Hello, everyone. Thank you for having us. My name is Mehta Helu. I'm an associate professor of anesthesiology and also program director for anesthesiology at University Hospitals. My colleague, Dr. Nicholas Pisa, is an assistant professor of anesthesiology and, like I said, works with us on the program. So our talk today is going to be strategies to help female NGRIM trainees launch successful postgraduate careers. And we're both here together today because it's very important to highlight that this is a group effort that entails everyone. And we want to talk about it together as a team. So this right here is one of our star alum. She is a pediatric anesthesiologist out in Cook, Fort Worth. And she is going to be working with us on an IRS panel to talk about career visioning and strategies to kind of help junior faculty grow their roles. And really, can we talk about trainees without talking about faculty? Can we talk about trainee development without talking about faculty development? It's really hard to do. And so we're going to talk about all the strategies that we use to develop our faculty and how we've created a resident version. So briefly, the outline's going to be about talking about the importance of advocacy, development sessions, and mentorship networks, as well as a mindset of self-empowerment and creativity. And the one thing that we'll say before we launch into this is a lot of these are going to be generalizable for every type of trainee. But we're going to make pit stops specifically for females and URIM along the way. But a lot of this is just going to be the human factor developing each other, and it'll be applicable to a lot of folks. All right, so we'll start first with the advocacy piece. So yeah, so in talking about the residents and then making a correlation with faculty. So for us, having a faculty advocate is extremely important. Having career visioning and really coming up with helping that person identify what the me is, like what brings that person joy, and then helping them align that with what the department or the institution or the system really wants. Finding that overlap is something that's extremely important for a faculty advocate. On top of that, having a faculty advocate that's a strategist, right? So mapping out a career from day one all the way through to retirement, which is something that I'd love to do one day. But in having yearly goals and reevaluating these goals consistently, either on an annual basis or preferably even more frequently than that to make sure that progress is occurring, especially for the juniors. And also faculty advocates can be motivators, right? So they can allay unfounded concerns about promotion readiness. I'm probably guilty of this as well, of not feeling ready for the next step, not feeling worthy enough or not feeling productive enough to really apply for the next level. And I think having a faculty advocate that helps motivate that and encourages them to say, no, you are ready, you've done the work, now present it, I think is really important. And then also helping faculty verbalize desires for leadership roles and promotions, right? Asking for it is just kind of half the battle, besides deserving of it, but getting that person motivated enough to ask for what they want. And then we've translated that from our faculty development into a residency version. We have our mentorship pods and we try and kind of group people together into specific areas. And so on the little slide left here, we have kind of our URM pod, where we've had really good success in terms of motivating, mentoring, and all these things that we're looking for. And what we really like to do during these sessions where we meet with our mentorship pods is career roadmapping. At first, it's typically focused on what the next step for our trainees is. It could be fellowship, it could be private practice, it could be even something more personal or within the residency itself, but helping them map out what their future's gonna look like is really important. So we also have faculty development sessions where we go over what the value of promotion is, what the value of development is. We go through the criteria at our institutional level, which is probably translatable to most institutions in terms of PMIDs and talks and national, regional, and local efforts, and then going over a timeline. So having a good map and what waypoints you're gonna look at along the timeline is very important. Our residency version of this is, it's kind of longitudinal throughout our trainees' course through their CA years, although we do start kind of early with our interns. We try and include them. But having a biannual professional development workshop where we go over development of your CV, the cover letter, promotion tracks and criteria, and how to get involved in leadership training so that our trainees can develop even further than they are. We kind of based all of what we go over during those professional development workshops on what the trainees really needed. This is just an example of one of our surveys where we asked what they valued the most, where they felt they were most deficient, and we usually follow up each year and each session with more surveys to make sure that we're actually addressing the things that they wanna hear, and also addressing the things that maybe don't wanna hear but are important for them to hear. And then really, helping them develop a network, and whether that's at the department level, the institution level, the regional, international, it's really important to get that done early so that when they do leave us, they have some kind of network to reach out to to help them, because we only get them for four years, and we wanna make sure after they leave us that they have something to fall back on if it's not just us. All right, so continuing this practical spirit of the talks, hopefully you guys will go with some ideas of what to do at home, but before we launch into this any further, it's been shown that gender and race concordance really aren't needed for successful mentorship, and that's a huge piece to remember. Looping in male and non-URIM mentors is gonna be very helpful for efficient mentoring and for their sponsorship opportunities. So this right here is an example of our diversity pod. It's just not the whole pod, but it's just a few that Dr. Leonel, our pod leader, gathered for dinner at the hospital. And so they do a lot of work with our residency program. This right here is an example of a community outreach program with Dr. Juana Matthew, who's our CA2. She goes to some of our inner-city high schools and helps with recruitment and pipeline programs, and so do some of her member pods also. And so there's a lot that we kind of help them. We help them become mentors for others early on and also stay connected within a departmental level. At an institutional level, we have an Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. They help us a lot. So we send our residents and connect them with institutional mentors at that level, but they also help us with our unconscious bias workshops and help us to train everybody who does interviews with cookross training and things of that nature. So they help us on a residency selection level too. And that cookross training is super helpful. It's just a bunch of practical exercises that help people really reflect on their internal biases and improve on that. All right, other organizations. Radar, reducing, sorry, Radar. I'm trying to remember exactly what it stands for, but raising anesthesia, diversity, and anti-racism. That's what it stands for, sorry. They're a national group, University of Michigan-led, and they're really good for connecting our trainees with national mentors. Other ones are SNMA. SNMA is for medical students, but really it also helps connect them in a mentor role, and it also helps them build a framework for future connections too when they go out and act as faculty. Some other strategies that we use are peer-to-peer, which is a senior supervising mentor who also oversees a group of junior peers. So it allows women and URM faculty to mentor a larger group of folks at the same time, because as Dr. Brown mentioned, there isn't always the adequate number that's necessary. So this right here is just an example of our mentorship barbecue. So we do that, and we have a handful of faculty. They get together with residents, go into small groups over food, and kind of talk about the questions that the mentees raise. And so we do this yearly. It's a more recent development that we've put together, but we also have other versions of it within the residency program. So mentorship versus sponsorship. This is a big question, and is a sponsor necessary? I would say it's nice to have one. My personal experience says that we can still do it even without one, but it's definitely nice to have a sponsor. And there's a big barrier to really creating a high volume of sponsors, mainly because it's really hard to either identify them, or their work isn't always recognized, and so it gets lost in the shuffle. So a lot of places have started creating awards for sponsors to encourage them to be helping the trainees and the faculty. And I would say, what if it doesn't exist in your institution, what do you do? So I would say create our own. So if somebody helps, for example, one of the PhDs in our department helped me with my promotion packet, I made sure to email the chairman, email the whole internal promotion committee, thank him very publicly, and then also speak highly of him and his abilities. So if an explicit award doesn't exist, a thank you and making sure that they're acknowledged to the right people is an award in and of itself, and it's a way to really help the senior faculty and just show gratitude. I think that really goes a really long way. Sometimes we feel it, but when we express it, it goes such a long way. And then talking about minority tax, and this is a conversation that we definitely do have. Distance traveled is a big one, especially on the recruitment end, but also helping applicants kind of come to peace with it too. Sometimes folks who've had a little bit of a rougher upbringing or not enough mentorship when they were younger, it just takes them longer to get to med school. So when we filter for our residency applications, that isn't something that we necessarily hold against anyone as long as that time was described appropriately. And so also we kind of end up talking about our trainees too when they're going out into the job market and helping them alleviate how they see that time. So I have a resident who was a football player in college. He did great. Sometimes his grades suffered, and then it took him some time to get into med school because he didn't really understand the path. And so he's prepping for job interviews now, and we had specifically that conversation. Don't worry about it. This is how you use your time. This is your background. This is great. And so talking them through it is really, really helpful, especially around job interviews and fellowship interviews. Pardon me. Gratitude tax. It's when we feel indebted to the institution because they gave us a chance. And that is another thing to also discuss with especially minority applicants, that true, you had a chance at this institution and you were treated well, but that doesn't mean that you didn't provide something in return, and you have the right to move on to the place that's best suited for your future. Minority tax, Dr. Brown also discussed, and this is something that we definitely focus on with our URAM applicants. There is a general notion, in addition to being the token speaker, that now you're getting called in for a lot of community outreach, and we all know that we need to do a lot of work with pipelines to have a broader range of applicants. And so all of our faculty and our young trainees are getting pulled into this, and if we read institutional promotion criteria, it's not always a line item there. So what I tell them is don't stop doing what you love, just figure out how to present it to the promotion committee in a way that lines up with their criteria. And so for example, like Dr. Matthew and some of the high school initiatives that we have, surveying the students, writing about it in the local papers, talking about the experience, even if it's an opinion piece in a journal, there are ways to get out there the importance of these activities and then have them translate to the institutional criteria. And I think something that we've been doing in a more new way is talking to the high school students themselves about the impact that our program has had on them, and that's been helpful. A few pearls. We're all unique. No single mentor is going to fulfill all of our needs, so give the mentors grace too. I think this applies to anyone who's being mentored. So just expect that, we tell the trainees, just expect that you're gonna need to look for several different mentors to get all of your needs met, and that's okay, that's how we all are, because we're all unique creatures and created very uniquely. And also being super receptive to feedback is very helpful. I'm sure the senior members of the audience realize that, or can attest to the fact that it's probably easier to mentor somebody who's always in the receptive mode. A couple other pearls. Networking, hanging to the coattails of the program director or chair. So when we have our applicants, I always try to connect them to somebody that is similar from another institution. So for example, Dr. Oki, the first resident of mine that was on the slide, I connected, she's of Nigerian background, I connected her with a critical care anesthesiologist of Nigerian background out in Dallas, and we were at a conference, and I said, I'm gonna start getting you connected. And so doing the same thing as they graduate and they're with their chairs is very helpful too. And I always tell them, always assume that people want to help. Sometimes we're worried that people don't wanna help so we don't ask, but we'll be surprised when we ask how many people actually want to help and just didn't know we needed it. And then the last thing that I wanted to talk about, even though it runs us over a little bit, is just pretty important. Time and time again, we see letters of recommendation for females focusing on how nice they are in their work ethic, they work real hard, but for men, it's abilities, it's talent, it's assertiveness. And so this is something, this disparity is something that's out there. And so we definitely, in our professional development workshops, talk about it, but also individually when our residents request letters of recommendation for later steps or for future jobs, we tell them about this bias. And we say, you know what, when you ask for a letter from someone, summarize your achievements in the body of that email and really highlight what you want highlighted the most and talk to your letter writer. So when they say, yes, I'll write you a letter, talk to them about what you want highlighted because that's really gonna help. So frequently, they don't even really know what an achievement is. They're like, what do you mean? I didn't do anything. And I'm like, what? You did this QI project and you presented here and you published here. And they're like, oh yeah, you know, I didn't think about the QI project. So they don't know. So we tell them about all of these things and we highlight community outreach in a very specific way, at least I know I do in the end of all of my letters, and personal challenges too. I tell them if there's anything that you have overcome or even failed to overcome, a special life circumstance, talk to me. I will put it in a good light and show them who you really are. And so the final note that I wanted to end on is really the world is changing very rapidly with social media. And I think the hardest thing that everybody's starting to deal with is the, I'm not enough. There's this idealized version of life out there that everybody's racing to accomplish. And so I tell these residents that honestly, we all experience this. The best way for everyone to grow is for all of us to lift each other up. And so you can lift your mentor up, your mentor can lift you up, but you guys can also lift one another up. And it's all just about wanting to help fellow humans and grow together. So thank you so much for your time.

female NGRIM trainees

postgraduate careers

advocacy

mentorship networks

self-empowerment