Anesthesiologist
After reading his career story, ask yourself whether one significant reason for his career choice was “the wrong medicine” for career satisfaction.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
EA’s father worked within the movie industry on the West Coast. His mother was a nurse. EA was the youngest of two sons. The family had a membership in a country club.
CHILDHOOD THOUGHTS OF AN ADULT CAREER
EA attended a private secondary school, where playing varsity sports (football and baseball) were his main interest. His teachers noted within periodic progress reports that “EA is obviously very bright and achieves high grades without much effort.” EA does not recall having a specific adult career in mind during high school or while applying to colleges.
COLLEGE YEARS
A university with a national reputation for varsity sports and party life was EA’s first choice and fortunately he was accepted, soon thereafter joining a fraternity and enjoying the additional camaraderie of his varsity baseball team. However, the university also had a reputation for academic excellence and EA’s strategy to rely upon his innate intelligence rather than dedicated studying was less successful within this university’s curriculum.
Still undecided about a career direction as a college senior, EA signed up through the university’s career office for several job interviews with miscellaneous business organizations. Among several job offers, EA accepted an entry level, research staff position with a venture capital fund, which seemed to offer the most promise of high earnings to afford the country club style of living provided by his parents.
FIRST ADULT JOB NEVER A BINDING CAREER COMMITMENT
EA used his native intelligence to learn the fundamentals of an entry level hedge fund administrator but within the first year, realized that the daily details of the job were not very interesting or challenging and that it would likely take a long while to establish a client base yielding income at a level EA hoped to achieve in a shorter time. He expressed his job frustration to his parents, who sympathized but had no lucrative family business into which EA could easily transition.
FAMILY FRIEND OFFERS CAREER GUIDANCE
By coincidence, a close friend of EA’s family was the non-medical, business leader of a major California based health system, where the leader had achieved both financial success for himself and for his health system employer. This family friend learned of EA’s current career path unhappiness and while knowing of EA’s high academic potential, recommended to EA that he change his career goal from finance to medicine, specifically the high-paying medical specialty field of anesthesiology. EA appreciated the opportunity, confident he could both master the medical skills necessary and reap its financial rewards.
MEDICAL SCHOOL
Deciding upon a career in medicine is the first step toward pursuing that career but a required second step (hurdle?) next arises: where can the hopeful, future doctor be accepted as a medical student? At this point, EA’s native smarts played a secondary role to his modest university grade point average.
Through a lengthy search, EA found a low-rated medical school willing to take a chance on his admission with the assistance of some wealthy alumni pressure.
RESIDENCY IN A MEDICAL SPECIALTY
EA enrolled and eventually graduated. The next step along the medical career path, following med school graduation, is to be matched with a medical residency for the specialty preferred by the recent med school graduate. While usually the family friend / health system leader would not have accepted a resident from EA’s lesser ranked medical school, the friend had sufficient influence within his health system to accept EA as an anesthesiology resident.
There, the senior anesthesiologist was known to be a tough taskmaster while mentoring all his specialty’s residents. EA worked hard to earn the respect of his family’s friend since he didn’t want to fail or even settle for mediocrity. The senior anesthesiologist was sufficiently satisfied with EA’s capabilities that he helped EA to find an entry level position for that medical specialty within the same health care system.
CAREER CHALLENGE – INDUSTRY ECONOMICS AFFECT COMPENSATION
For the initial several years of EA’s anesthesiologist practice, he had career satisfaction involving collaboration with multiple surgical teams while being paid pursuant to his first compensation arrangement, which had no restrictions on additional gifts (dinner gift certificates and sports event tickets) received from drug company representatives and shared among the entire medical staff. Plus there was the potential to follow the high earnings career path high of senior anesthesiologists employed within the same health care system.
However, per the old adage “The only constant is change,” one day all the physicians within EA’s health care system were notifed of significant changes when the health care system adopted a different business model: prohibiting acceptance of all gifts from outside vendors. (Editor’s note – such vendor gifts provide the appearance of an opportunity for a conflict of interest; for example, was drug X prescribed instead of drug Y because the representative of pharmaceutical company X had delivered a stream of gift cards to the prescribing physician?)
EA consulted with his mentor, the family friend, who advised EA to accept the changes, likely to eventually include slower salary growth, since the only alternatives were: (A) join a different health care system as an employee or (B) start his own anesthesiology practice independent of any health care system or (3) abandon the medical field toward a business career, possibly returning to a hedge fund. The mentor and EA reluctantly concluded that none of the alternatives were guaranteed to produce a significantly better financial result.
PARTIAL CAREER SATISFACTION
EA has significant personal satisfaction when using his skills to ably sedate a patient for a surgical procedure which often requires constant and prompt adjustments. He is glad to be associated with a well-known health care system, which provides the highest quality care for its patients and opportunities for internal professional consultations to analyze the best treatment options. But EA remains highly disappointed by his decreased earnings in contrast to what he had anticipated.
EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE
Anyone choosing a career path with a primary goal of high earnings is often significantly disappointed. Measuring success in ability to finance a lifestyle comparable to others, is a recipe for continuing frustration.
Life is short enough. Disease and accidents affecting quality or extent of life are often unavoidable. A better plan is to pursue happiness within an interesting and useful career and adjust your style of living accordingly.
