Webinar is sponsored by Sky and it's supported by Abbott, Abiumed, Casey, CSI, Medtronic, Phillips, Siemens and Zoll. And thank you so much to our sponsors. We really appreciate the support we notice and we love having your support. Thank you again. So my name is Nadia Sutton. I'm an assistant professor in interventional cardiology at the University of Michigan. And the co-planner for this series is Dr. Nishtha Sareen, who is with us this evening. Our moderators will be Dr. Mikayla Ayer-Turneau and Dr. Soha Iqbal. And for our panelists, we have Dr. Sasanka Jayasuriya and Dr. Vivian Ng, Dr. Kate Kearney and Dr. Catherine Conkle. Today, we'll be talking about finding the right job, characteristics of the right job, creating a niche, transitioning from fellowship to practice, and best strategies for finding a mentor at your new job. So hello, good evening, everyone. Thanks so much for joining. We have an excellent panel today. I'm going to introduce myself, have our micro-moderator introduce herself, and then we'll have all the panelists give you one or two-liner about where they are professionally. And we'll go from there. So my name is Dr. Soha Iqbal. I am an interventional cardiologist over up in the Boston area. I'm chief of cardiology at Salem Hospital, which is under the umbrella of Mass General Brigham. And I have moved after 10 years of practice to my new job. So I kind of have a little bit of a different perspective, and we'll be focusing on kind of early career. But if there's any questions, I'm happy to answer as well. I'll hand that over to Dr. Iantorno. Hello, everybody. Welcome. My name is Michaela Iantorno. I've been in practice for the last almost three years already. I am an interventional cardiologist, specialized in also structural and peripheral. I'm in Virginia, in Fredericksburg, between Richmond and NDC. And I'm in private practice. My practice is called Oracle Heart and Vascular. So let's get started. Great. So I'll have the individual panelists introduce themselves. We are waiting on one, but I can start with Dr. Jayasuriya. Hi, everyone. My name is Sasanka Jayasuriya. I'm an interventional cardiologist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am the director of the cardiac cath lab at our Ascension Tertiary Hospital. I'm also the chair of interventional cardiology for Ascension, Wisconsin. And my practice, I'm in a private practice, and I do coronary and peripheral work. Excellent. So Dr. Kunkel, can you introduce yourself? Hi, everyone. My name is Katherine Kunkel. I am an interventional cardiologist. I have been in practice for six months. So I just graduated and just found my first job. So happy to tell you guys what that experience was like. I did advanced training in CHIP, so complex coronary hemodynamic support CTOs. My practice setting is kind of one of these privedemic situations, so largely private practice model. But we have a large research portfolio and are pretty active in terms of research and society involvement. I've never heard of privedemic. I say academic adjacent. So there's probably lots of buzzwords, but I think that's really helpful for our audience to know. And Dr. Eng, can you introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Vivian Eng. I'm an interventional cardiologist here at Columbia University in New York. I'm in a large academic institution. I specialize in structural heart interventions, so a broad range of interventions ranging from valvular heart disease to PFO closures, and also do coronary interventions. And I'm considered an early career attending. I am four years out from practice. We're going to split this up to a couple of different sections. And we're going to start with how we thought about finding our first job and any tips and tricks. So I wanted to just start, we're going to ask everyone on the panel this question, but when you were finding your first job, how did you find it? Who did you speak with? You have any kind of insight there that you wanted to share with the group? I'm happy to start. So everyone is the short answer. To give you a little bit of a longer answer, so you know the first piece of advice that I got. So I kind of did the job search twice. The first time I did a job search in parallel to looking for a CHIP fellowship. So I actually had a dry run at the job search, which was really, really helpful. And I learned a lot that first round that really helped inform the second round. The first thing was to get your CV ready to go. And you need to be ready to hit send to people July 1st of your last year of training. And so I was given the advice, take your CV and give it to lots of people to get edits on. And people at different levels and people who do hiring. So your cath lab director has hired a lot of people and they've trained a lot of people. Have them give you feedback because they've read a lot of CVs. And so I did that. I sent it to a lot of different people and got a lot of really constructive feedback. Same thing with your cover letter. Most of us have probably never written a cover letter before. And the type of job you're applying to really changes what's inside of that cover letter. So I reached out to a guy who was a couple of years ahead of me who always had his stuff together. And I said, hey, can you send me your cover letter and I'll go from there. So that's kind of how I did that. And I was ready to hit send on July 1st. With the job search, it's really tough because you never know what seed's going to grow. So I planted every single seed I could think of. I cached in every single connection I could think of. Anyone I had worked with, prior fellows who had moved on, attendings, heart failure attendings, anyone that I had touched kind of in residency fellowships throughout the journey, I sent an email to or I called or I texted and I say, hey, you know, I'm doing this complex coronary year. I'm going to be looking for a job. Same thing with industry. So, you know, I reached out to prior reps that I had good relationships with. You know, I scoured the job sites. The Sky Job Bank was really useful. But unfortunately, a lot of the jobs in our field come from word of mouth. And so I think my experience kind of in both of my job searches, I kind of expected people to say, oh, I heard so-and-so is hiring and here's your job on a silver platter. And I think that's not most people's experiences. You kind of have to get out there and start pounding the pavement. And so, you know, make a plan, be ready. I had a spreadsheet. The second time I did this, I learned a lot. The first time I had a spreadsheet with, like, these are the people I'm emailing. These are their cell phone numbers. These are their emails. So I was ready to go. And then I was very clear on what my priorities were. So I said, you know, I want a chip job. I love CTOs. I love coronary CTOs. That's what I want to do. I'm structurally tamed. I can do TAVRs. You know, I can do ASD, PFO. I'm happy to help out and be a team player. I can do PERT. But my passion is CTO. And that's my priority. And I'm happy to be a team player. But three years from now, I want a big CTO practice. And so that was my deal breaker going through the job process. How I actually found my job is a bit of a crazy story. And it's kind of one of these network at every level of your training and plant seeds everywhere stories. So I was actually in the green room for a webinar talking to a colleague that I had just met through Sky a year or two before and about how I was kind of having a hard time finding the job that I wanted, which was a coronary CTO, high risk coronary position. And actually another person in the green room overheard that conversation, kind of texted me and called after and said, hey, I heard that Piedmont might be looking, connected me with a person at Piedmont. It turns out that I had actually met the head of our group at a conference a couple years ago, phone calls, emails, you know, working with, you know, kind of all of the connections. And it materialized into a job three or four months later. So it's kind of one of these, you are in the right place, having the right conversation with the right person at the right time, but also networking and making a lot of connections and putting the work in because you never know which of those seeds are going to grow. Great. Yeah. So that was a lot of really, really good information. And especially coming straight out, you have, it's really fresh for you. So great. And you also covered one of my other topics. So organically, which is, you know, knowing how do you decide what you are going to put as a, you absolutely have to do, or, you know, if I don't do it, that's a deal breaker. And what do you, how do you decide if you're going to give some things kind of up or put them secondary? So I would throw that to Suskina. Sorry, Suskina. And then we'll go from there. My approach was very similar to Dr. Conkle as well. I, you know, I was initially quite taken aback when I applied to all these jobs on some of the websites and heard nothing back from recruiters. And I thought maybe I'm not going to get a job because I wasn't getting any answers back. But then it, I realized that actually most of the jobs are through connections and word of mouth. So I connected with all my previous residents and fellows and through them, heard about several practices, interviewed at different places. I stayed at the same program that I trained at, but certainly the personal network carries a huge amount of weight in the job search. So if I can just add to that as someone who's been recruiting for an interventionalist recently, I will tell you when you are reaching out to, especially through websites, recruiters, that sometimes goes to a non-physician and it could sit on someone's desk. So if you don't hear back, it doesn't mean they're not interested. It just means that it hasn't gotten to the right hand. So I would say on top of everything, everyone else is saying, just be aggressive, follow up with the recruiters. You know it's at a certain practice, ask people or a certain group or hospital, ask people, do you know anyone in that group? Can you connect me? Because I know they're looking. So just putting it out there as someone on the other side, there were definitely things that were sitting on someone's desk that I found out about and we kind of bumped that up. So great. And Dr. Eng? So one thing that I think Kate kind of brought up is, you know, reaching out to everybody. That doesn't just mean your MD colleagues. You know, during fellowship, you're going to also interact a lot with industry, a lot with reps, with clinicals. And they can also play a critical role in all of this because they are going out to multiple sites. And so they will also, you know, have insight as to which programs could be potentially, you know, hiring. And then they also do provide information to programs that are recruiting, right? And this also goes back to, you know, you should always, you know, either way, be kind to everyone, be respectful for everyone. But people are watching. And so the reps will also be providing information back to sites that are recruiting. And they, you know, they may say, oh, you know, it looks like maybe you guys are hiring. There's somebody, there's a fellow at another site that's looking and, you know, they'll provide feedback like he or she is really great or, you know, or a lot of times recruiting sites will even ask the clinicals because they also know that the clinicals are going to other sites. And so they'll be like, hey, do you cover that site? Have you seen this person working? How do they interact with people? What do you think their skill sets are like? So definitely also leveraging that network. Excellent. And we're going to have a little bit more about this later. But what you just said and everyone said about people knowing you, reps, nurses, that's very key for our next part that we're not there yet. But, you know, in terms of building your network once you get your job.

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