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Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
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This is fellowship interview season; a time when residents across the nation finally get to play the script that they have rehearsed for quite some time.
I was an actor in that movie several years ago and remember my part quite well. I was a clinical researcher without much research experience, but I had a research project in mind.
Notice how many times I repeated the word “research;” it is all part of the script. I was a future academician with a 50% clinical and 50% research time distribution who would be involved in teaching, grant submission and all the other good stuff that true academicians are expected to do.
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Notice again several other key words in my script: academician, grant, and teaching. Notice also a very specific time distribution plan that tells the interviewer that I have carefully planned for what is most likely uncertain at that point in time.
Not surprisingly, the idea of planning is central to the script.
My favorite all-time question and climatic part of almost every interview is: “How do you see yourself 10 years from now?” That is the moment of truth; the moment that differentiates the experts from the rookies.
“I will be an academician, a clinical researcher who spends 50% of the time doing research in the field of atherosclerosis imaging and 50% taking care of patients while teaching students, interns and residents. I am planning to have my own grant, hopefully by the first or second year of being a faculty member,” is the reply.
During one of my fellowship interviews I was asked to talk about the research I was doing at the time. I had recently published a case report on Chagas’ disease and had several conversations with a cardiology attending regarding a possible research project that would use MRI to identify individuals with a positive titer who may be at an increased risk of developing cardiomyopathy in the future. Interestingly, even though that research never materialized, I am able to describe it better now than back then. Nevertheless, I told my story.
The interviewer, after drifting into a relatively long discourse regarding how useless that line of research was, embarked in an epidemiology and biostatistics line of questioning regarding the design of the study. “What type of study is it? Is it observational? What is the power of the study and what sample size would you need?”
Power what? Several 10s of subjects will do, I suppose. I had no clue and could not answer those questions appropriately. The interviewer violated the rules of engagement; he had to take at face value the story and the act that I had practiced for months.
No matter who you ask, attendings or fellows (as long as it is off the record) will tell you that successful interviewees are those who know how to play the game well. Although I agree with that reality, I believe that the whole expectation of having an bulletproof academic plan for the future is ridiculous. As a matter of fact, the rates of fellows who stay in academia at the different academic-oriented institutions may solidify this point of view.
I had no specific ideas of what I wanted when I was interviewing for fellowship, except for the fact that I wanted to be the best cardiologist that I could be. I did not know what specialty area within cardiology I was going to pursue, what specific research I would conduct or much less what I would be doing in 10 years.
I will most likely be staying in academia, but not due to a well thought-out and executed old plan. I will because during this uncertain path that we call training, I was lucky enough to have worked with key people that were able to detect, shape and help develop an interest and excitement previously unknown to me. I guess that if programs and program directors were to focus more on this process, they wouldn’t have to be so paranoid about picking the candidates destined to stay in academia.
I say eliminate the question, “How do you see yourself in 10 years?”
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.