This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Research provides no rest for this weary fellow
There is no room for moonlighting while balancing a research fellowship, late nights struggling with Stata and time with family.
Several months ago, I expressed in my column the sense of relief that I felt after the end of my clinical training in cardiology. No more call nights or six-hour rounds. I was transitioning to a research fellow.
All clinical fellows can’t wait to be research fellows. Research fellows always look well-rested, fit and casual. Some don’t even carry their pagers anymore and none have to work during the holidays.
That was supposed to be my case; instead, I decided to go back to school.
|
|
Back to school
My goal is to be an academic cardiologist specialized in cardiovascular prevention epidemiologic research. There is one problem though with that goal: I have no biostatistics or epidemiology training background. Like many of you, I skip the statistics section of most scientific articles. So I decided to get a Masters degree in epidemiology and enrolled in a cardiovascular epidemiology training program.
How hard can it be to go back to school? After all, we survived medical school. What can be worse than that?
Let me tell you a thing or two about being a student again.
I’ll start by acknowledging the fact that I underestimated the amount of work that needs to be invested to do well in these classes. The first time that a professor addressed the class and announced that an assignment was due the next week, somehow I felt that he was talking to everyone else but me.
“I have been through enough already and earned my stripes; no one is telling me at this point in my career to hand in an assignment a specific day. Tell it to the intern,” was my initial reaction. Soon enough I realized that it was no joke; the assignment was due on Monday.
I learned very early how little I knew about biostatistics and how important this knowledge is to the career development of any academician. It is not easy to learn though. I am spending a ridiculous amount of time per week just trying to stay up to speed. They give us problem sets, which have to be done using Stata and sometimes take a whole week to complete. When you add the responsibilities related to the other courses, time becomes a luxury.
No moonlighting
Going back to school at this point in my life is hard. My study hours begin at 11:00 p.m. when all my kids finally go to sleep. Most days, I finish studying past 2:00 a.m. I feel like I am getting behind on my research and publications since I have little time to write and to collaborate with colleagues.
Finally, to be honest with you, I am not so sure that I will be able to moonlight this year.
I hope that in the end I made the right decision to go back to school. I hope that I can achieve a certain degree of research independence due to the knowledge and experience that I am gaining. Most of all, I can’t wait to be able to read and understand the statistic sections of journal articles and be able to debate about the adequacy or inadequacy of a particular study design.
There is probably no need to tell you that as a research fellow I am not well-rested or as fit as I would like to be. I am not playing too much golf, either. I spend my nights crunching numbers while fighting with Stata, imagining where I fit in the Kaplan-Meir survival curves, and trying to reject the null hypothesis that I will fail biostatistics.
For more information:
- Juan Rivera, MD, is a Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for Prevention of Heart Disease and a member of the Cardiology Today Fellows Advisory Board. He also writes a cardiovascular prevention blog for Hispanics called Corazon Hispano. The blog can be viewed at: corazonhispano.blogspot.com.