was ridiculous. I remember people telling me things from, "Your lifestyle's going to suck," to, "Your patient's population's going to be so difficult to work with." Even people telling me, "ED doctors are the dumbest doctors. We don't trust their work." That put a lot of self-doubt in my choice of wanting to do emergency medicine.

But on my first night shift ever in the emergency department, I'm sitting with the attending in his office. It's about 2:00 a.m. and we get a notification saying that there's a really critical patient and they're going to be using our parking lot to transfer the patient from an ambulance to a helicopter. But the patient's not going to come into the ED at all.

We get word that the ambulance arrived and the attending said, "Hey, let's just go out there and just eyeball the patient to make sure they're okay."

As we're heading out, we see this helicopter in the distance. And I remember my attending just yelling at me, like, "Duck down." And so we end up sprawling underneath the cars in the parking lot as this helicopter descended from above us. And as soon as it landed, we made our way to the ambulance, and we realized the patient was being bagged. They weren't intubated. There was just so much stuff that needed to be done in order to further stabilize this patient for transport on a helicopter.

That's when my attending made the decision, "No, we need to take this patient inside," which freaked the staff out because they're like, "We're at a small hospital. We're not going to know how to accommodate things." He was insisting. He's like, "No, we've got to take him in because it's going to be way harder to do these procedures on the helicopter that's flying in the air, moving, than it will be in our ED."

So me and the doctor, we roll the patient into the ED. The emergency doctor really took lead at that point, where this doctor does pretty much everything and he stabilizes the patient and he's able to, like, control the room, and he's such a great leader.

My biggest fear is to come up onto a scene where someone is like absolutely sick or hurt and I can't do anything. And this is exactly what the doctor did, is he came up to the scene where this patient was absolutely sick and injured and there was nothing that this hospital could provide, but he ended up providing so much.

And I remember thinking like, "This guy is freaking amazing." He's just jumping around this entire patient. He was a one-man hospital. He was at the head of the bed at one instance, and he was putting the tube down and intubating the patient, and cutting the side of the chest, putting in a chest tube, ultrasounding the patient. And I'm sitting there and I'm just like handing towels, handing whatever he calls for.

And finally, we packaged the patient up, and we rolled him out back into the parking lot and put him onto the helicopter, and they ended up flying away.

I never got to actually work with that attending again. And I actually don't even really remember his name, but the image of him just dealing with everything, doing all the work that had to be done, formed the image of how powerful an emergency physician can actually be. And it melted away all those judgments that I had and all the doubts that I had from other people telling me how awful the field would be.

From there on out, I decided, "No, this is the field I have to do." And so here I am as a . . . what am I? I'm a first-year resident. And I realized when it comes to success, when it comes to truly being the best at whatever you want to be, you have to follow your heart. Every time I was in the emergency room, it was great. I knew this was where I wanted to be, and I just had to push all those voices back and realize I was meant to be in the emergency room as an emergency physician.

I immigrated to this country when I was three years old, and one thing that we always did was watch television. Me and my sisters and my mom and dad all would sit together and watch the news mostly to learn English. I do remember that, when they would go to work, me and my sisters would always watch "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

I remember one day we were sitting on our sofa. It was 4:00 p.m. We had just come home from a long day from school, eating roti and sabji, Punjabi food, and staring into our old-school 1990s television. And this particular episode stood out to me. This particular episode was about uplifting the stories of those who had been sexually abused. In the end of the episode, Oprah said some words that will never leave me. She was looking straight into the screen with tears at the brim of her eyes. She said, "You matter, and your voice matters." I felt like she saw me that day and heard me and her words were for me.

Oftentimes, we think of mentors as people that we have personal interactions with. When I was little, that moment felt personal. I think it's one of the biggest reasons why this podcast is so important to me. When I think of the words that she said in those episodes, I also understand how relevant what we are going through in this country is today. When I think of the #blacklivesmatters, that's what I see. I see that there has been generations and generations of individuals that have not been heard. And Oprah even saying that to me a little bit, I knew my voice mattered. It's about uplifting each other. And more importantly, it's about honoring every single human on this world.

Another thing that I have been thinking a lot about in that episode is she had mentioned that it's really important to acknowledge pain, and that is both at a personal level, a family level, a community level, and also a societal level. What has been going on now is centuries of pain that has not been acknowledged. And because we are all connected, what I understand from that is I am also connected to the liberation of black lives.

I am always reminded of this episode in my everyday life, and that is why I try to utilize my voice. I also try to understand my pain and reflect on it so that I can use it as a tool to change the way I think and the way I behave. Although Oprah has given me many mentor moments, this is one that I will hold onto forever.

Harjit: Hi, everyone. We are the Bundle Of Hers, with Harjit, Bushra, Leen, and Margaux, and we are excited to share our mentoring moments with you.

Margaux: Mentor moments can come at unexpected times or from unexpected people. These moments have been an important theme throughout our episodes, and it is a good relationship that is impactful and helps guide both our professional and personal lives.

Bushra: We believe that centering mentorship relationships around identity is vital. When we discover who we are and project our identities, we find people who we can connect with.

Leen: We wanted to create a mentoring series based on sharing moments that held life-changing and learning experiences. We also wanted to share these moments that opened up and directed our minds towards choosing our path in medicine and even influenced many aspects of our lives.

Margaux: It can seem like there's a normalized way to have a mentor and a way to officially seek them out, but I hope through this mini-series that we can share our individual mini mentor moments and show that mentors can come in many different types of relationships, even if it's just one moment with a person that you may never interact with again.

Bushra: I think I can speak for all of us when I say that mentorship kind of gives you a little bit of a guideline for whatever it is that you're looking for. It gives you an opportunity to explore things and to seek the wisdom of people who have gone through things before you. And I feel like through this mini-series, you'll be able to learn from the lessons that we've gathered over the years and kind of formulate your own thought process on how or what a mentorship relationship looks like and how it can impact your life.

Harjit: I'm excited about this mini-series because I think it will be awesome to reflect back on moments that have really impacted my life. I have also noticed that mentoring is something that you . . . a skill that you hone and get better at. And I think listening to everyone else's stories will allow me to add things in my skill set so that I can become a better mentor.

Margaux: Join us as we grow together through our reflections in this mentor moments mini-series. Please share with us your own mentor moments or how you are reflecting on ours @bundleofhers on Instagram or @bundleofherspodcast on Facebook.

Interviewer: Thinking about getting an MD-PhD? Today we're going to talk to a guy who just completed an MD-PhD program, next on The Scope Radio.

Announcer: Navigating your way through med school can be tough. Wouldn't it be great if you had a mentor to help you out? Well, whether you're first year or fourth year, we got you covered. The Med Student Mentor is on The Scope.

Interviewer: Today we're going to talk to someone who has a very specialized degree, an MD-PhD. We're here with Ryan Craig. Can you tell us a little bit about how obtaining an MD-PhD is different than the four-year medical school degree?

Ryan: The way that our program works, and most programs, you do the first two years with your normal medical school class, go to all your classes, take step one, but whenever the rest of the class moves on to the clinicals, you go into the lab and start your project.

Most places can take two, three, four, sometimes even five years to finish your research, and then you get injected back into med school with third years in the clinics and the hospitals. So it's a little bit more of a time commitment, but in the end you come out with both your degrees.

Interviewer: So when you talk about doing research as an MD-PhD student, do you pursue a type of research that you're initially interested in, or is it something you're assigned?

Ryan: Well, it's kind of funny because my situation was a little unique. I started medical school after Hurricane Katrina came through New Orleans. A lot of the researchers didn't come back the year following, so we were a little limited on what we could choose. I originally wanted to go into cancer research, but at the same time found a great lab with a wonderful mentor and lots of resources doing HIV research.

I don't really think that the project itself is as important as the tools and information that you can learn, because my plan in the future is probably to go back to more cancer-oriented research using the tools that I did learn in my lab.

Interviewer: As an MD-PhD, do you get to choose what kind of topics or what kind of interests that you get a PhD in?

Ryan: Yeah, our program was really great in that you could pick from a number of departments; pathology, biochemistry, physiology, neuroanatomy, even chemistry. So whatever your interest is, you can kind of find a place that you fit in across all those programs. As long as it's a biomedically-related field, I think that most programs would allow you to pick and choose exactly where you want to be.

Interviewer: When MD-PhDs complete medical school and the PhD program as well, do all of them go on to complete a residency in a hospital?

Ryan: As far as I know, most probably do. It seems to me kind of like a waste to put yourself through the tortures of medical school and not actually use them. So for the most part I believe that most people do. A lot of times they have the research kind of in the back of their mind during residency and try to look for future careers that can allow them to do both. I do know some people that will go through the residency and then focus the majority of their time in research. But for the most part I think that these MD-PhD students come out as clinicians with an interest in research, or like they like to call them, physician scientists.

Interviewer: For a prospective MD-PhD student, can you think of any skills that they might have developed before going into graduate education, or maybe personality traits, or just in general interests that might push someone to pursue an MD-PhD?

Ryan: I think it's important to have a real attention to details. You know, when you're planning experiments you have to have a lot of insight ahead of time as to what you expect, and how to deal with failure is a pretty important thing because more often than not your experiments don't work or don't come out how you expect.

So to be able to persevere in those kinds of situations is important. I think just a curiosity to learn is a good trait to have. I would consistently read things in textbooks and kind of want to know more about things that maybe are glossed over or not thought of as important, and so with the background in research, you're able to go in and ask those questions and maybe even solve some of those questions on your own.

Interviewer: I think that the ability to experience failure translates into both MD as well.

Ryan: Yes, that's for sure.

Interviewer: What would the difference in everyday practice be like between an MD-PhD versus an MD?

Ryan: I do plan on practicing medicine as an MD for probably more than half the percentage of my time, but I also want to be able to be involved in projects that are going on in the hospitals, in the medical schools, and in the research labs.

One of the main reasons that I didn't just do a PhD is because the difficulties I saw in running an entire lab yourself, where you spend most of your time writing grants and writing papers, and not really a lot of time doing the research yourself, as an MD-PhD you bring a unique skill set where you have access to patients, you have the knowledge of the medical side of things and you also have the skills and tools necessary to do the research. So you're a very wanted piece of the puzzle.

To be able to have a little bit of extra time of your medical practice to put forth towards doing research, it makes it better to where you can kind of focus on the things you want to focus on and not necessarily be the bureaucracy behind running your lab and being a full-time researcher.

Interviewer: That certainly is a great point because throughout my medical education it comes up again and again how important evidence-based medicine is, and to have a good idea of how that evidence-based medicine is developed seems invaluable for an MD to have.

Does your MD-PhD degree qualify you to do anything that an MD can't do?

Ryan: That's a good question. It's not quite as specialized as one might think. As an MD, you can actually run your own lab if you wish. I've known people that have quit practicing but kept their MD degrees through continuing education classes and retaking boards and whatnot, but that use their full time towards running labs.

So it's not that you can't, it's just that the MD-PhD training program really puts you in the position to know how to do those things and not necessarily wasting a lot of time later on in your career trying to figure out how to write grants, how to write papers, and what projects you may or may not be interested in.

Interviewer: Do you have any advice for a pre-medical student who is considering obtaining an MD-PhD?

Ryan: Yes. Find a lab to work in, whether it's volunteering over the summer or getting involved in a big project, or even as much as just preparing materials for projects. To be able to be in that environment, to really see if that's what you like, because it is a pretty big commitment to do an MD-PhD program, and if you find out a couple years into it that you don't like it, you might have wasted a good bit of time.

Experience is a plus no matter how you can get it, and like what happened to me, it doesn't necessarily even have to be the thing that you're most interested in as long as you can learn something from it. Meet some professors, meet some researchers and see what their lives are like.

Interviewer: Last question. Would you do it again if you had the option?

Ryan: Yeah. The benefits that I see now looking back, it made me a much better public speaker, it made me much more confident about my work. This program in most places will pay your tuition and a stipend as well, so I came out of this program a few years behind but with no loan or debt out there. I think that is one of the biggest advantages, too, is that I don't have that hanging over my head right now when I look towards the future.

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