Show Notes
Description
The mid to late career in academic medicine does not wind down. It evolves! Dr James Cray visits the studio as we explore how experienced faculty can redefine success, choose meaningful responsibilities, mentor others, shape sustainable programs, and turn individual accomplishment into a durable contribution. We hope you can join us!
Guest
Dr James Cray
Professor and Vice Chair for Research
Department of Biomedical Education and Anatomy
The Ohio State University College of Medicine
Learning Objectives
At the end of this activity, participants should be able to:
- Identify milestones of the mid to late-career transition in academic medicine.
- Analyze how responsibilities evolve across teaching, scholarship, service, and leadership.
- Evaluate career opportunities according to personal values, strengths, purpose, and impact.
- Develop a plan for mentorship, sponsorship, succession, and sustainable contribution.
Links
- AAMC Professional Development Toolkit
- AAMC Professional Development for Medical Educators
- The Ohio State University Office of Faculty Affairs
- Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning
- Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement
- Mentorship Training Curbs Academic Abuse
- The Nature and Evolution of the Mentoring Relationship in Academic Health Centers
Episode Transcript
[Dr Mike Patrick]
This episode of FAMEcast is brought to you by the Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement at the Ohio State University College of Medicine.
[MUSIC]
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of FAMEcast. We are a faculty development podcast from the Ohio State University College of Medicine.
This is Dr. Mike coming to you from the campus of Ohio State. We’re calling this one Ages and Stages, the Middle to Late Career in Academic Medicine. I want to welcome all of you to the program.
We are so happy to have you with us. You know, the mid to late career in academic medicine does not wind down. It evolves.
It brings broader influence, deeper perspective, and new opportunities to mentor others, shape programs, and preserve what matters most. It’s also a time for some important questions. Which responsibilities deserve a yes?
How should success be redefined? And how can decades of experience become a durable contribution? Today, we explore how faculty can approach the mid to late career with intention, curiosity, and purpose.
Of course, in our usual FAMEcast fashion, we have a terrific guest joining us in the studio to discuss the topic. Dr. James Cray is professor and vice chair for research in the Department of Biomedical Education and Anatomy at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. He will be with us shortly.
I do want to remind you about those additional faculty development resources that you can find over at our website. So, if you head over to FameCast.org, click on the resources tab up there at the top of the page, and you’ll find two sets of learning modules. One called Advancing Your Clinical Teaching.
That’s a series of 17 learning modules that can be taken separately or as a full series. And then we also have a Faculty Development for Medical Educators, also known as FD4ME. And that is a robust collection of learning modules designed to equip medical educators with advanced teaching skills in both clinical and classroom settings.
Group and institutional pricing are available for both sets of modules. Just contact Fame at osumc.edu for more details. And again, you can find more information and links to all of those modules by clicking the resources tab up at the top at FameCast.org.
Also want to remind you the information presented in every episode of our podcast is for general educational purposes only. Your use of this audio program is subject to the FAMEcast Terms of Use Agreement, which you can find at FameCast.org. So, let’s take a quick break.
We’ll get Dr. James Cray settled into the studio, and then we will be back to talk about navigating the mid to late career in academic medicine. It’s coming up right after this.
[MUSIC]
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Dr. James Cray is professor and vice chair for research in the Department of Biomedical Education and Anatomy at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. He also serves as interim director of the Division of Anatomy and director of anatomy graduate programs. We have previously covered the early career and the early to middle career in academic medicine. Dr. Cray is here as we continue those conversations and consider the middle to late career. Before we dive in, let’s offer a warm FAMEcast welcome to our guest, Dr. James Cray. Welcome to the podcast.
[Dr James Cray]
Thanks, Dr. Mike. Great to be here.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, great having you. And we are excited for this conversation as we continue our ages and stages series on FAMEcast. So, when we talk about the middle to late career in academic medicine, who exactly are we describing and why is this stage really better defined by our changing responsibilities rather than a number of years in our role?
[Dr James Cray]
Yeah, thanks, Mike. That kind of hits the nail on the head. I’d say that it’s definitely not measured in years. That’s the first thing.
And, you know, I think mid to late career is best understood as that transition of responsibility and perspective. You know, you could take two separate faculty members who have the same number of years, and they could be in very different places professionally. You know, as an example, you know, my transition probably became more apparent when my work expanded beyond individual teaching, individual projects in my lab and moved into, like many broader roles in education and research leadership and division and department leadership.
You know, those roles certainly require different lenses and in leadership, you’re probably still teaching and mentoring and writing, engaging in scholarship. But you have to think about the bigger picture, whether programs are sustainable and whether faculty and trainees are being supported and whether the systems we build will still be around when one person or multiple people. So, to describe that kind of mid to late rank or career of faculty, I think we often use the word stewardship, and that is the really big defining factor.
We don’t ask, how do I establish myself probably anymore, but more about how do I use my experience that I’ve accumulated to help learners and colleagues and programs as well as the institution to be successful?
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. What are some of the milestones that sort of signal that we have arrived at the mid to late stage of our career?
[Dr James Cray]
Yeah, thanks, Mike. I think that, you know, one of the ways is probably just to look at your Outlook calendar and see what’s making up the majority of your appointments, although that’s probably a bit subjective. I would say, you know, one major signal is when people start seeking you out, not just for expertise, but for judgment.
You know, early in career, people may come to you because you’re a content expert or have a technical skill. Maybe as an educator, you’re really good at writing test questions or in the lab, maybe you’re really good at running western blots or you have a histology stain technique that’s unique that can help your colleagues, you know, with their scholarship. But later, it becomes more of what you’ve seen and how you can apply your experience to a situation because you’ve probably seen the exact situation a colleague is encountering.
So that could be anything from a junior faculty member looking at student evaluations for the first time or a graduate student thinking about career options or colleagues navigating promotion experiences, which is part of what this series is about. The other piece I would say about signals is not to expect it to happen overnight. It’s quite gradual.
It won’t happen the day you’re promoted. I think, you know, when you’re a promotion full professor, it can prompt reflection, but it’s certainly not an endpoint. You still have a long road after that point, but it certainly will coincide with expanded responsibilities, whether that’s education, research, administration, clinical leadership.
But the responsibility becomes a lot broader, and it becomes a lot more visible, which is a real key. And probably one other signal that we often don’t think about is we become the keeper of institutional memory. You know, we become the historian.
You remember why the decision was made. What we’ve tried before, maybe why it was succeeding and why it failed. And new faculty and even new leaders sometimes need context on some of the historical nature of how we got to where we are.
So that can be useful, but it also carries a lot of responsibility.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, it sounds like our priority kind of shifts from inward, like thinking about my career and how do I advance it? How do I get promoted to associate professor? How do I get promoted to full professor?
And then it’s almost like we’ve arrived and instead of focusing in on ourselves, it’s time to sort of focus on the institution. Although, I mean, that’s simplifying it because, of course, we focus on both of those things at the same time, but, you know, throughout our career. But it does seem like there’s a larger focus as we step into leadership of putting our efforts into the gain of the whole institution rather than just our own career.
Yeah, I love that.
[Dr James Cray]
You know, early in our careers, it’s natural and very appropriate to worry about individual credibility. You know, you’re building your identity, teaching identity, developing your scholarship niche. Maybe you’re starting your clinical practice.
You’re publishing, pursuing funding, learning about promotion criteria to your point or figuring out where you fit academically. And those priorities really matter. When you move into leadership or even later, just career stages, which leadership comes along with that, the center of gravity changes.
For me, it’s the idea, and that’s a hard idea for all of us, that the idea shifts from personal excellence to kind of a collective capacity. I still care really deeply about doing excellent work in the classroom and in my lab, but I spend a lot more time thinking about if others have what they need to succeed. Are junior faculty getting useful feedback?
Are graduate students being prepared for the careers they want? Are courses coherent across a curriculum, not just within a single course? Are we building transparent systems or are we relying on heroic efforts by individual faculty members?
So, I think just mature leadership takes a lot more time on the horizon. But yeah, work becomes less about accumulating personal accomplishments, checking boxes, updating CVs, and more about shaping environments where others can do excellent work.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, that really sounds exciting, honestly. And I think that when you sort of get there and get settled in, there are opportunities that come up that you, you know, did not have those sorts of opportunities when you were at the early to just middle career stage, the early middle career. What opportunities are especially meaningful for mid to late career faculty that may come up unexpectedly?
[Dr James Cray]
I think any opportunity where you convert experience into impact is so, so very exciting. You know, I think the big ones certainly are mentorship and scholarship. At this stage, you have enough perspective to help other people interpret challenges, understand expectations, decide what matters most to them, maybe what their mission is going to look like.
You know, when I think about my own mentoring approach, I think about communication, setting expectations and role modeling and commitment. And those, you know, principles just kind of ramp up as you as you mature and go through rank. I think another meaningful opportunity is about program building that may not be available early in your career, but you can move into broader curricular leadership, research leadership, administrative leadership, I’m sure clinical leadership as well.
You know, using again myself as an example, I still enjoy teaching individual lectures, but I also find meeting and looking at the whole curriculum and see where it fits. And, you know, maybe how I can hand that off to a colleague who will improve it. And another opportunity is that idea of stewardship.
I think, you know, it’s often and if it hasn’t already, you know, at that stage, you may start to engage in greater editorial work, you know, grant reviews on the basic science or clinical translational side, national service leadership and professional organizations that we’ve probably attended meetings, but now we’re on boards. And so, it really allows faculty to contribute beyond their own institution at these later stages and help shape a discipline, not just their department or their own institution. Yeah.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
You know, as you’re describing those things, I can feel the energy of that shift from, you know, our own personal career to sort of the greater good of the learners following behind us and the institutions that we serve. It can be energizing, but there are unique challenges at this stage as well. At the same time, how do you kind of walk that line with being energized but also feeling particularly challenged?
Great and great way to put that question.
[Dr James Cray]
You know, it’s such an exciting time because experience creates trust. And when people trust your judgment and a lot of doors end up opening, you may be asked to lead programs or mentor faculty or faculty groups, like I said, serve on boards, review, grant, edit for journals, solve institutional problems, you know, in some cases. And that can be really rewarding because it means your experience is useful and a different context.
The challenge is that those invitations just accumulate. And one of the realities in that mid to late rank or, you know, career transition is that responsibilities across, you know, whether it’s clinical, education, research, administration, service, and mentorship, they grow exponentially at the same time. Use myself again as an example, my teaching work occurs across multiple learner groups here at Ohio State, direct graduate education, I lead educational service curricula, have division, department, university, administrative responsibilities, but you’re also mentoring trainees and faculty and contributing to professional organizations outside the institution.
The energizing part is the work feels so meaningful. And, you know, if it wasn’t meaningful, we wouldn’t do it. Challenging part is that it can still become a lot if it’s not aligned with purpose, you know, if it’s a title collection kind of approach.
So, I think this is, you know, sustainability really comes from being clear about one’s values and where the experience is most useful and what work is worth saying yes to. Yeah, yeah.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
This next thought is a little esoteric, but it really does build on what you’re saying. It seems like when we think about the different pillars of academic medicine. So clinical, teaching, research, service, as we think about those in our early to mid-career, oftentimes they’re siloed, like not necessarily related to one another, but the more that you sort of dig in and become an expert in a particular thing or field, they start to merge together a little bit so that you have one body of work that may involve clinical, teaching, research, service, all of those things.
How do you sort of assimilate it into one body of sort of a coherent body of work?
[Dr James Cray]
Yeah, I think that’s a great question because if you’re not merging at this stage, you know, I’m going to use a buzzword, burnout risk is so high. You know, it’s such a reality. There’s only so many hours in the day.
Your buckets cannot continue to remain separate. It’s easier to compartmentalize those at earlier stages of the career. So, you know, I think coherence really starts with identifying the mission, your mission, understanding the roles.
If you have the teaching scholarship, clinical practice, as you said, leadership and service, if you treat those as separate buckets, it’s just fragmented. And when you identify the common ground, the pieces can start to really reinforce one another. Myself, I’ve had themes.
I have a lot of themes, unfortunately. But, you know, it’s, you know, anatomical science, education and leadership and my research, my craniofacial biology, you know, sort of background. So, where I pull those commonalities together are in larger nodes of mentorship and preparation of future educators and scholars.
My teaching does span, you know, multiple subfields of anatomy and research method and design. I do multiple learner groups. So, you know, you have to pivot between medical education, education of allied health and dental students and graduate education or resident education.
Some of that base comes from my research in craniofacial development and teratology and bone biology and, you know, just translational science. So that’ll define how I teach development or clinically related kind of anatomy. So, and leadership roles will follow that to leading educational programs.
I think about how those pieces fit together as well. So, you know, I think identity becomes much more coherent when the roles are not competing for meaning and they become different expressions of the academic purpose.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, throughout our career and we have actually mentioned this in all of our previous programs. So regardless of the stage of your career, learning what to say yes to, what to say not now and what to say no to can be difficult.
Because if we shut things out, we may miss opportunities. But at the same time, we can’t say yes to everything. Does that get any easier, knowing what to say yes and no to and not now as you progress in your career?
[Dr James Cray]
Academics were terrible at this, right? I mean, that’s the challenge. You know, I think it needs to be prescribed.
I think of it like filters. You know, if you take a filtered approach, the first filter is mission fit. You know, does this opportunity align with the contribution that I most want to make?
For me, that usually means that I ask simple questions like is this opportunity connected to anatomy education or research or is it connected to graduate training, mentorship, my scholarship, faculty development, or is it just stewardship? Which is fine. That’s an okay answer.
The second filter I think is a bit harder is to ask yourself whether the opportunity truly needs my experience. That’s probably where we fail a lot. There are some roles where senior faculty members perspectives and institutional memory or professional network is essential.
There are others, you know, where saying yes might actually take away from an opportunity for somebody else, you know, to grow. And I think the third filter is sustainability. Academic medicine, this is why we’re so bad at it.
Academic medicine rewards people who say yes, especially when they’re dependable. But at some point, leadership is not just doing more. It’s being intentional about what we’re actually doing.
And to your question, sometimes the right answer is yes. Sometimes it’s not now. Sometimes it’s no.
But I generally qualify no as a suggestion of who might benefit from the opportunity. So, I think senior faculty, we should ask ourselves, can I do this? But then also say, is this where my experience is most needed?
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that, you know, it takes some thought, but not too much thought, right? Like you want to sleep on it, but you don’t want to necessarily drag out a decision, you know, for weeks and months.
And then once you make it, like move forward, right? It’s easy then to look back like, oh, I should have taken that opportunity. Just, you know, move forward with what you got and look at future opportunities, right?
[Dr James Cray]
Yeah, I think you have to hit pause on the initial knee-jerk reaction that we learn or habits early in our faculty career where we’re accumulating as many roles as possible to define ourselves. So, I think making a 24, 48-hour rule or something reasonable to your point, because yeah, if you wait a month, they’ve moved on from you as their option, but create a role for yourself. So, you give that opportunity to think about, as I call them, filters or whatever your decision tree happens to be to go down through.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Is this something I should be doing? Yeah, yeah. You know, we describe ourselves in academic medicine as lifelong learners, but there is a tendency as we enter into the late career of, you know, being comfortable with where we are and with what we know.
And sometimes that’s the easiest path, sort of the least resistance to our career. Where does growth happen? And like, how can we sort of focus in now?
We want to continue to grow even in our late career. How do we know where and how to do that?
[Dr James Cray]
I think it comes back to growth continues everywhere we remain open to. You know, it can continue in the classroom because your students change, curricula’s change, what learners need from us change, AI has changed, you know, the whole framework of how we approach things. You know, I think a lot of us in our teaching philosophies use the term, we meet the students where they are.
That’s a, you know, that’s a big ask. That’s a challenge. You know, for me, if I say that, that means even if it’s the same topic and I’m teaching to different groups, I need to tailor to the content for delivery of that topic to a medical student, to a dental student, to a graduate student, undergraduates, or a seasoned resident.
Growth can occur in new research collaborations for those of us that are heavy into research. You know, maybe you have a former student who now has their own research program, a lab and wants to continue to collaborate. Such an amazing thing that can happen in our careers.
And growth certainly, you know, later stage career is amenable to leadership, whether that’s department, college, university, national roles. It reveals part of academic medicine that I don’t think any of us really understood at junior rank. You start to see policies and resources and staffing and accreditation and culture and professional development and how that shapes kind of academic mission.
And in mentorship, I think growth continues there as well. You know, I still believe very strongly that there’s always something to learn. And that applies whether you’re mentoring somebody else or being mentored yourself or just doing a peer learning kind of approach.
So, I think it’s not about starting over, but it’s about learning in larger, more complex kind of rooms and situations.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. As we think about mentorship and coaching and sponsorship, you know, our past experiences sort of define how we approach those roles. And of course, that changes over time.
What is your experience been in terms of being a mentor, coach or sponsor at a later stage in your career? Because it really is different than when you were in your middle stage and just starting out with mentoring others.
[Dr James Cray]
It’s completely different. You know, mentorship node is lifelong. And I think part of the thing that gets lost is it should kind of still be a two-way street.
You know, when I give talks about mentorship, I use the example of the great, well, probably the greatest blues guitarist, B.B. King, and he gave an interview late in his life where he revealed he was taking guitar lessons. And I think, you know, the interviewer kind of probed of like, why are you taking guitar lessons? Who has the nerve to give B.B. King a guitar lesson? I mean, to simply answer, you know, there’s always more to learn and more to learn from people. And that idea really shapes how I think about mentorship. As faculty become more senior, mentorship becomes reciprocal, more networked, less individual in most cases.
Senior faculty still need mentors and peer mentors, especially as we move into leadership roles or new opportunities. You want to talk to somebody that’s had a similar or the same experience. At the same time, you’re in that position to mentor trainees, you know, to your point, junior faculty, colleagues through difficult decisions or tasks.
And, you know, I’ve just been fortunate in my career to have such great mentorship, and I still do, you know, to this day. Another piece is sponsorship. You know, we think about that a little bit differently.
Sponsorship becomes really important at later career stages. Mentorship helps people think through problems, but sponsorship kind of gets defined sometimes as opening doors. And there’s a subtle difference there.
You know, that may mean you’re at a professional meeting and you make an introduction for somebody or you encourage somebody to apply for a role that they’re not confident that they’re competitive for or nominating somebody for an opportunity or award or helping them see themselves as ready to take on a role. So, I think some of the most meaningful moments happen when a mentee begins to see themselves as a part of the larger profession. It just kind of flips that light switch a little bit.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, you know, our definition of success, I feel like, also has to change a little bit as we get further into our career. Only one person at a time can be the division chief or chair. And so, there’s, you know, there’s going to be a lot of folks in the early stages of the late career that may not have an opportunity to lead a department or a division.
How can we define success, you know, from a personal standpoint when maybe not all the opportunities are really available to us?
[Dr James Cray]
Yeah, I mean, you kind of said it. There’s an important transition between early and late career and how we define success. And it is very individual.
But the, you know, kind of the benefit of later rank is it can become more collective. You know, early in our career, we do similar things. We’re looking at promotion criteria and publication and grants and teaching emails and award recognition because they’re important.
You know, they’re important because they shake where we’re going. But later career needs a broader definition. It doesn’t need to be defined by titles to, you know, to your point.
For myself, you know, I think, you know, success includes whether programs are strong, whether learners are thriving, trainees are making meaningful scholarly progress, whether faculty colleagues, you know, it doesn’t have to be reporters, you know, faculty colleagues feel supported, whether systems are sustainable. Leadership, a little bit, you know, different. If it’s defined leadership, it requires transparent processes and real focus on faculty development and promotion readiness, operational stability.
So, it is slightly, you know, different. It’s not as visible as things in our early careers like publications or getting a federal grant or an award, but they have enormous impact. And I think success becomes more durable, you know, in those contexts, because it’s not about just adding another accomplishment.
It’s about thinking about what will remain when I’m no longer in a particular role, even if it’s just your faculty pool. Did your students find direction? Did your students land that job that they were so excited about interviewing for?
Did a fellow faculty member gain confidence? Did the curriculum that you participated in become more coherent? Did a program become healthier?
Those are really meaningful outcomes. So, it transitions regardless of title, from adding stuff to your CV to leaving whatever it is stronger than because you were there.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
How do you sort of sharpen your focus? You talk about putting all the pillars of academic medicine together into your career and getting out of the silo mentality. You’re thinking about institutional memory, and you are mentoring and coaching.
How do you still keep a single purpose? And that really takes some intentionality, right? Like, you have to maybe even schedule some time with yourself to think about these things.
[Dr James Cray]
Yeah, putting time on your calendar to reassess is critical. Otherwise, I think our habits just have us to simply continue the same things that we’ve been doing. And I think that can be a mistake.
I don’t mean to suggest that we always have to reset at every stage. I think that’s also a mistake. But I think a lot of us build habits early in our career because we’re trying to establish ourselves.
We say, yes, we work hard. We build credibility. But to your point, mid to late career, it’s important time to ask whether those habits still serve the contribution I want to continue to make.
And curiosity is key in that. Curiosity remains by staying connected to parts of the work that still make you want to be a lifelong learner. For me, it’s about teaching complex anatomy to different learner groups or continuing my scholarship in craniofacial development or merging the two, putting those together.
To your point about the pillars and buckets and making basic science make sense in the classroom or the laboratory. And it’s also about relationships, intentional mentorship, intentional communication. Communication is so key in effective relationships and academia and really mentorship because listening very carefully to people’s goals, worries, and aspirations really changes the quality of the relationships you have with your colleagues and mentees and even your leadership.
So, I think purpose protects our values and not habit, not status, but then that can also aid in guiding our future commitments. Yeah.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
At what point do you start thinking about your legacy and really stewarding programs that are going to exist after you retire? So, you know, there’s someone has to be the next Jim Cray. And when do you start thinking about passing on the baton?
[Dr James Cray]
Yeah, I think that legacy is a tough one. I mean, I always hope my legacy are the people, the programs, resources, and values. And I don’t think much about legacy.
I hope I still have a long, you know, kind of off ramp. But, you know, people, program, resources, values, it’s not nothing about stewardship, leadership, whatever we want to call it as ownership. It’s responsibility.
And stewardship includes mentoring trainees and colleagues in ways that build confidence and opportunity. And mentorship certainly continues beyond, you know, arm’s length, continues beyond graduation or publication or the first, you know, faculty position that your student gets or their first grants. Or even if you have a colleague moves on to a new role or opportunity, you know, you have that reciprocal mentorship relationship, you still have to be there, you know, for that person.
I think building programs and processes create some longevity that can function beyond a single person. I think that’s key to remember. We think about legacy.
You can’t build a legacy based on everything that your heroic efforts or things that you’ve done in programs or even department leadership. You need reliable systems, clear communication, transparent decision-making. You need a lot of role clarity, a lot of faculty development, success-oriented, you know, thinking.
So, stewardship, I like that more than legacy, is about people, programs, and values. And again, just leading things stronger when your role changes. And maybe you go back into the faculty realm or, you know, eventually, you know, move on or retire.
Yeah, yeah.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Our audience here on FAMEcast is about half from Ohio State and then about half from other institutions. In what ways has Ohio State supported your career with where you are right now? And what are some things that institutions in general can do to support those who are late-middle to early-late career in academic medicine?
[Dr James Cray]
Yeah, you know, Ohio State’s been very supportive, but I think when we think about institutions in general, it’s a tough one because there’s such variability. I think if we globally think about institutions, they can help by recognizing that experienced faculty still need to grow. You know, they still need pathways for growth.
Terminal promotion, we use that term for full professor, terminal promotion. I don’t like that term, but it’s not the end. You know, sometimes the senior, you know, we think senior faculty are fully formed professionally, and that’s not true.
They may move into different leadership roles, mentorship, scholarship, institutional service. So, I think formal faculty development, leadership training, mentorship training are really critical at this stage. And centers like Fame, you know, here at Ohio State do a great job of this with the very catalog for different levels of learners.
And I’ve been fortunate enough to take advantage of a lot of those programs and also just rely on senior mentors, both here at Ohio State and elsewhere. I think another piece is that institutions should look at stewardship as academic work. And it may not show up as a percent on our FTEs, but it’s value-added work.
And mentoring faculty and building programs and strengthening teams and preparing others for promotions, they’re not extras. They’re part of institutional health and growth. So, you know, I think institutions can help by supporting role clarity and succession planning, to your point about legacy.
Experienced faculty carry many invisible, hidden responsibilities. Naming those responsibilities, aligning them with capacity, valuing them appropriately can really help senior faculty continue to grow and contribute without getting overloaded. Experienced faculty continue to grow when institutions treat stewardship as core academic work.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah, very important. And I think that the more the institutions sort of at the C-suite level sort of understand and have a pulse on the, you know, middle to late career faculty, they can learn a lot from, you know, what you need for support because a lot of the folks in those positions are not necessarily academic faculty and have different priorities. And so, the more that we understand each other and our own challenges with where we are in our career and what our role is within academic medicine can really be helpful for sure.
What are some parting words of advice that you would have? Maybe they’re going up to become a full professor or they’ve recently become one. So, they’re sort of in the early stages of the late career.
What final advice do you have for those of us who find ourselves there?
[Dr James Cray]
Yeah, you know, I think my advice would be to pause and reassess. I think that’s good advice for most things we encounter. Don’t assume the priorities that helped you succeed early in your career will automatically define your next stage.
Ask deliberate questions like what contributions do I want to make now? What work truly needs my experience? What should I continue?
What should I change? That hard question of what should I release? What should I, you know, potentially give up or hand off?
I’d encourage, you know, faculty at that stage to think about people and programs, not just about accomplishments. Most meaningful parts of this stage in general through my career were not only publication or grants or certainly titles. I’ve enjoyed mentoring students and working and mentoring with faculty, building educational programs, training students and colleagues in laboratory techniques that they’ve, you know, not applied to their scholarly work.
Just supporting colleagues, being part of the academic community, contributing to other larger professional communities outside of your institution, and just that idea to leave structures stronger than you find them. Maybe the last piece at this stage would be not viewing it as winding down. You still have time as a senior faculty member, sometimes a lot of time as a senior faculty member to contribute.
So, it’s a period to renew focus as well as what your contribution is going to be. Move intentionally from accomplishment to contribution and measure progress by people, programs and values.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Terrific. This has really been a fantastic conversation and enlightening. And of course, we appreciate you stopping by to share your perspective on the middle to late career.
We are going to have lots of resources in the show notes for folks. So, if you head over to famecast.org and look for the show notes for this episode, we’ll have those links for you. One is to the American Association of Medical Colleges, the AAMC.
They have a professional development toolkit and one in particular for medical educators that you may want to check out. Of course, the Ohio State University Office of Faculty Affairs and the Center for Faculty Advancement Mentoring and Engagement at Ohio State will have links to both of their landing pages. And then the Michael V.
Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning has some great resources. And then there’s a couple of terrific journal articles. Mentorship Training Curbs Academic Abuse from Nature and the Nature and Evolution of the Mentoring Relationship in Academic Health Centers from the Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings.
So, if you want to dig a little bit deeper into resources that really relate to the middle to late career in academic medicine, please do visit the show notes. So once again, Dr. James Cray, Professor and Vice Chair for Research with the Department of Biomedical Education and Anatomy at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Thank you so much for stopping by and chatting with us today.
[Dr James Cray]
Thank you so much, Mike, for having me.
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[Dr Mike Patrick]
We are back with just enough time to say thanks once again to all of you for taking time out of your day and making FAMEcast a part of it. We really do appreciate your support. Also, thanks again to our guest this week, Dr. James Cray, Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Biomedical Education and Anatomy at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Don’t forget, you can find FAMEcast wherever podcasts are found. There might be an easier way for you to subscribe and listen. We’re in the Apple Podcast app, also Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Audible, and most other podcast apps for iOS and Android.
Our landing site is famecast.org. You’ll find our entire archive of past programs there, along with show notes for each of the episodes, our terms of use agreement, and the handy contact page if you would like to suggest a future topic for the program. Or if you just want to say hi, I love hearing from listeners through the contact page.
Reviews are also helpful wherever you get your podcasts. We always appreciate when you share your thoughts about the show. And then don’t forget about those additional faculty development resources over at famecast.org.
Just click on the Resources tab up there at the top of the page, and you’ll find those modules, one set called Advancing Your Clinical Teaching, the other Faculty Development for Medical Educators. And again, group and institutional pricing is available for both sets of modules. Just contact fame at osumc.edu for more details. And again, you can find all that information and links to the modules by clicking the Resources tab up there at the top of famecast.org. Thanks again for stopping by. And until next time, this is Dr. Mike saying stay focused, stay balanced, and keep reaching for the stars. So long, everybody.
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