The inestimable value of a mentor
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Quick, think of someone unrelated to you who has had a major impact on your life. I’d wager the vast majority of us pictured a face or two, and that nearly all (I hope) represented a positive influence. In my thirty-plus-year career in medicine, I’ve been blessed with several, and their impact on my life and career is truly inestimable.
As a smart kid who went to medical school because it’s what I thought smart kids did, I was ill-equipped for the all-out competitiveness, the unreasonable hours, the complete immersion in school required to excel in medical school in the 1980s (and we had it easy if you asked our predecessors). My goal was to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s, and I received some (bad) advice that I needed an MD to be taken seriously. It’s a good thing I applied as an MD/PhD, because I pretty quickly realized I hated chopping off heads of rats and performing bench research that had little chance of impacting anything but the pages of a journal over the course of even a long career.