Session 82 Dr. Brittany Henderson is a former academic Endocrinologist, just switching to private practice and today she discusses her specialty, what she loves, and more. Our goal for this podcast is to show you what is out there for you once you get through medical school. Too much focus is on the academic setting as you're going through medical school and the majority of medicine is practiced outside of an academic setting. However, medical students don't get that exposed that typically. Our goal here, therefore, is to compare and contrast different settings. If you’re still on your journey towards medical school, please also check out all our others podcast on the MedEd Media Network. Back to our episode today, Brittany is an endocrinologist who has been out of training now for five and a half years. She has mostly been in an academic setting but is now moving to a community setting, opening up her own private practice. [01:57] An Interest in Endocrinology and Finding a Mentor Brittany started getting interested in the field during residency when she did an elective rotation with an endocrinologist, although she decided between this and geriatrics. She liked the patient population in geriatrics a lot but didn't like the subject material as much such as incontinence and the like. She likes endocrinology due to her chemistry background. During her second year of residency, she worked with an endocrinologist who was in the community and was on staff at the hospital. She got more exposure to endocrine and general endocrine and tried to see what it looked like on a daily basis. She points out the power of mentorship. "Really narrow it down to subspecialties and really look for those mentors around you to try to see firsthand what it looks like in the real world." [04:00] Traits that Lead to Being a Good Endocrinologist One must be able to look at the big picture but also be able to look at the little intricacies of how hormone systems work. As with her, Brittany's chemistry background really helped. You have to have an inquisitive mind and be able to think through things. [05:25] From Academic to Community Setting When decided she wanted to be an endocrinologist, she started working on some papers and presentations at some of the national meetings. She sees this as a very important aspect to be able to get into a fellowship. Once you've identified your mentor, ask for cool cases that you're willing to write up. This would serve as your academic exercise. You're also going to be able to get publication case reports and poster presentations at some of these national meetings. Then you're able to put this on your application for a fellowship. Ultimately, this sparked her interest in doing an academic career. Brittany has always loved the academics but she had an awakening that although she liked it a lot, she didn't want to be in the laboratory for the rest of her career. She didn't want to be struggling for grant money, which is a very hard thing to do in their field. She then decided that as she joined the faculty, she wanted to focus more on clinical endocrinology. She was an academic endocrinologist for ten years and ran the Fellows Thyroid Clinic and the Thyroid Cancer Tumor Board, which are two institutions. She was the medical director for the Thyroid and Endocrine Patient Clinic. She loved it having had the time to do clinical work, write papers, and do research. "But when you're split between doing a lot of clinic and wanting to do research, it's really really difficult to do everything well and have enough hours in the day." All this being said, she pondered on what she wants better – clinic or research. She chose the clinic and decided to go to her own practice she wants to build a thyroid center. Most of her practice in the academic world focused on thyroid disease along with some general endocrinology. But she wasn't able to do some of the other components of thyroid medicine that she wanted to do like running spec