Ben Hau

Tips for Interns

Seeing some of my friends give advice/tips for the incoming Interns, I thought I’d put in my two cents too.

I won’t repeat what everyone has been telling you – you’ll have to take care of yourselves before you can take care of others, remember to eat, drink and pee. Rather, I’d like to highlight what caught me off guard working as an Intern.

  1. Most of the work you’ll encounter is shallow work, i.e. it only takes weeks to months to train a recent med school graduate to complete the tasks required of an Intern. (That’s why they put you on the job – no one wants to do it). Master these skills as quickly as possible, and get your daily tasks done with accuracy, precision and speed. Don’t be stuck in shallow tasks. Only then will you be able to pursue meaningful deep work – studying case notes, talking with seniors, reading, studying.
  2. Your work environment is distraction at its extreme. You no longer have the privilege of a med student to study in a quiet library. The wards operate haphazardly. You work in the nurse’s station, where the level of distraction is much worse than an open office. You have doctors running around doing rounds on patients and making calls to family, nurses coming up to you demanding immediate answers and urging you to process their stuff first so they can carry on with what they’re trying to do, you have the secretary asking you to amend patient notes, the pharmacy might be calling you about some drug you’ve prescribed. All at the same time in the background you have allied health professionals doing their job, patient transport moving patients around, phlebotomists taking blood, assistants changing nappies, and nurses handing over cases and gossiping. Meanwhile your tasks keep coming in and piling up. It’s chaotic. Don’t get caught up in distraction. Try to isolate yourself – mentally – from distraction. Recently I witnessed an event where the nurses were trying to clarify with the patient and his helper on whether or not he had blood drawn that morning. They took a substantial amount of time to figure it out, albeit with quite some small talk in between. During the whole process the doctor sitting next to them remained laser focused at the workstation typing his notes. He didn’t seem to hear any of the conversation. He wasn’t interested in small talk.
  3. You might struggle to find job satisfaction, but at least try not to hate it so much. Job satisfaction and dissatisfaction don’t lie on the same scale. It’s not a continuum where on one end you absolutely love your job while on the other you’re absolutely miserable. On one hand, things like your work environment, work hours, the on-call system, outdated medical system, patient load and toxic people might make you hate your job to the bones, but on the other hand you should still find job satisfaction by doing challenging, meaningful and interesting work that helps with your personal and professional growth. They’re not mutually exclusive. The absence of job dissatisfaction won’t make you love your job, you just won’t hate it anymore. Although there’s little we can do to completely remove the things that lead to job dissatisfaction, it certainly helps if you minimise the impact these issues have on your mindset, and maximise your job satisfaction with the things that bring you motivation.

Therefore, quoting Steve Jobs, “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do”. Keep looking for your passion. Find what motivates you to jump out of bed every morning, and do that for the rest of your life. We live in the most technologically advanced era of history, and we’re just at the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution. It’s never been easier to do work that you love, create the life you want, and help change the world. So, go out and chase your dreams.

 

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