Dr. Lombardi has agreed to be our panelist until Dr. Kearney is available, which I think is, we're very lucky because we have a wealth of knowledge from the other side and I can just, since we are starting to talk about finding a job, I'm sure Dr. Lombardi has some thoughts on the other end for people who are just starting out, you know, early career, so either finding their first job at a fellowship or their second job. If you have any kind of backdoor advice that they may not have heard before, Dr. Lombardi would love to hear from you. To reach out and ask anybody, anywhere, at any time for a job. Number two, I think the, there are a few things I tell all the fellows and early career people when you get a job is one, you're not getting married to this job. So when you take a job, this isn't the end of the world. It's not a right and wrong decision. You can quit in a year and go find a new job. Now you can't do that every year for five years. It starts to track you down. But if you pick a job and it doesn't work out, find a new job. There are actually lots of jobs out there. It's just, do they meet your needs and do they do what you want to do? With that being said, when you take a job, don't buy a house. You know, a very important thing when you come out, you get a job, one, you're going to be making a lot different income than you were making. Two, you actually don't know where you're going to live when you get out. And three, if you buy a house, you can't quit because it's hard to sell your house. So I strongly encourage everybody when they come out for their first job is rent a place, wait six or eight months, figure out where you want to live, realize what your economics are, and make sure you want to stay there. The other sort of uniform advice I would give to people starting is take two to three months off. Start in September or October. You are never going to get a block of time to go out and enjoy yourself. And if you need to run your credit cards up and put debt on, do it because you're going to make enough money. It doesn't matter. And in the grand scheme, you've worked really hard for a really long time without a lot of breaks. Your job is not going to give you a lot of breaks. So take some time, take two or three months, travel, boat, camp, you know, whatever it is you want to do, but go do something for yourself before you start work. Your skills will be there. They're not going to erode. You're all really smart, and you'll be fine. But so take some time off. Those be sort of the generic things. And the last would be is don't represent yourself in getting a contract. Physicians have no idea what they can get. They usually get themselves less than they deserve. And you don't know enough to know what you should and shouldn't ask for. I think Catherine, I don't know if you use my sister or not, but I think you would agree that using an attorney is helpful. Yeah, so I did. And it was kind of one of the one of the better decisions I made in this whole process when I was doing a job search. Because I think I didn't really know what to ask for, right? I didn't know what numbers were reasonable. They say negotiate, advocate for yourself. It's like, what does that actually mean? What is a normal starting bonus? What is a normal salary? What other things can you even ask for? You hear stories, oh, this person at Harvard got their own phone line. Do I need to ask for a phone line? Do I need to ask for a nurse? Do I need to ask for the types of wires I want? Who knows? And I think it depends on the practice. And that was critical for me to have a lawyer that was familiar with what is a normal contract? What are the normal asks? What's reasonable for me? The other piece that having a lawyer was critical for, and I think a lot of people deal with this, is kind of like the exploding offer issue. So say you have a contract offer from job A, and job A would be fine. Job A is totally acceptable for the next three years, but your dream job is job B. You have a contract, and they're like, okay, you have two weeks for job A, but your interview for job B is in three weeks. So how do you navigate dealing with having a lawyer in that formula was worth every penny times 10, but don't tell her that. So going to Sanfrancois and Vivian, do you have any thoughts about the negotiation part of this when you're thinking about contracts? Did you have anything that you specifically realized you hadn't realized to negotiate for, and you did? And how did you go about doing that? So when I was initially looking at the job, I made a list of the things that were deal breakers for me. There were some things that I would not give up on. If I couldn't do peripheral procedures, that job wouldn't work for me. There were things that would work for me. I'm imaging trained as well. I wouldn't give up echo, but I was completely happy to give up nuclear. So like that, there were some things that were okay to let go, some that were not. And it's a very comprehensive list like that that I made. Also, my family's back in Sri Lanka. It's halfway around the world. You can't visit in one week. So I was very upfront with everywhere I interviewed to say I would need a two week block every other year because my parents live there. And if people were not very happy with that, it was not going to work out. So on a professional basis, on a personal basis, there were some definite yes options and some definite no options. And that really helped me decide. So I think on my side, it's similar to what Sasanka said. And I think this goes not just for the negotiation, but also finding the right job. So this is often the first time for a lot of us where we have options and we're really trying to choose something as opposed to like when you're doing fellowship, yes, you're choosing location, things like that. But otherwise, it's pretty standard, right? You join an ACGME fellowship, it's all along the same track. Whereas for your job search, you really do have to prioritize what you want, right? It's unlikely that you're going to get everything that you want. So is it that you're not going to compromise on location? Is it that you're not going to compromise on your job description? Is it that you're not going to compromise on salary? And I think those are really things that you have to think about when you're going on the job search for the first time.

job search

contract negotiation

early career

medical field

renting a place