About 18 months ago I bit the bullet and signed up for a full time PhD, essentially leaving clinical practice for 3 years. I still private assist a couple of times a month at a couple of private hospitals but day to day I have no list, no pager, no patients, no consults, no on-call, just research.
It’s been a massive adjustment. The advice from one of my consultants before I started was “in clinical the work just comes at you, but in research you have to actively look for it”, and that’s been true. The hospital is a hyper scrutinized environment. If a boss wanted a scan done in the morning and it was 12:30 in the afternoon and the scan wasn’t done I’d be under the gun. In research I could turn up and just browse Pinterest all day and I’d guess it would take ~6 weeks for somebody to notice.
First, about my PhD. My PhD is co-supervised across a few specialties (medical, physics and engineering) on imaging research. I’m looking at spine MRI and have finished my animal work and will be moving on to humans in the next couple of months.
It’s a very different job in a lot of ways. My days are much more variable, but also a lot more self directed. It took a few months to get out of the habit of turning up at 6:30 every morning to an empty building. The pay isn’t great with a government stipend especially compared to a surgical reg job with overtime, callbacks and reasonably chunky private assisting, without wanting to get down into the weeds too much think roughly 80% pay cut. The main difference though is the time scale of work. As a reg there’s very little long term planning. The longest horizon for any job that needed to be done was a couple of weeks max and most tasks were hours to days. I routinely will work on one problem for months at a time in PhD land chipping away at something bit by bit. I spent a big chunk of the start of this year working on a couple of grant applications, one of those documents had 200+ hours work on it over more than a month, I never had a single task that long in clinical land.
There’s also a lot more uncertainty in general. In clinical I spent most of my time in a hospital in Eastern Sydney where the motto was “call early, call often” and if I wasn’t sure I just texted or called the consultant and the definitive plan appeared. In research there are a lot more questions that just don’t have answers, or at least known answers, the first time I asked what to do and was told “well you probably have as much experience as us, let us know what you come up with” was eye opening.
There’s also a lot of skills that are transferable from clinical medicine to research. Probably the key skill so far for research seems to be “Defining the problem well”, there are no precise answers to vague questions. The same sort of process you go through with a complex new admission works well in research at least some of the time: define what the problems are, agree goals, define what success looks like, figure out what useful information is missing and weigh the different tools to achieve your objectives.
The flexibility is good but you really have to break out of the hospital mindset to take advantage of it, which took me 12 months to do. There was a workshop at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year in the middle of the day on a weekday, it was an epiphany moment realizing I could just mark myself “at the writers’ festival” on the google calendar and buy tickets. No supervisor approval, no arranging cover, no begging, borrowing or swapping. I just took a few hours off.
My days are varied. Today I had a personal appointment in the morning so I started at 10, did some paperwork for the ethics committee at another uni for an upcoming collaboration, sent some thank you emails to some coauthors (we got a paper accepted this morning in a big journal in our field), had lunch, spent a few hours at a radiology practice associated with our research group where I was a second rater for another researcher’s study, came back to my office and backed up some research data to a university archive, then finished about 5. There’s no typical day but our group has wetlabs, biomechanics labs, a computational core (where I mainly work) and a research office in a radiology practice as well as working at some main campus facilities and I work across all of them plus do teaching so even the view out the window changes most days.
To be honest I was nervous starting but I’m really loving research so far, mainly the long horizon thing, I’ve found chipping away at one big problem for months suits me and didn’t realise how much I missed out on it in clinical. I’m glad I bit this bullet.
If anybody has any questions feel free to ask me here or message.
Kyle
It’s been a massive adjustment. The advice from one of my consultants before I started was “in clinical the work just comes at you, but in research you have to actively look for it”, and that’s been true. The hospital is a hyper scrutinized environment. If a boss wanted a scan done in the morning and it was 12:30 in the afternoon and the scan wasn’t done I’d be under the gun. In research I could turn up and just browse Pinterest all day and I’d guess it would take ~6 weeks for somebody to notice.
First, about my PhD. My PhD is co-supervised across a few specialties (medical, physics and engineering) on imaging research. I’m looking at spine MRI and have finished my animal work and will be moving on to humans in the next couple of months.
It’s a very different job in a lot of ways. My days are much more variable, but also a lot more self directed. It took a few months to get out of the habit of turning up at 6:30 every morning to an empty building. The pay isn’t great with a government stipend especially compared to a surgical reg job with overtime, callbacks and reasonably chunky private assisting, without wanting to get down into the weeds too much think roughly 80% pay cut. The main difference though is the time scale of work. As a reg there’s very little long term planning. The longest horizon for any job that needed to be done was a couple of weeks max and most tasks were hours to days. I routinely will work on one problem for months at a time in PhD land chipping away at something bit by bit. I spent a big chunk of the start of this year working on a couple of grant applications, one of those documents had 200+ hours work on it over more than a month, I never had a single task that long in clinical land.
There’s also a lot more uncertainty in general. In clinical I spent most of my time in a hospital in Eastern Sydney where the motto was “call early, call often” and if I wasn’t sure I just texted or called the consultant and the definitive plan appeared. In research there are a lot more questions that just don’t have answers, or at least known answers, the first time I asked what to do and was told “well you probably have as much experience as us, let us know what you come up with” was eye opening.
There’s also a lot of skills that are transferable from clinical medicine to research. Probably the key skill so far for research seems to be “Defining the problem well”, there are no precise answers to vague questions. The same sort of process you go through with a complex new admission works well in research at least some of the time: define what the problems are, agree goals, define what success looks like, figure out what useful information is missing and weigh the different tools to achieve your objectives.
The flexibility is good but you really have to break out of the hospital mindset to take advantage of it, which took me 12 months to do. There was a workshop at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year in the middle of the day on a weekday, it was an epiphany moment realizing I could just mark myself “at the writers’ festival” on the google calendar and buy tickets. No supervisor approval, no arranging cover, no begging, borrowing or swapping. I just took a few hours off.
My days are varied. Today I had a personal appointment in the morning so I started at 10, did some paperwork for the ethics committee at another uni for an upcoming collaboration, sent some thank you emails to some coauthors (we got a paper accepted this morning in a big journal in our field), had lunch, spent a few hours at a radiology practice associated with our research group where I was a second rater for another researcher’s study, came back to my office and backed up some research data to a university archive, then finished about 5. There’s no typical day but our group has wetlabs, biomechanics labs, a computational core (where I mainly work) and a research office in a radiology practice as well as working at some main campus facilities and I work across all of them plus do teaching so even the view out the window changes most days.
To be honest I was nervous starting but I’m really loving research so far, mainly the long horizon thing, I’ve found chipping away at one big problem for months suits me and didn’t realise how much I missed out on it in clinical. I’m glad I bit this bullet.
If anybody has any questions feel free to ask me here or message.
Kyle
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