Doctor and Patient: The Bullying Culture of Medical School. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's 2008 Harvard Commencement address. Can Doctors Have Work-Life Balance? Medical Students Discuss. If having work-life balance is important to you, then don’t become a doctor. That was Dr. Karen Sibert’s advice to students considering careers in medicine, in a controversial New York Times op-ed last summer. “You can’t have it all,” Sibert wrote, exhorting students — women mostly — to remember that “medical education is a privilege, not an entitlement, and it confers a real moral obligation to serve.” If you want to work and be a mother, then you can find a job in journalism or professional cooking or law.
Sibert’s piece likely sparked countless conversations — and moments of doubt — at medical schools around the country. What follows are excerpts of that roundtable conversation. The students’ responses: Alexandra Charrow: Implicit in what you’re asking is the question of whether doctors are “special,” so special that we should be required to work additional hours and so integral to society that we have additional duties. Their responses: Dr. Don’t Quit This Day Job. The Optimistic Life. Yvetta Fedorova My recent column on optimism drew hundreds of comments from readers who testified to the value of living life as a glass half full. But one in particular — from a 90-year-old man living in Calabasas, Calif. — was especially telling. The reader, William Richmond, wrote that a phrase in the column, “Fake it until you make it,” summed up his long and very successful life.
His approach to life could serve as a battle plan for the millions of recent college graduates now searching for work in an unforgiving job market, as well as for older adults trying to re-enter the workplace after a long hiatus and those who lost jobs and must now reinvent themselves. In 1946, after serving nearly four years as a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps, Mr. Richmond said he returned to civilian life “certain I could conquer anything I went after.” After all, he’d managed to fly solo and safely land a Piper Cub after just six hours of training, then spent the next year learning to be a pilot. Mr. The science of being a working mother: The M.D. Studies have found little difference between the children of working mothers… (Betsie Van Der Meer, Getty…) If you ask my 10-year-old son, he'd tell you that I'm not a "real doctor.
" His point of reference is my husband, David, a surgeon who usually leaves the house before 6 and works 12-hour days. Most mornings, while David is at the hospital preparing for the operating room, I'm home making breakfast for our kids or packing lunches for school. In the late afternoons, while David is wrapping up office hours, I'm busy driving my son to soccer practice or overseeing his homework. It wasn't always this way. Throughout medical school and residency, I worked as hard — if not harder — than my husband.
But all of that changed 17 years ago with the birth of my first child, when I decided to work less and mother more. Deciding to scale back at work wasn't easy. And I didn't know what would be best for my family and me. So what's really optimal for mother and child? It hasn't always been easy. Business - Derek Thompson - 3 Charts Explaining How Moms and Dads Balance Work and Family. Anne-Marie Slaughter's controversial cover story for The Atlantic this month acknowledges a simple point: There is a "family cost" to your career and a "career cost" to your family. Time is finite, even if our ambitions aren't. This is a trade-offs millions of parents recognize every day. Today, even with women accounting for a nearly equal share of the labor force, it is still the case that working mothers spend much more time with their children than working fathers.
How much more? We can answer that question in graphs, thanks to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly review of working parents from 2008. (1) More kids means less full-time work -- but only for mom. More than 90% of married men aged 25-54 were employed full-time, with or without kids, BLS found. . (2) Older kids means more full-time work -- but only for mom. . (3) Why fully employed mothers spend more time taking care of their kids than fully employed dads. Transcript and Video of Speech by Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook | Barnard College. Thank you, President Spar. Members of the board of trustees, esteemed members of the faculty, proud parents, squirming siblings, devoted friends: congratulations to all of you. But especially, congratulations to the magnificent Barnard Class of 2011. Looking at you all here fills me with great joy, in part because my college roommate, a member of your faculty, Caroline Weber, is here.
Carrie, it means so much to me to be at your school, and in part because I work in Silicon Valley, let’s just say I’m not usually in a room with this many women. I graduated from college exactly 20 years ago. Today is a day of celebration, a day to celebrate all the hard work that got you to this place where you can sit, kind of sweltering in that gown. As you leave Barnard today, you leave not just with an education, but you take your place amongst the fortunate. Compared to these women, we are lucky. I recognize that this is a vast improvement from generations in the past. So today, we turn to you. Magazine - Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today.
Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.
Revaluing Family Values.
It’s Not About You. But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt. More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front. College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities.