Career and Life Planning Guidebook for Medical Residents

In-person mentorship remains fundamentally important in medicine because a lot of mentorship is about developing a relationship that’s close enough that your mentor wants to support you.. – Anne Pereira, MD Assistant Dean for Curriculum University of Minnesota Medical School (Sourced by: http://md.careers/physician-mentorship) F I E L D N O T E S Part I. Assess Your Current Network 1. DIVERSITY Whenyou reviewthe people inyour list, reflect on howanalogous or different these people are toyou. Areyour advisors of the same gender, from the same race/ethnicity, close in age, or from a similar background? Noting patterns of similarities will give you a sense of commonalities as well as areas where adding diversity could be beneficial. Studies have shown that in mentoring and success networks, “like attracts like.” This applies not only in attracting advisors but also in terms of receiving support. Some of our deepest levels of sharing are actually from those most similar to us, while some of our best advice, or at least advice that really makes us think about our goals and how to achieve them, may very well come from advisors who are different from us on one or more of these important dimensions. 2. REDUNDANCY Assess your set of relationships in terms of how much overlap there is in the support you receive. Do the same few people provide most of each type of support? Or are you missing support in your current network? 3. DENSITY Does most everyone know one another well in your network (as shown by connecting lines)? This indicates a closed network. If allyour advisors knoweach otherwell, theymaybe prone to “groupthink”where they treat you similarly, perhaps even giving you very homogenous advice. Alternatively, in an open network, where your advisors are not connected or are minimally connected, they may give varying, even conflicting advice. Sometimes this variance in opinion is important in generating different opportunities for you. This can be time-consuming, however, you have to expend more and more effort to seek out the truly differentiating advice that can help propel you towards your career goal. SECTION III: T MINUS ONE YEAR CAREER AND LIFE PLANNING GUIDEBOOK FOR MEDICAL RESIDENTS 398