Well, This is another entry in the Joy of Surgery Blog.
This note will focus on my thoughts about medical students and career choices. I will once again repeat my oft given advice to students.
"Life is too short to do something you don't like."
"In choosing a field of specialization in medicine, the wrong choice will make it the shortest life you can imagine."
The trigger for this entry is an article passed out at our departmental leadership meeting. The article is entitled "How medical students define surgical mentors"; appeared in The American Journal of Surgery 187 (2004) 698-701. The survey research was done at University of Utah.
I guess the first thing that struck me about the article was the authors declarative statement under methods = "No definition of the term [mentor] was provided so the definition was open to student interpretation." From my perspective this almost renders surgical mentorship equivalent to pornography. "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." Probably the most often quoted comment ever by a Justice. The next most interesting comment was that 84 of 98 students were able to identify at least 1 attending mentor. So what we have here my friends is a class of third yaer medical students in which more than 15% of the students could not or would not identify 1 attending surgeon. In reflecting on this statement of the inability of medical students to name an attending, I am reminded of how often over the years I have had individuals approach me at medical meetings, charity events, social or political occasions, even airports, and address me by name and then go on to identify themselves as someone who was a third year clerk on surgery under my tuteledge. The majority of the time they did not go into the field of surgery yet they clearly remembered me. I suppose I have considered this remembrance of me as an attending in surgery to students most striking when reported to me second hand. My youngest son, a tennis pro at a famous Southern tennis resort on more than more than one occasion informed me that he had students in his tennis university stroke and drill classes who had been students at a medical school where they were third year clerks and remembered me. So now I am pondering the difficult question - was I a positive or megative role model? Guess I would have to do a survey to find out. Now for the question of relevancy - do I really want to know? Not really, because the survey would have no impact on the fact that I love surgery. So. Looking for comments here. JTE.