A New Year has begun, which means you have two options: either this year can simply be an extension of decisions you made in 2016, or it can lead to the biggest strides in your medical career thus far. Though there is a temptation to be timid and formulaic in such a high-stakes profession, you also have the tremendous potential and awesome responsibility to make a huge impact with your work. Of course, this requires that you be willing to step outside your comfort zone and take risks along the way. Here are a few ways you can push the boundaries and maximize your potential in medicine—from failing more in medical school, exploring global health, and choosing the career path less traveled. Outside your comfort zone: education In medical school, there tends to be a results-based mentality. Students obsess over their exam scores and class rank, believing these are the measure of a good physician. Yet, cramming and mindlessly memorizing for short-term rewards fails to adequately prepare future physicians for the comprehensive knowledge they need to be successful on the job. One medical student puts it this way: “The focus of medical school should be on long-term knowledge, but it seems that the real focus is on competitiveness. Forget the grades. Forget the ranks for the first two years. Give us the most challenging questions you can, and let our failures teach us valuable lessons. I am absolutely certain this approach would make us into better third-year students (and doctors!) in the long run.” Perhaps if there were a greater focus on learning rather than performing, there would be a greater sense of grit and empowerment—not to mention lower dropout and burnout rates—among medical students, residents, and physicians, alike. Outside your comfort zone: geography In addition to thinking beyond test scores and school rank, physicians to be must also begin thinking beyond their geography bubbles. Our increasingly diverse society demands that we not only understand a greater variety of treatments, but also the patients we’re treating. From an academic standpoint, this means seeking out classes beyond the usual biology and anatomy—such as politics, environment, economics, policy making, etc to understand our world at large. Thus, in addition to incorporating global health into U.S. medical school education, more and more students are seeking out opportunities to train and practice abroad—typically choosing to spend a year away between their third and fourth year of medical school. (In fact, some of these programs are even more competitive than getting into Harvard!) Dr. Bell suggests a potential reason for this growing trend: “Perhaps rapid development of telecommunication has enhanced our sense of interconnectedness. Maybe the ease of travel helps make global health more feasible. Outside your comfort zone: career choice When it comes to choosing a specialty in medicine, there are typically two trains of thought. Some professionals will tell you to consider extrinsic factors, such as aptitude and salary, while others will tell you to assess more intrinsic factors, such as interests and lifestyle preferences. Like these are certainly legitimate considerations, they typically require you to pigeonhole yourself into an existing mould within a hospital, rather than creating your own unique path. Founder of a podcast called Docs Outside the Box trauma surgeon striking out on his own as an independent contractor…working as a locum physician—one who fills in when a regular physician is absent or a hospital is understaffed. He is also starting his own locum physicians company. “Most of the people who you know who are extremely successful have had some form of big failure in their lives…through failure, they learned how badly they wanted to succeed and they got stronger because of it.” In other words, fear failure is a very poor excuse to not go for your dreams. In fact, failure (and not success) should become your goal, because it’s often the only way to achieve it. Source
