Tag Archives: Education

When to Get Involved in Extracurricular Scholarly Work?

Starting a new residency is tough. With new opportunities come new challenges: balancing between learning a new discipline and getting involved in scholarly endeavors can be stressful in its own right.

A sound advice I heard as a first year resident was to hold off unnecessary involvement early during the residency. A free license to procrastinate.

However, procrastination implies a postponing of something inevitable, not to mention that research and quality improvement projects are parts of the residency requirement.

So the question remains, when does it make sense to get involved? And how? Continue reading

5 Tech Tips Before Starting Radiology Residency

After a well-deserved celebration, the medical students who matched into radiology this year will realize what they’ve known all along – it will be a little more than a full year before they would start the actual residency they signed up for.

In many training programs, this post-match, pre-July-1 time is when the attention starts to focus on the folks who matched last year, those who will be starting in three months. Personally, April was when I also began to both getting psyched about starting a new residency program and getting nervous about preparing.

This post is about buying technology for those who are fixing to start radiology residency this year.

1. Find out If Your Program Has a Computer Fund

Any form of technology is a serious investment for a resident, as a computer can easily cost you a 2-week paycheck.

Before you buy anything, find out if your residency program provides funding for new computer and/or textbooks.

If it does, then great! It is then worth finding out when you can start using it. For instance, my residency program requires that you be officially working – i.e. July 1 – before you are eligible for the professional funding.

2. Get at Least One Portable Computer/Device

A paper in Academic Radiology states that having ready access to technology will become increasingly important in education.

The PACS stations at some hospitals provide unlimited access to the web and are outfitted with modern web browsers and office tools, but others may provide heavily filtered web access with minimal applications. Unless you are certain that your situation is the former, it would be worth having some form of portable computer/device.

Which form factor you decide to go with – tablet, ultrabook, regular notebook, or phablet – is a personal choice. Just keep in mind that the things you might end up using them for:

  1. Take notes during conference
  2. Look up a diagnosis or finding on Radiopaedia.org or one of its commercial competitors
  3. Integrate with electronic medical records – some institution’s EMR would ask that your device meet some security feature requirements
  4. Access the digital edition of a textbook
  5. Touch up a slides presentation for journal club or case conference

3. Get a Twitter Account

Social media is becoming increasingly important in radiology. Any national radiology conference you attend will have a strong Twitter presence, and many people are also on LinkedIn.

Since one of your tasks during the residency is to learn about the most pressing issues in the radiology community at large, becoming familiar with tools like Twitter can be tremendously helpful.

Also, if you start now, you can grab all the cool names before someone else gets them.

4. Avoid EInk Readers for Radiology Books

Radiology textbooks are expensive. It is made worse by the fact that there are so many of them! You will need a book for each subspecialty to really learn the nuances of each rotation.

Unfortunately, eInk readers are just not good enough for images on radiology. Kindle Paperwhite, for example, sports only 16 shades of grey. Reading the same books on a tablet like the iPad, Nexus 9, or Kindle Fire is a different experience, owing to the markedly improved contrast resolution over eInk.

However, be careful that sometimes Kindle or EPUB format books compress images so much that the quality is visibly degraded.

This is not to say electronic books are bad. Buying electronic books can be a good way both to save Benjamins and to reduce the weight of your bag if you load them on a tablet instead of carrying the hardcover incarnations.

EInk readers are great, and I love my Kindle Paperwhite. They are just not for radiology images.

5. Decide If You Want to Pay for an Anatomy Resource

If you are anything like me, you would find memorizing anatomy in a vacuum nearly impossible. Incidentally, it is also one of the most important funds of knowledge to acquire as a first year resident.

Therefore, it is sometimes worthwhile to have access to a good anatomy resource for use on-service. There are free resources like HeadNeckBrainSpine neuroradiology and XRayHead for MSK MRI. e-Anatomy by IMAIOS is an atlas that has some free content but is mostly a paid resource.

At some point you will have to decide whether free resources are sufficient for your needs. Your institution may provide access to a paid resource already, or your professional funding may cover it. If you have to pay out-of-pocket, consider the possibility of sharing an account with a co-resident (make sure you are not violating the user agreement, though).

Conclusion

Radiology residents use more technology than possibly more than other specialty residents from devices, educational resources, to social media. Ultimately how much technology plays a part in your training is a personal preference. However, keeping some of the above points in mind may help you avoid making bad purchase mistakes and be more prepared for July 1.

Be a humble impostor

There is such thing as the impostor syndrome, in high-powered institutions when students and trainees hear their inner voices tell them that they are a fraud, that the admissions office made a mistake.  And the worst of it – on the next test, the truth will be revealed, and everyone will find out.

You might not be an impostor, but you also might be working among very smart people.  If you are as lucky as I am, you would have the occasional opportunity to be the dumbest person around.

I say lucky because once you realize that you work with a the world’s smartest people and trust that you still belong, you will have the humility to become a little bit more like them and the confidence to believe you can.

Write it down if it’s important.

Increasingly, I hear professors giving a lecture saying something like “don’t worry about taking notes because the PowerPoint slides will be posted.”  Having a copy of the lecture slides is obviously incredibly helpful when reviewing.  However, given that some of most solidified knowledge I remember came from painstakingly recorded class notes (or a very, very funny professor), the “do X because Y” correlation with note-taking strikes me as strangely dissonant.

A lecturer who recommends against taking notes makes the following assumptions.  (1) The delivered lecture/speech can be fully captured using a set of PowerPoint slides.  (2) Reviewing his/her PowerPoint slides provides near-identical experience as reviewing one’s own paraphrase of those relevant learning points. Assumption #1 is one the lecturer makes of the educational content itself and is outside of the learner’s control.  However, assumption #2 is one made about the learner, and I’m not so sure that it’s true.

In the digital age, the world has moved away from manual production of information and into data automatism.  Book used to require manual copying which was labor-intensive and expensive.  It gave the actual reproduction of writing value.  The advent of printing made the reproduction of information dramatically cheaper, but creating information de novo was still labor-intensive and considered valuable.  Then came the arrival of the computer file system and electronic books (quick age test: when you think “file” do you think a computer folder with word documents or an actual vanilla folder with paper files?).

On the other hand, the cost of creating good information improved more slowly.  The labor of recording creative thoughts has decreased: we no longer carve words onto tree barks; some of us even stopped writing on paper altogether.  However, creating information ultimately relies on an innate ability to convert thoughts into something the five senses can digest – words, images, sounds, gestures, dances.

So the underlying question is this: is “taking notes” a creative or replicative learning process for you?

What does your gut tell you?

Credit: Dilbert.com

There is polarized debate on whether instincts are worth following.  Companies are increasingly relying on quantitative metrics for new hires over subjective interviews.   Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise pitches old-school scouts against number-crunching quants to find the next baseball star.  And doctors are taught to follow the science even if it sounds counter-intuitive (such as prescribing beta-blockers, a heart slowing medicine, for patients with heart failure actually prolongs life).

But all is not lost for those relying on instincts – as your gut instinct may tell you.  Last year a New York Times article argues that big data is imperfect.  In his research, Nobel-prize winning Daniel Kahneman finds that our minds are naturally wired to think in both instincts (System 1) and data (System 2).

At the end of the day, the new age of big data and massive informatics does not preclude the need to slow down and use our own System 2 to process whether the science behind our decisions truly make sense.  Instinct is neither good nor bad; it is merely instinct.

Quote

Experts Articulating Expertise

One problem with relying only on subject matter experts for course development is that experts can only articulate about 30 percent of their knowledge.

Ken Koedinger, Professor of Carnegie Mellon University, as cited.

This phenomenon is called the “curse of expertise,” and it shows up in all sorts of settings—not just the instructor who can’t communicate what she knows to her students, but also the parent helping with homework who can’t get a concept across to his child, the marketer or salesperson who misjudges what customers knows, and the manager who’s frustrated that his employees don’t “get it” more quickly.

Annie Murphy Paul, The Brilliant Report, as cited.