Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills
to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.
As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients.
When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find
that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research
program.
Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit.
However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.
For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians
the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.
Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene.
Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast.
I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is an absolute pleasure to be talking with you today.
I'm super excited to bring you today's episode, and I'm talking today about how you too can
love your academic career, how you too can love your academic career.
And when I've said this in certain spaces, people look at me funny, and they're like,
wait a minute, academic careers are not about love.
And I just want to say that I think they could be.
I think they could be, and I want you to not tune out.
I want you to pause and listen and just hear what I have to tell you.
But I always like to start with the beginnings of my academic career.
And to be honest, let's go all the way back to my training.
I felt so lucky to get into medical school.
I don't know about you.
I was an international student who wanted to be a physician in the United States.
And people told me, frankly, it's going to be hard because people who are American citizens
are not able to get in.
You're coming from another country.
It's going to be so hard for you.
And so that's the mindset that I had going into the process was that, wow, this is going
to be so hard for me.
And so getting in was like, oh, wow, I'm so lucky.
I'm so fortunate.
OK, never mind that I did put in the work.
I got the grades.
I aced the tests.
I did all the things I was supposed to do.
But I recognize that working hard is not necessarily the ticket to success.
So that was good fortune along my path as well.
But I certainly came to medical school and my whole academic career from the beginning
with this sense of, I'm so lucky to be here.
I'm so lucky to be here.
And in reality, I should have always had that sense of good fortune.
And I think everything I have was given to me.
And so I believe in that sense of gratitude, of being grateful for what you've been given.
But one of the dark side of that is this sense of, well, now that I'm just so lucky to be
here, I don't want people to wake up and find out that they don't think I'm supposed to
be here.
So I'll just take whatever I'm given without argument, without complaint.
And added to that is the whole culture of medicine where it's like, oh, I'll just go
wherever they take me.
We feel like we're begging to get into medical school.
We feel like we're begging to get into residency programs.
We feel like we're begging to get into fellowship.
And so to be honest, when we come to our faculty careers, we're not thinking, oh, great, now
I'm going to be the one in the driver's seat.
No, we've been begging for years.
And so we come to our faculty career sometimes with that same begging mindset.
Like I am so lucky that you're taking me on as faculty.
And because of that, it's all backward.
And many times we take on things that we actually don't want to take on.
We accept salaries we don't really want.
We accept positions that we're not so excited about because we feel grateful.
We feel we're just lucky to be here.
And if we don't say yes, then what are we going to do?
We're going to be stuck.
So that was my experience.
And maybe you resonate, but maybe you don't resonate.
Maybe you're like, oh, no, no, no, I've been in the driver's seat the whole time.
Well, good for you.
I would say that you should still listen to this episode because you might think of somebody
who would benefit from it.
But if you do resonate, then I think I'm speaking directly to you today.
I'm saying that we came through our training with this sense of, while you're so lucky
to be here, you just do what I tell you and you're going to be okay.
And when we come to our faculty careers, which honestly, academic careers are meant to be
created, there is not a template.
There is not a one size fits all.
Whoever worked for your mentor 20, 30, 40 years ago is not necessarily going to work
for you.
But who's going to put in the energy and the power to create what's needed, especially
if you don't even feel as if you have a say in it or you don't feel like you have ownership
in your academic career?
And so for many of us, and certainly for me, when I first started, I hated my job.
In fact, honestly, if I'm going to just be honest with you, I hated my life.
It was so hard.
I wasn't afraid of working hard.
Don't get me wrong.
Working hard is not what I hated.
I've been working hard actually way before I got into med school.
Working hard is just what we do as physicians.
So working hard, I think, is not what we are afraid of.
But working hard at the soul sucking thing that drains our life?
Oh my gosh, that's not sustainable.
That is where I was.
When I started, I just, I hated it.
I was working so hard.
I could never finish closing charts.
I always needed, I was always behind in reaching out to patients and updating them on their
lab work.
Someone was always upset.
I was not making my academic milestones.
How could I?
I was so busy and I had no framework with which to reconstruct a career that I actually
want or that I actually wanted.
And so like many people, I got to a place where I was like, okay, you know what?
I tried.
I gave it my best shot.
Medicine is probably not for me.
And that is the point at which I just want to pause and say, oh no, oh no.
What a tragedy for so many of us in medicine who get to a point where we're like, you know
what?
I've tried.
I've given this the best years of my life.
It sucks.
I won out.
And we quit.
And for some of us actually, we're not quitting physically.
We're quietly quitting.
We're still here, but we're totally tuned out.
We totally don't care anymore.
And we've just accepted the soul sucking experience.
So I think I'm here to say that it doesn't have to be our reality.
It didn't have to be my reality.
I didn't recognize that.
For me, I was a young mom of two children.
At the time my second was born, my oldest was two.
So it was a rough time.
And then I was seeing patients five days a week.
I could never keep up with my medical charts.
And so there I was working weekends, spending time in my office, trying to close things
away from the family that I really wanted to be with.
And it just really felt like I was like, and I couldn't find the mentoring I needed or
I thought I needed.
I didn't like the projects I was working on.
It just felt like I was doing everything I had to.
And it just wasn't, it wasn't what I wanted.
So I'm here to tell you that you don't have to have a soul sucking career.
I'm here to tell you that if you hate your experience, it doesn't have to continue to
be true that you hate it.
There is a way out.
And so I'm inviting you to think about a different way to recreate your academic career so that
you can love what you have or so that you can create something you love and saying that
we are taught to be people who just accept the obligation.
Oh, I need to be up for a 30 hour call shift.
Okay, I'll do it.
And you know, kudos to physicians all over the world, shouting us out and just saying
we are people who will put our lives on the line to get the job done.
And I think that's an admirable quality.
But what if, what if we thought about our careers, not just as careers that we just
have to go through the motions and get to the end of the day, newsflash, there is no
end of the day for us ever.
But what if we could actually love what we do so that even though there's no technical
end to the day, we're exhilarated at the end, we're tired, exhilarated, not tired, crushed,
exhausted.
How can we do that?
And I want to just speak to creating the academic career that you love.
Okay, the first thing I want to share with you is it's important for you to decide that
you're not going to be miserable anymore.
I mean, it's just, it's a funny thing.
You get to a place where you're super miserable and you're like, you know what, I just quit.
And I'm saying don't quit.
I'm saying this is the point before you quit where you're like, you know what, I don't
want to be miserable anymore, but how can I make things change?
It means you're not accepting the status quo.
You're saying this is not the way it has to be.
And I just want to invite you, especially if you're a woman, especially if you're underrepresented
in the academy, because I feel like so many more of us get to this point where we feel
like it's not working.
It's not working.
Why am I still here?
And then we're like, okay, I'm going to quit.
And so I want to say, decide that you're no longer going to be miserable in academia,
but don't quit, not just yet.
Don't quit at least until you hear the end of this podcast episode.
Don't quit because there is a way out that doesn't involve quitting.
And the reality is here's the thing about your investment in medicine.
You will always make a return on your investment, but only if you wait long enough in the market.
You will make the return.
If you're a farmer and you plant seeds, it's going to grow a harvest.
If you're an investor and you've invested in the market and you've invested consistently,
you're going to have something at the end of it.
But if you pull out too quickly, you're not going to make the maximum return on the investment
that you can.
I know I'm talking kind of like in the financial terms, but think about it even from the standpoint
of just planting seeds for harvest.
If you decide I'm quitting on my farm before the season of harvest, all of that investment
goes to waste.
Somebody else gets that return on investment.
And that's why I'm inviting you to think about if you're miserable, the answer is not to
quit.
It is always too soon to quit.
I don't even know whose quotation that is.
I will find it and put it in the show notes, but it's always too soon to quit.
My husband's always telling me that.
And I'm saying that if you're about to quit and you're quitting not because you're like,
wow, this has been a great career.
I'm so excited to now hang up my shingles and go do something else.
If that's not you, if you're like, I'm going to quit because I can't do this anymore.
And I'm telling you that you shouldn't quit.
I'm telling you that it's time to rethink and reimagine your career because you've put
a lot into this career.
You've invested so much.
And if anybody deserves to reap the rewards of every investment you have made, it is you.
So don't quit until you've made the return on your investment.
Don't.
Don't pull out of the market until you've achieved maximum returns, until you are ready
to say, okay, I'm ready to pull out now.
I've had a great career.
I've had a great ride.
So the first thing I'm asking you to do is don't be miserable anymore, but also don't
quit.
It's not time for quitting.
It's time for re-imagining your career.
Okay, that's the first thing.
The second thing I want to say is it's time to begin a journey of discovering what makes
you happy.
What resonates, what makes you tick, what resonates with you, what makes you hold again.
And it's a journey.
It's a journey because if you're at the point in your career where you feel like, wow, this
is not working, I want to quit, it's because for years, and it's usually a situation that
you've grown into over years, you've gotten used to putting yourself on the back burner,
putting the way you feel in the back burner just to do the things that you're supposed
to do.
You're used to doing what is necessary.
I'm just here to pay the bills.
And because of that, you've lost touch with the spark, the fire that first drove you to
your medical career.
And to be honest, that spark, that fire is still there.
Yes, its embers may be dying and the coals may be actually a little bit cold to the touch,
but the fire is still burning inside you.
And what you really need to do is to stoke the embers and add a little bit more fuel
and put a few more logs on the fire so that you find that the fire is rekindled again.
But that doesn't happen naturally.
It's going to take time.
It's going to take work.
And you might need a coach.
And I would love to coach and support you in this journey.
But what I'm saying and what's so important is that you begin the journey of rediscovering
why you came into academia, what the dream was when you said, I'm not going to go into
private practice.
I'm not going to go into industry.
I want to do this thing called academia.
What did you think was going to come out of it for you?
What was the promise?
What was the drive?
You've got to go back to that place.
And I know for some of you, you're so burned out.
You're so angry.
You're like, no, I'm done.
I don't know.
I'm not revisiting that place.
It's too painful.
And I just want to encourage you to do the work.
It is hard work.
And yes, there is pain.
And yes, there might be tears.
And yes, there might be regret.
That is absolutely worth the work to go back and remember what made you so excited about
academia.
Remember what fueled your fire.
Remember what made you say, this is the place for me because that is the beginning of the
journey of creating the academic career you've always wanted to.
You've put your life on the back burner.
You've done all the stuff you're supposed to do.
You've done obligation.
And now it's time to do what you love.
And to be honest, it doesn't matter where you are in your career.
You're like, well, I'm not yet senior faculty.
So maybe I'm senior faculty.
No, it's today.
Maybe you're junior faculty.
I hate that term.
Let's say early career faculty.
I think it's a little bit better because it's a sense that you're not enough, but you are
enough.
You may be early on in your career, but you are enough.
And at any point in your career, even as a trainee, you get to decide what your career
means to you.
You get to decide to have a meaningful career, even if you haven't, as people would like
to say, earned it.
Yeah, I don't even know what that means.
What does it mean to earn it?
Yeah, you may have to put in work, but it's not OK anymore to live in the academy in a
way that's not consistent with yourself, with your inner values, with the things that align
or the things that bring you joy.
If you're having a joyless experience, it's not OK.
And you don't have to wait until you're a senior faculty member to start to figure out
what is going to make you happy.
Because to be honest, sometimes that's kind of late.
Sometimes that's kind of late.
So I'm just saying wherever you are, do the work.
Start the journey of figuring out what resonates with you, what brought you to academic medicine
in the first place.
The third thing I'm inviting you to do is to find the people who are having a great
time.
OK, I have to tell you that everybody in academic medicine is not miserable.
In the faculty standpoint engagement survey from the AAMC and the one I think about is
the one from 2010, when they did the survey and they asked people, how satisfied are you
with the medical school?
Only 60 percent of faculty said they were satisfied or very satisfied.
That left 40 percent of faculty who were very dissatisfied.
OK, 40 percent is a big number, but 60 percent is also a big number.
And the number of people who are very satisfied, I want to know who these people are.
What are they doing?
And so I want to invite you, if you are at the point where you're like, I want to quit,
this is not working for me.
Before you do that, I want you to go out and find the people who are having a blast.
And yes, they do exist.
You may not know them because you might be in the circles where people are having an
equally miserable time celebrating each other in their misery, patting each other in the
back and wanting to continue to revel in misery.
This is not to cast aspersions on your company, on the company that you keep.
I'm just saying that misery tends to love company.
And if you can't find someone yet who loves their academic career, it's because they're
not in the company that you're keeping in the state that you're in in your career.
So I want to invite you to go find people who seem to be having a good time.
And here's the thing.
Here's the thing about life and certainly the thing about academia.
It's hard to hide when you're miserable.
It's hard.
I mean, to be honest, you can you can kind of distract people by being super successful.
And you're like, oh, yeah, I have so many papers published a year.
I have so many grants.
And people are like people are distracted by all the things you've you've you've gotten.
Oh, but they can see that you're not happy.
They can see.
And to be honest, it shows up in your attitude.
It shows up in the way you treat people.
It shows up in the way you treat yourself.
So if you're not having a great time, people can tell.
But they probably are too respectful to tell you because, hey, you have all the stuff.
It's like, well, you know, you got all of it.
So I guess we're not going to begrudge you that.
The reality is you can tell when people are actually having a great time.
You can tell people who are not.
So I'm inviting you to go looking for the people who seem to be having a great time.
They're there.
We're here in academic medicine.
If you just look up long enough from being focused on the challenges you're going through
to say who seems to be having a good time and go after those people and find out what
they're doing differently from what you're doing.
Find out what they're doing that's different from what you're doing.
And I don't want you to stop and say, well, of course, they've been here 30 years.
Of course, they're loving their career.
It is not a function of time in the academy.
It's a function of their approach to life.
They're thinking about their career in a way that's different from how you're thinking
about your career.
They have habits that support them in a way that you may not have habits.
There is a system that helps people succeed.
I'm going to stop here for a little bit and just help you recognize that if you see someone
who's succeeding the academy, doing all the stuff and happy in their job, it does not
happen by accident.
This is not like I was born on the happy side of life.
It's an intentional curated experience.
People who succeed, they're happy, they're whole.
They have good marriages, good relationships, good experiences with their families, with
their children.
They have good relationships with people they work with.
It is not an accident.
It is an intentional curated strategy.
I will tell you the truth.
I have not yet met anybody who's over successful and happy, who just kind of found themselves
there.
Here's the challenge.
You've got to do this work.
You've really got to help people because some people forget what investments they made to
get them to where they are.
They forget.
They forget the challenges.
They forget the problems they have.
They don't share with you how many problems they had because they bury those deep inside.
But what they don't share is the investments that they made to become who they are and
to be happy.
Happiness is not an accident.
It's not something that you just find and you're like, oh, wow, I'm happy in my career.
It's something that's created.
In going out and looking for people who are happy in their careers, what you're doing
is you're asking people to give you their secret sauce.
And that's what I'm inviting you to do.
Look up, find the people who are having a great time and go ask them how they're making
it work.
Okay.
The fourth thing I want to share with you is that you've got to create or find a community
that supports joyous living within the academy.
You've got to create or find a community that supports joyous living within the academy.
Okay.
Not everybody is happy in the academy.
We've established that.
You might be one of those people who are not very happy because you're on the verge of
quitting.
But I'm saying that there are people who are and you want to be part of their communities.
You want to figure out where they hang out.
You want to figure out what communities they frequent.
You want to figure out where they go and you want to go hang out with them or you want
to create your own community.
And this is so important because I think one of the challenges for us in academia is that
there is a lot of isolation.
We're struggling.
We're having challenges.
We're not telling people about it.
We're showing a bright face when we go out.
But the reality is we're miserable and we're lonely.
We're isolated.
The moment we find communities of like-minded people who reject the status quo, who want
to do life differently, it changes our experience.
And because it transforms our experience, it is worth the investment.
It's absolutely worth the investment to go looking.
And here's the thing.
It may not be within your division.
It may not be within your department.
It may not even be at your institution.
The world is such a small place now.
You can connect with communities globally.
You can connect with communities nationally.
Our community meets every Monday at 6 p.m.
You know, it's a community.
It's virtual.
We're not meeting in person, but we're able to create a community.
We're able to meet and write together, you know, during the week.
Communities exist.
You may not know about them, but it's an opportunity to find out what those communities are.
I'll say apart from our coaching community, Clinician Researcher Academy, one community
that has been such a nourishment to me and to be honest, I'm still part of is the Faculty
Success Program with the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity that was
founded by Carrie Ann Rockimore.
That has been an amazing community for me.
And to be honest, it's not a community really for clinicians.
It's not oriented towards clinicians, but it's been such a game changing community for
me where I both coach and I'm coached in that community.
And so there are communities that exist of people who've decided they want a different
experience in academia.
And I want you to get up and go find a community to be a part of.
And if you're not part, if you can't find it, create your own.
Create it.
I'm creating a community of like minded people.
And then you'll have the community that you always wanted, but never had because you didn't
know you could create it.
So find and or create the community that you've always wanted, that you need to support you
in creating a career that you love.
The fifth thing I want to tell you is that you've got to be courageous because you're
taking bold steps on the road not traveled, right, or the road less traveled.
If you're going to take back your experience, if you're going to become to begin to build
an academic career that you actually want, you're going to find yourself in the minority.
And being a minority in whatever way you're a minority, many times it sucks because it
feels lonely.
It feels like you're going against the grain.
It feels like you are, you know, like, oh, doing your own thing.
It's a hard journey and it takes courage.
It takes courage not to go back to what everybody else is doing.
It takes courage not to say, let me just grin and bear it one more time.
It takes courage to say, I'm going to forge ahead on a path that may not even be supported
on a path that people may call me out and say, what are you doing?
We don't do that here.
It takes courage.
And I want to tell you that if you're a physician, if you're an academic clinician, if you're
a scientist, whatever you are listening to me, or whoever you are listening to me, you
have what it takes to succeed.
You absolutely do.
Don't let anybody lie to you.
Don't let them tell you you're a clinician.
You can never be a scientist.
Don't let them tell you you're a scientist.
You can never understand, you know, things from the clinical perspective.
You can do whatever you want because you're so capable.
And especially from my community, those of you who are physicians, who are clinicians,
holy cow, you've come through like one of the most strenuous like training programs
ever in becoming a physician.
And if you could do that, oh my gosh, of course you can do anything.
The question is not can you do it?
The question is do you want to?
Are you hungry enough to go after what you want?
Because what you want is worth fighting for.
What you want is worth going after.
And I invite you to step into the space to create the career that you love because only
you can be the architect of this career.
Only you can create the masterpiece that only if you decide that you're going to step into
the space of becoming the artist.
If anybody else is painting on your canvas, they're doing it half-hazardly because they
have no idea of the artist's intent.
But if you are the artist, the architect of your career, if you would step into that role
courageously and you can build intentionally, you can build directionally, you can begin
to create a career that you actually want.
And I'll tell you this, no joke, it will take you time.
It takes time from the investment to receiving the return on your investment.
And up until now, honestly, you've been investing in misery because if you're miserable now,
it's because it's the investment you've been making.
You've been doing the things you don't want to do.
You've been showing up in the places you don't want to show up in.
You've been doing the stuff out of obligation and look at where it's gotten you.
And so what if you paused and you started to sow different seeds in your career experience?
What if you decided that, oh, okay, I'm going to start planting different seeds, seeds that
I want to see germinate.
You can plant seeds of joy.
I'm going to plant seeds of courage and commitment.
I'm going to do something different.
What if you make that decision?
What kind of career could you have at the end of all of that?
I am excited for you because you've listened to this episode, because this is the day your
life changes forever.
This is the day you stop accepting the status quo of misery and you take ownership of the
career that you want.
Yes, it's going to take time.
It's going to be challenging, but you can make it.
And I'm inviting you to step into the space to make it work for you.
All right.
It has been a pleasure talking with you today.
I'm going to recap, actually.
Sometimes my viewers, my listeners are like, wait a minute, you didn't recap.
I missed all you said.
Okay, I'm recapping.
Number one, decide that you're not going to be miserable anymore.
Number two, look deep inside to find what resonates with you.
Number three, find other people who seem to be having a good time and figure out what
they're doing that you're not.
Number four, find and or create your own community.
Number five, be courageous in taking those steps to get there.
It has been an absolute pleasure talking with you today.
I hope that you're going to make a difference in your careers by taking steps today to start
making the investment that you absolutely want to make in your own career.
It's been a pleasure talking with you today.
Thank you so much for your time.
I look forward to talking with you again.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic
clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they
have a mentor.
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