By Sonia Chaudhry, MD

Write Everything Down. You are often busy during “teaching moments,” as they occur in the operating room, a busy clinic, or on overnight call. Take the time to write down teaching points as soon as you can and in more detail than you think you need. Even if that skill or “pimp question” becomes something you think you could never forget, once you’re in a subspecialty practice, you’d be surprised how fast you forget your general orthopaedic knowledge and when it might come in handy down the line. Our trauma hospitals required us to hang a preoperative plan for every case that detailed the equipment needed, patient position, surgical approach, and postoperative management. This should really be done for every single case you do, ever, so that you can annotate it with pearls and add to it through the years. Keep these, along with notes from conferences and lectures, organized, ideally electronically, so that you can quickly access them for clinical or educational use. They help make lectures you give more robust, as you can add relevant information instead of summarizing a review article or chapter, even if you haven’t come across that particular pathology or case in some time.

Publish. Every presentation you are assigned could potentially be a review article. Each interesting case may be worthy of a case report or example with literature review. Each clinical discussion during conference without a clear-cut answer is a potential research project. Time seems limited during training, but being in an academic practice as a mother of two, I now realize that you tend to only get busier as life packs on responsibility. When putting in the work to prepare for presentations and rare cases, it is worth the extra effort it takes to publish on these early on. This will not only improve your knowledge base but also begin to get you recognized in your field and create opportunities you might not otherwise have had.

Get specialty-specific disability insurance while in training. There’s an invincibility complex you get when you’re living the fast-paced life of a resident. When you can do it all, pulling 80+ hour work weeks while working out, studying, socializing, etc., the last thing you want to do is commit to giving part of your paltry salary towards the depressing idea of being disabled. However, things can and do happen at any stage, and these policies are exponentially more affordable at a young age before health issues occur.