Archive for October, 2010

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The Happy Doctor

Friday, October 8th, 2010

I was reading a review of a new book called The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law and couldn’t help but draw parallels to academic medicine.

In the book, the authors–law professors at the University of Missouri–cite statistics of how unhappy lawyers are. More than one-third of new associates in law firms leave within three years. Half of all lawyers would discourage their children from taking up the profession. It seems that the same demands for increased productivity that pervades medicine have made the legal field less satisfying.

Their recommendations to reinvigorate lawyering could just as easily apply to medical schools. They tell aspiring attorneys to choose a law school with students and faculty they relate to. Graduates of the top-tier law schools tend to be less pleased with their career choice than graduates of the fourth-tier schools. It’s not prestige that matters.

They also advise finding a cause to motivate you, even if it’s in a dull area of the law. Finally, they say to leave work at work and feel more comfortable with your family.

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Posted in Faculty development | 14 Comments »

Sexual Health

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

This is the season for rankings. In addition to the U.S. News and World Report list of best colleges, the National Research Council released their scores of top doctoral programs. Of course, the Nobel Prizes are being announced this week.

In the midst of such accolades comes another ranking: The Fifth Annual Sexual Health Report Card, sponsored by Trojan condoms. In conjunction with a research firm, Trojan surveyed 141 U.S. universities on their resources for sexual health. The categories included:

  1. Health center hours of operation
  2. Availability of patient drop-in vs. appointment only
  3. Availability of separate sexual awareness program
  4. Contraceptive availability and cost
  5. Condom availability and cost
  6. HIV testing, cost and locality (on- vs. off-campus)
  7. Other STI testing, cost and locality (on- vs. off-campus)
  8. Availability of anonymous advice via email / newspaper column
  9. Existence of lecture / outreach programs
  10. Existence of student peer groups
  11. Availability of sexual assault programs
  12. Website usability and functionality

Columbia University came out on top followed by Michigan State, Ohio State, and the University of Michigan. Brigham Young and the University of Idaho came in last. Boston University was not surveyed.

As we work with students and trainees, it's important to consider if we make available the necessary resources for their overall well being. The rankings may lack the stature of other lists, but they remind us that--whether we acknowledge it or not--students are engaging in sexual activity and deserve access to information and contraception.

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Leaderful, not Leaderless

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

This year I am participating in a program for administrators in higher education called the Susan Vogt Leadership Fellows Program. The program brings together 16 mid-level workers from universities across the Boston area and trains them to achieve a milestone project. Ultimately, they will serve as agents for positive change in their home institutions.

The program's approach to leadership comes from Dr. Joe Raelin, a professor at Northeastern's Center for Work and Learning. He advances a theory of leaderful organizations. This model contrasts with popular managerial metaphors of the leaderless organization (see The Starfish and the Spider).

His concept of being leaderful refers to an organization where every member exercises leadership. Most of us feel comfortable with a strong executive who articulates the vision and delegates responsibilities. Raelin suggests that a more productive way to mobilize people is to cultivate leaders at every level. Through the fellowship program, we'll be working on ways to operationalize those principles in our workplaces.

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Article Acrobatics

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

I'm part of a medical education journal club. Before each meeting, the organizer circulates a PDF file of the assigned reading via e-mail. When we want to share an article with students, it's common to post the PDF file on Blackboard so the class can access it. At my own website, I maintain a reading list of faculty development topics, many accompanied by PDF files of articles.

The ubiquity of PDFs (a product of Adobe) has made scholarly life easier. I know I greedily hunt out PDF versions of articles to save to my hard drive when I'm doing a literature search. But a post on the blog Savage Minds questions the long term consequences of making PDFs the default academic format.

For one thing, it's a proprietary system. I can read PDFs for free, but if I want to annotate and manipulate the files, I need to buy the $300 Adobe Acrobat software. It's also possible for publishers to place restrictions on files that make them more difficult to circulate. With the rise of e-books, there are several alternative models out there for reading files on a screen. The next time I attach a PDF to an e-mail, I'll think before I send.

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Group Intelligence

Monday, October 4th, 2010

Working in an academic medical center often means working in teams. Some teams seem to problem solve quickly while others get bogged down. What makes for an effective group interaction?

Scientists have studied the dynamic of work teams. An NPR story last week featured the results of a research project designed by Anita Woolley, an organizational behaviorist at Carnegie Mellon. She had groups of up to five people work on tasks that required brainstorming, arriving at the right answer, or engineering a novel solution.

The data showed that groups where conversation was evenly distributed and multiple perspectives shared performed better at the tasks. Somewhat provocatively, Woolley also found that the higher the proportion of women in the group, the better it did. This reflects less any innate intelligence of women but rather their sensitivity to social environments.

Woolley and her collaborators published their findings in Science. It's encouraging that group efficiency rests not on the intelligence of its members but on their democratic problem-solving. I'm not sure if the findings indicate that an all-female team is the most efficient of all, but it does prove the power of listening to your colleagues.

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The Peter Principle

Friday, October 1st, 2010

Just before the more prestigious Nobel Prizes for 2010 are announced, the Ig Nobel Prizes were handed out this week by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research.  These cheeky awards recognize studies of unusual topics or common-sense conclusions.The biology prize, for instance, went to a group that documented fellatio in bats.

This year's prize for management went to a paper from a physics journal that applied computer science to the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle states that people in the workplace are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. Supervisors tend to promote people who are good at their jobs, but then they are put in a new position for which they may not be as well suited.

The paper's authors simulated this with a computer program that promoted the best performers. Soon, the organization was operating inefficiently. But when the computer promoted people at random, workplace efficiency improved. This paradoxical result may warrant an Ig Nobel Prize, but it also holds a striking lesson for managers who try to balance the development of individual talent with the goals of the entire organization.

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