Hi everyone, I’m trying a new post format today—A discussion thread where people can comment and ask questions of me and other readers. For this inaugural discussion, I’d love to have you introduce yourselves, tell me why you subscribed, and what you’d like to learn reading All Science Great & Small. This will help guide my future writing, and if this format is successful, I’ll be doing them more regularly for subscribers in the future!
Hi Eric, great idea for a thread. I'm glad to connect up with other science writers on Substack. I'm not sure what I want to learn, but I'm sure I'll learn something.
Thanks, Melanie! I certainly hope you do :) Always feel free to follow-up here or in a separate message if you have requests for anything you'd like to see me write about
I found your work because you found mine, and I’ve enjoyed reading it. You piece “Quitting Time” was powerful, and I think a lot of veterinarians can relate to the feeling of poor training, insufficient oversight and support, and genuinely bad leadership. You take responsibility for so much of the things that went wrong, but it’s outrageous that you were put in those situations without the education and support to prepare you, and then criticized by the same leadership who’d set you up for struggle and failure.
And I think maybe you held yourself to an unattainable standard. We all have flaws and deficits as veterinarians, we make mistakes and forget things and will not correctly diagnose every patient who comes our way, regardless of our level of expertise and training. A veterinarian, like everyone else, makes mistakes, errors in judgment, lapses in memory, and will sometimes fail at their task. If the standard were bulletproof perfection, there’d be none of us left.
Thanks, Doc! I really appreciate your kind words. It's definitely true that many post-grad training programs (and new grads who go right into hospitals) immediately throw freshly minted DVMs into the fire without the tools they need for success. I did enjoy my internship (at Virginia Tech), though ER oversight was an area for improvement; luckily, I've heard in recent years they've made great strides there, and also have actual criticalists available for help. There's been a spotlight on raising the bar for internship quality the last few years, which is great to see. Likewise, companies from BluePearl to VEG and others are putting together structured mentorship programs with defined didactic curricula, milestones, scheduled check-ins with mentors, and importantly, much better pay than internships! Great trends in the profession, I hope to see it trickle down from the corporate world into smaller clinics, too.
I was so surprised to see your recent posts on ChatGPT and AI, because so few vets seem to be paying attention. I've enjoyed your essays and opinion pieces as well, which is why I put you on my Substack Recommendations page. Keep writing!
I'm here because I find it really beneficial to get out of my specialty and see the world through other people's eyes. I feel stultified just talking to like minds, being shut in a cabin echo chamber. This subscription is another in a long series of such by a 74 year old trying to really learn, so late in life, how wide this world really is. I can't guarantee I'll be here forever-i will move on eventually. So much to see, so much to do...
Thanks for the comment and reading, Michael! That's so great to see that you actively seek out knowledge in other fields outside your expertise in math and engineering. Frankly, I wish more veterinarians (and physicians!) had this mindset; there is so much for all of us to learn from each other. When you look at so many of the early scientific greats and Nobel laureates, many were dilettantes in a variety of fields, and so many discoveries were the results of serendipity or plain accidents. The field of genetics was launched by a monk whose hobby was gardening; microscopes were invented by a quirky Dutch merchant; and PCR was invented by an LSD-taking surfer (current crackpot views noted). Many of these discoveries were delayed by years or decades or longer because the information was not in the "right" journals or conferences. People like Paul Ehrlich spanned fields ranging from chemistry to pathology to microbiology and pharmacology. He probably would be written off as "unfocused" in academia today and unable to get tenure!
Hi Eric, great idea for a thread. I'm glad to connect up with other science writers on Substack. I'm not sure what I want to learn, but I'm sure I'll learn something.
Thanks, Melanie! I certainly hope you do :) Always feel free to follow-up here or in a separate message if you have requests for anything you'd like to see me write about
I found your work because you found mine, and I’ve enjoyed reading it. You piece “Quitting Time” was powerful, and I think a lot of veterinarians can relate to the feeling of poor training, insufficient oversight and support, and genuinely bad leadership. You take responsibility for so much of the things that went wrong, but it’s outrageous that you were put in those situations without the education and support to prepare you, and then criticized by the same leadership who’d set you up for struggle and failure.
And I think maybe you held yourself to an unattainable standard. We all have flaws and deficits as veterinarians, we make mistakes and forget things and will not correctly diagnose every patient who comes our way, regardless of our level of expertise and training. A veterinarian, like everyone else, makes mistakes, errors in judgment, lapses in memory, and will sometimes fail at their task. If the standard were bulletproof perfection, there’d be none of us left.
Thanks, Doc! I really appreciate your kind words. It's definitely true that many post-grad training programs (and new grads who go right into hospitals) immediately throw freshly minted DVMs into the fire without the tools they need for success. I did enjoy my internship (at Virginia Tech), though ER oversight was an area for improvement; luckily, I've heard in recent years they've made great strides there, and also have actual criticalists available for help. There's been a spotlight on raising the bar for internship quality the last few years, which is great to see. Likewise, companies from BluePearl to VEG and others are putting together structured mentorship programs with defined didactic curricula, milestones, scheduled check-ins with mentors, and importantly, much better pay than internships! Great trends in the profession, I hope to see it trickle down from the corporate world into smaller clinics, too.
I was so surprised to see your recent posts on ChatGPT and AI, because so few vets seem to be paying attention. I've enjoyed your essays and opinion pieces as well, which is why I put you on my Substack Recommendations page. Keep writing!
I'm here because I find it really beneficial to get out of my specialty and see the world through other people's eyes. I feel stultified just talking to like minds, being shut in a cabin echo chamber. This subscription is another in a long series of such by a 74 year old trying to really learn, so late in life, how wide this world really is. I can't guarantee I'll be here forever-i will move on eventually. So much to see, so much to do...
Plus I love James Herriot!
Thanks for the comment and reading, Michael! That's so great to see that you actively seek out knowledge in other fields outside your expertise in math and engineering. Frankly, I wish more veterinarians (and physicians!) had this mindset; there is so much for all of us to learn from each other. When you look at so many of the early scientific greats and Nobel laureates, many were dilettantes in a variety of fields, and so many discoveries were the results of serendipity or plain accidents. The field of genetics was launched by a monk whose hobby was gardening; microscopes were invented by a quirky Dutch merchant; and PCR was invented by an LSD-taking surfer (current crackpot views noted). Many of these discoveries were delayed by years or decades or longer because the information was not in the "right" journals or conferences. People like Paul Ehrlich spanned fields ranging from chemistry to pathology to microbiology and pharmacology. He probably would be written off as "unfocused" in academia today and unable to get tenure!