When I spoke with Laura Roberts, MD, chair of psychiatry at Stanford, for a 1:2:1 podcast about the new book she edited, The Academic Medicine Handbook, I told her I thought every profession needs what she’s created, a hands-on guide on how to achieve success. Think about it. How much of our professional success is determined by skills we were never taught in college or grad school? In Chapter One, she writes, “…my sense is that nearly all early-career faculty members experience, as I did, an unsettling combination of feeling overly schooled and yet, still unprepared. Decades of formal education, as it turns out, are insufficient for some of the unexpected and labor-intensive everyday duties of the instructor/assistant professor...”
So here it is, a soup-to-nuts manual that gives academics in medicine a road map for how to excel. It covers the basics, with chapters on how to manage time, how to give a lecture and how to prepare the best curriculum vitae. And it gets even more sophisticated, with how to evaluate an offer letter, how to understand flaws in clinical research and how to prepare an IRB application. The bottom line: If you’re a young professional just beginning a career in academic medicine, here’s a bible to have along your bedside.
