My Work
We started off with looking at some articles and learning more about neurology and how does the life of a neurosurgeon looks like.
I read some articles about neurology
https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/neurosurgeon/
I learnt more about the life of a neurosurgeon, how does their life looklike and how much vacationdays, and salary do they get.
It was new to me as I had never actually dived deeper into learning more about the profession. Though the job is extremely hard It affirmed my decision of still being on the track to become a neurosurgeon one day.
Ms.Thielen and I worked on Work/Life or Life/Work balance. We reached a point where I had multiple questions on how do I want my life to looklike. We had a few converstations regarding those questions.
Some of the questions were;
Do I want a family?, a spouse/partner and if I do then when do I want kids? Do I want to work when I have kids?
Do I want to work full time? Or do I want to take some gap years to raise my kids? Or do I want to find someone who will raise my kids as I go off to work?
Am I interested in an academic career? Do I want to do 9 years of education to have a career or do I want to pivot?
What can be some roadblocks along the way? What roadblocks can stop me from becoming a neurosurgeon?
How do I define job satisfaction? Do I need more vacation days to enjoy my life or do I like I not?
I read some articles about Work/Life balance just to have a better idea of what can be the possible ways through which I can have a life and a career.
Here are some articles I read:
A takeaway from this article was that you cant be perfect at both work and life at the same time but you can manage your time wisely enough to do both. This article also has a lot to say about how women tend to not say no and overburdenize themselves with responsiblities. It also talked about Quality over Quanitity whch is a concept I truly believe in.
Refllecting on this article I would say this article had some new information for me. Although I was aware of the "quality over quantity" phrase I wasn't aware of how often women say no and are often the committee assignments and administrative tasks seemed to fall more to female colleagues, even if they were still in the minority. This was something interesting to learn about. I did look at how she had a list of priorities in which her Critically ill patients came first, her children took top priority at all other times then Family and household obligations and finally her Me time (includes sleep). I liked that list and I think in upcoming years I would like to have a list of priorities too.
An interesting article about burnouts.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7771504/
A takeaway from this article was that managing work and life for female physians and neurosurgeons statistically face more burnouts. This article mostly focused on burnouts and why so many medical students faced burnouts due to several reasons including work dissatisfaction, sexual discrimination and bias compared to male physicians.
I agree with this article sexual discriminaiton and work dissatisfaction can lead to burnouts which can lead to severe issues.
For me I would say this article was very helpful I gained knowlege about what burnouts are, how prevalent the are and how they are caused and provides solution for the burnouts. I myself faced a minor burnout during this week so I think I related to it.
I also took some career tests to figure ot what I was actually interested in. There career tests were helpful but not really because even though I took those tests it just told me what I already knew. Though there were couple of things I didn't know like I am someone who likes to research, investigate and dive deeper into things. I used to think I was someone who likes to follow more than lead but those tests told me that I am more of a leader. Here's a lik to one of the test results.
https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/neurosurgeon/compatibility/
There was a pivot point in my life that affected how Ms. Thielen and I were working. I went from a student who was going to apply to US as a foreign student to a kid who was going to apply for colleges as a resident. Ms.Thielen was very flexible with that and we shifted our paths completely. We started to work on what I want in my future highschool classes and my learning goals.
Here's a short PPT i made explaining my goals, my learning plan and the steps we took to achieve those goals.