Career and Life Planning Guidebook for Medical Residents

R E A D : Personal Values and Objectives When faced with a difficult decision, we tend to oversimplify and anchor on previously chosen alternatives and solutions. This natural tendency "to think as we have thought before" leads us to unimaginative and routine solutions getting us no further ahead. In medicine, we often lean on our routines in the learning environment; we are often told “repetition isagood thing.” It is, toapoint. Though practicing procedural skills helps you hone them and having a treatment algorithm in mind for most problems is useful, these routines can cause you to miss the devil that is often in the details of patient care. The same is true of our life decisions as well. How do we avoid these pitfalls (and many others) whenwe aredecidingwhich joboffer toaccept?One way is by applying the science of decision making. For more than 50 years, scholars and practitioners have been working in the field of Decision Analysis for the express purpose of improving our decision making skills. As you progress through this chapter, you will be asked to think about and jot down various aspects of the different job proposals you are facing, and by chapter’s end, you will not only discover which job opportunity you most prefer, but you will also knowwhy. Just as there is a method to making medical decisions, there are two sides to the process of Decision Analysis: descriptive - how does one make decisions, and prescriptive - how should one make a decision. From the descriptive side, we have learned that there are predictable decision- making mistakes that the majority of people make. From the prescriptive side, we have learned how to systematically and rigorously incorporate the decision maker’s very own values and objectives into the decision process. In this chapter, we will go into some depth explaining how you, the reader, can incorporate your own values when choosing among a variety of job offers so that you choose the option that is best for you. The Decision Analysis processwill guide you in discoveringwhich job offer you most prefer. We have one caveat before proceeding. There is no magic wand or app that is going to make a hard decision easy for you. As we often say in medicine, you can ask 20physicianswhat they’ddo in adifficult (or easy!) case….and you’ll get 20 different answers, all valid and unique in their own way. Decision Analysis requires that we think through all the various aspects of the decision. It provides us with a structured methodology that helps us avoid certain mistakes (such as leaving something important out or counting something twice) but it requires us to carry out some self-reflection. If you have a family, then it makes the decision all the more complicated as you will have different sets of values that need to be accounted for. In short, to gain the confidence earned through a clear understanding of the issues, we must put in the work to gain insights into which option is the best for us. SECTION II: T MINUS TWO YEARS CAREER AND LIFE PLANNING GUIDEBOOK FOR MEDICAL RESIDENTS 270