There’s a stereotype that anesthesiologists are hiding behind the drapes trading stocks or doing sudoku puzzles, but that’s certainly not the reality of my job! I think it’s so important to share what the reality of the job is like and one reality of being an anesthesiologist is that it can be physically and mentally exhausting. Here are some of the reasons that contribute to this:
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If you’ve come to this page, it’s probably because you’re a 4th year medical student searching how to figure out how to excel at your residency interviews. I have had the experience of interviewing for anesthesia, preliminary medicine, and transitional year programs when I was a medical student [back then, it was in person] and also the experience of being an interviewer [in a virtual setting]. I tend to like to give a lot of unsolicited advice, so here I am again sharing 7 residency interview tips that I think will help you get to a successful 2025 Match season.
Here are the 7 tips:
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We receive feedback in numerous areas of our life. When training to become a physician, there are a lot of different timepoints where structured feedback is given. Sometimes that feedback is negative or critical. It never feels good to be the recipient of this type of feedback, but it is inevitable… none of us are perfect.
I recently received written feedback from my residents and while there were certainly positive comments, all I could do was focus on the negatives. I’d almost say I perseverated on the negatives. So I thought I’d do something productive with it… figure out the best ways to deal with this type of feedback when it comes and share it with all of you. Here’s what I came up with:
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In a previous post/YouTube video, I discuss why I stayed in academic medicine. But with anything in life, where there are benefits, there are downsides. As a medical student, I remember reading and hearing about how academic medicine jobs included a lot of promotion pressures [to apply for professorship; which is why everyone is hustling/stressed to do research] and lower pay. This sounded like a terrible deal, so I never considered staying in academic medicine beyond residency [I knew I wanted training at an academic environment, but it didn’t seem like a good long-term career fit]. Fast-forward over a decade later and here I am… in academic medicine [cue: face-palm emoji]. So even though I heard about the potential downsides of an academic medicine job, I decided it was still a good fit for me.
The 4 downsides of being an academic physician that I go over in the video are:
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I went to an anesthesia resident conference recently and was approached by students who had come across my blog or watched my YouTube videos. It reminded me that maybe some of the content I put out there is useful and inspired me to record this video. Here are the 6 pieces of advice for those pursuing a career in medicine:
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[I just wanted to point out that this video went live at 4am 🤣]
I start most of my mornings at ~4am. I find that this is the best way for me to start the day to be productive and overall for my well-being. I think for a while I was in denial about being a morning person, but once I became an anesthesiologist, it became clear that my days were just *so much better* when I started them early.
My 4am morning routine looks like this:
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When I started residency, I fully intended on joining a private practice group. But my residency and fellowship @mghanesthesia ended up changing my trajectory. Here are some reasons I stayed in academia:
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I took my anesthesia critical care medicine board examination on October 9, 2021 – a significant delay from my graduation from my fellowship in June 2020 because of pandemic restrictions. It was a different experience studying for this exam because I was working as an attending at that point and this board exam doesn’t have as “straightforward” of resources to use [e.g. BASIC/ADVANCED/ITE = TrueLearn + review book]. Also, it feels weird to have to study for yet another exam when you’re finally DONE with training.
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During a talk I gave recently to an anesthesia department about social media for use by medical professionals, I used the example of typing into Google: “Are anesthesiologists…” and allowing the predictive text to fill in the rest. The FIRST response on Google is: “Are anesthesiologists doctors?” which I used as a demonstration that we [as anesthesiologists] need to do a better job with letting the public know our role in the surgical team.
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For the 2022 Match, the ERAS application included a “supplemental” portion that introduced something called preference signaling. 3 specialties participated in this pilot [though ENT started this starting with the 2021 Match cycle] and this year, this program is expanding to additional specialties [16 total]… including anesthesia.
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