As many of you know, Dr. Susan Kaib took a new position this year in student advising. Dr. Kaib, a recipient of the Gold Humanism Award, is adored by many students for her teaching style, intelligence, and kindness. While we were sad to see her minimize her presence in Doctoring, we are delighted to know that she will be guiding us through our medical school careers through mentorship. Here, she details some of her new duties as a student advisor.
When I applied for the position of career and professional advisor in the Department of Student Affairs, I thought I knew what the job entailed. I had been at the College of Medicine – Phoenix for nearly six years so I knew about faculty advisors, learning specialists, financial aid, the registrar, and counselors available to the students. But now that I’ve been in my new role for two months, it is so much more than I realized.
To start with, every student is assigned a both a physician faculty advisor and a learning specialist at the start of medical school. Every week, your team (the advisor and learning specialist) meets with Dean Restifo to ensure that each student is on the right track.
But what does “on the right track” mean? One of our main goals is to guide you towards the right career path post-medical school, which includes ensuring you have the necessary study habits and are passing each exam, block, course, shelf exam, etc.
If there is a concern, one of the team members will reach out to see if and how we can help. The plan is specific to every student. The help we offer may be study suggestions based on your learning style, a tutor, stress-relieving activities, counseling (which is confidential and includes two free visits), learning accommodations, and, sometimes, depending on the circumstances, a temporary leave of absence.
Each of you will meet with your advisor a minimum of twice a year. The meetings are timed to ensure you are ready for the next phase of school. During first year, the meetings are to get to know you, ensure you know about the different resources available, discuss your thoughts for your scholarly project and Personal Active Learning (PAL) block, and explore your career ideas.
Careers in Medicine (CiM) through the AAMC is a program that assists you in finding the specialty choice that suits you best. During the first two years of medical school, the CiM program helps you identify personal characteristics, interests, and values that will help you identify what is truly important to you in a career. These include the Medical Student Preference Inventory and Values Auction.
Once you have narrowed your choices, the next phase is exploring your options. The CiM has descriptions of more than 120 specialties and subspecialties including salary ranges, length of training, mean USMLE scores for residents, average work hours per week, and much more information. Although your specialty choice is your decision, your advisor can be your sounding board throughout the process.
Eventually, it will be time to start the application process in order to land a residency in your selected specialty. Between your third and fourth year of medical school, there will be lots of new terms and websites to learn: CV, LOR, SLOE, ERAS, FREIDA, NRMP, just to name a few. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of these; we’ll guide you through the process. And as one of the new career and professional advisors, I’m happy to help.
Dr. Kaib completed her residency at Phoenix Baptist Hospital and earned her medical degree from The University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson. She graduated cum laude from Arizona State University, Tempe, with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry. Dr. Kaib is a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the advisor for the UA COM-P branch of the American Medical Women’s Association. She previously had a private practice in Phoenix.