Tips for Residency Success:
1. As forces try to make you cynical and jaded, keep looking for real disease and advocating for the sick person.
2. Keep your teaspoon handy. Keep eating the mountain of medical knowledge a bite at a time. (Keep looking stuff up)

#TipsForNewDocs

3. Incrementally chip and chisel yourself into the shape of the attending you always wish you had.

It hurts to see a great intern still acting like a great intern as an R3.

4. Don’t hide.

Don’t hide from cases.
Don’t hide from your mistakes.
Don’t hide from requests to take on responsibility.
Don’t hide from invitations to do scholarship.

5. Get to know people. It may seem like a waste of time to get to know individuals in this endless stream of patients.

It becomes a rewarding habit to know details about people even if you never see them again. Know the dogs name; what they played in high school.

Knowing the people you work with is the same. Ask about kids. Hobbies. Pets. Garden. Good restaurants. Movies. Books. Vacations.

This is how you people. Connect. Make friends. Become a person. Join the tribe. Share your story and be curious about other people’s.

6. Learn to get along. Collegiality is a weird thing. Becoming able to get along with, work with, and enjoy people who might not be your kind of people is a skill for most of us.

I used to have enemies, and I used to develop conflicts with people I work with.

It hindered me.

So I have tried to stop doing it.

And I have met with a lot of success.

This has been a choice but required the acquisition of a few valuable skills:
- tolerance
- forgiveness
- apology
- humility

7. Learn to flip-flop between the role of teacher and learner.

Some great teachers become unteachable.

Some great learners never learn how to teach.

Notice people who do each role well and straight up copy them.

#TipsForNewDocs