How to Succeed as a Medical Education Scholar: Identifying Your Individual Strategy and Creating a Roadmap for Scholarship

Abstract

Abstract Introduction Educational scholarship is crucial for academic advancement of medical educators. Unfortunately, scholarship remains a goal that is difficult to attain for many junior and seasoned medical educators. Commonly, a project is started with good intentions and enthusiasm but ends up disappearing among many other tasks. In this workshop, participants identify personal and institutional obstacles towards scholarship and explore habits and strategies that successful scholars have used to circumvent these. This workshop targets faculty members at all levels, including those who can share effective strategies for scholarship. Methods This workshop is a series of group and individual exercises, is entirely paper-based and thus can be easily emulated at local institutions, in medical education fellowship programs, or professional meetings. In it participants identify personal and institutional obstacles towards scholarship and explore habits and strategies that successful scholars have used to circumvent these. The goal of the workshop is a frank exchange of ideas among all participants, including workshop leaders that will culminate in a personalized strategy for success. Results Overall, the workshop was very well-received. “Inspiring, motivating;” “Thought provoking;” ‘I really enjoyed the workshop; it was very helpful” were some of the comments we received. Participants indicated on a scale from 1 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely) how likely they would use the personal plan they developed to keep their scholarship on track. The average was 7.6 (range, 5–10). Discussion These preliminary data seem to suggest that the workshop was effective in the immediate term; we are planning to follow up with some of participants to ascertain to what extent the personal strategic plan was effective in producing a piece of scholarship in the longer term.

Keywords

• Medical Education
• Faculty Development
• Scholarship
• Leadership
• Medical Education Research