Everyone talks about the importance of mentors in career development, but there is another type of Fairy God Mother that doesn’t get as much press but can be just as important, this is the Sponsor. A sponsor doesn’t give advice and guide you like a mentor does, but when opportunities come up they think of you and put your name forward.
The most important sponsor in my career has been Chief of Medicine at Ascension St John, Lou Saravolatz. As a fellow, Dr. Saravolatz discovered a bug now known as Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus (remind me, what world changing research are you doing in your fellowship?). But as Chief of Medicine he has been my (and a host of other docs) sponsor. Dr Saravolatz invited me to give my first grand rounds presentation in 2003. A talk on contrast nephropathy.
Today, I gave another talk on contrast nephropathy. Here are the files. I will try to get a video with my narration up in the next few days.
Powerpoint (I just export the Keynote presentation to Powerpoint so I suspect many of the animations are crap. It is here just to preempt the chorus of Twitter requests for it)
I also am posting the talk bit-by-bit as #Tweetorials.
The first:
I am going to do a few tweetorials based on my Contrast Nephropathy Grand Rounds. The first one goes through the evidence that CIN is rare; in fact way rarer than the commonly quoted 10-25% incidence. For more information on my whole presentation see: https://t.co/yGmo9pb5Yh
This is not an uncommon finding at medical schools around the country. I have been to lectures by Dr. Heung at Kidney Week and he is a gifted teacher. There is nothing wrong with him. The knee-jerk response is to do what Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine did and make lectures mandatory. I get a full auditorium for every one of my lectures. It strokes my (already formidible) ego, but I don’t think it is the right response.
The empty lecture hall is because medical students are finding ways to learn that are better for them than sitting in a class room six hours a day. It’s more efficient to stream the lecture at 2x-speed with tabs open to other resources. If this is how they learn best, schools shouldn’t enforce inefficiency by making them attend lectures. Medical school deans should recognize how the material is going to be consumed and then develop curriculum around that consumption.
Every medical student, after paying tens of thousands of dollars for tuition, spends additional thousands of dollars on materials, tutorials, and videos to get ready for the big bad board exam at the end. What is the core competency of medical schools if it is not getting students ready to excel at licensing exams? Every one of those subscriptions is an indictment of the product that medical schools are providing their students.
Here is a list of vendors from the 2018 American Medical Student Association Convention. Check marks indicate vendors that provide services that medical students should be getting from their (wildly expensive) schools.
If we were to start from the position that students are going to consume every lecture on their own time on their own laptop, would we record the same slide show with the same talking head every year? No, that’s an absurd waste of the professor’s time to produce content that is not compelling or a good use of the medium. This is like the first movies, where directors would just film stage productions, ignoring the nature of the novel medium. Instead of seeing the empty lecture halls as a problem it should be viewed as the huge opportunity it is. The students have already moved to the new medium, it is time for medical schools to catch up.
It is time to turn those lecture halls into production studios. It is time to hire professional animators, artists, and video producers, and go from slide shows that need to be performed live every year to tightly produced educational shows that can be created once and shown many times. Let’s teach for the contemporary reality, rather than fight it with rules that serve to waste student’s and teacher’s time.
Kidney Week is my favorite week of the year. It’s Kidney Christmas. Kidney Week is the one week when all of the connections I make over direct message, e-mail, and text via the black rectangle in my hand transform into living, breathing people. If you are going to Kidney week, I’d love to meet you in real life.
Here is a rough itinerary
Pre-Conference
Tuesday and Wednesday
Fundamentals of Renal Pathology – Anthony Chang, MD, FASN, Lynn D. Cornell, MD, Mark Haas, MD, PhD
Conference
Thursday:
1:00 to 1:30 pm I’ll be at the ASN Community Booth discussing Leveraging Social Media for Your Career in Nephrology.
6:30-7:30 pm Nephrology Secrets Book Signing at the Elsevier booth (1119) during the ASN Welcome Reception
Friday
10:30am Join Cathy Quinlan and I on the NephJC Poster Tour. Meet at the Arkana booth (2515)
