Show Notes

Description

Dr Abby Lott Limbach visits the studio as we consider narratives in the promotion dossier. Approaching them as storytellers allows us to highlight contributions and impact while connecting with reviewers in a meaningful way. We hope you can join us!

Topics

Promotion and Tenure
Writing Narratives
Promotion Dossier

Guest

Dr Abberly Lott Limbach
Associate Professor of Pathology
The Ohio State University College of Medicine

Links

Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement
Promotion and Tenure at OSUCOM
Expectations & Requirements for Promotion at OSUCOM
Promotion Review Process at OSUCOM
Appointment, Promotion, and Tenure Toolbox at OSUCOM
Office of Academic Affairs: Appointments, Reappointments, Promotion and Tenure
Preparing for Promotion: Intentional Planning – FAMEcast 004
Preparing for Promotion: The P&T Process – FAMEcast 005

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.

Hello everyone and welcome once again to 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. It’s episode six and we’re calling this one Preparing for Promotion Tips for Writing Narratives. I want to welcome all of you to the program.

So, we are embarking on our third and final episode of our series on preparing for promotion. You’ll recall that we covered intentional planning on FAMEcast episode four and the P and T process in episode five. Both of those are available at famecast.org and of course wherever you get your podcasts. We’re wrapping up today with tips for writing narratives in the promotion dossier. A crafting a compelling summary of your career journey is really about more than listing accomplishments. It’s about telling your academic story with clarity and purpose.

And in this episode, we’re going to explore the narratives that bring your academic career story to life from biographical reflections to descriptions of your teaching, research and service activities, descriptions that highlight reputation and impact. We’ll explore how to structure your narratives, highlight your contributions and connect with reviewers in a meaningful way. And whether you’re just starting your dossier or refining the final draft, we hope today’s conversation will help you write with confidence and authenticity.

Of course, in our usual FAMEcast fashion, we have a terrific guest joining us in the studio, Dr. Abby Lott Limbach. She is an associate professor of pathology at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that the information presented in every episode of FAMEcast 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. Abby Lott Limbach settled into the studio, and then we will be back with tips for writing narratives in your promotion dossier. It’s coming up right after this. Dr. Abby Lott Limbach is a pathologist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and an associate professor of pathology at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. She has a passion for supporting her colleagues through the promotion and tenure process, and in particular providing tips for writing narratives in the promotion dossier.

That is what she is here to talk about, tips for writing narratives. But before we dive into the final installment of our Preparing for Promotion series, let’s offer a warm FAMEcast welcome to our guest, Dr. Abby Lott Limbach. Thank you so much for visiting the studio today.

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to talk about this today.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yes, and we are excited to have you here. Why don’t we start with the basics? What narratives are typically required in an academic promotion dossier?

I know it’s going to be a little different from one institution to another, but at least here at Ohio State, and I feel like that format is probably very similar to other places as well.

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Yeah, absolutely. And I will say, I think it is very similar across institutions, at least for the external letters I’ve written for other people at other institutions, they kind of tend to cover the same thing. So, there are really four narratives that you have to think about writing.

The first one is your biographical narrative, which is really kind of your highlight reel, pulls everything in your dossier together really, really important. The other three are related to kind of the pillars of the promotion process. So, when you think about promotion, you’re thinking about teaching, research, and service.

And so those are the other three narratives you’re going to write. There’s a narrative on teaching. Who do you teach?

What do you teach? Research? What’s your research portfolio like in service?

And those three narratives really are kind of the more in-depth focus. Your biographical narrative, as I said, is your highlight reel. And then you go deep into everything else in those other three narratives.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Why are these narratives such a critical part of the dossier? You know, we are spending an entire episode on just this, you know, out of these three episodes where, you know, a third of the content is on the narratives. Why are these so important?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
So, these are really where you get a chance to tell a story. So, if you think about is you’re putting your dossier together, it’s full of all sorts of facts and figures and numbers, and you’ve published X number of papers and you’ve mentored X number of students and they’ve done stuff. And most people don’t hang on to facts and figures really well.

Like if you think about if somebody tells you, oh, you know, we, we made 10 widgets for five different companies and blah, blah, blah. That doesn’t stick in your brain, but stories create sticky memories for those facts and data. So, if I tell you a story that, you know, I started this company when I was 10 years old and we started making widgets and now we’re making widgets for this friend I met at a conference and this friend that I know from school and blah, blah, blah.

Suddenly now you’re going to remember I’m making 10 widgets for five different companies, and you’ll even remember what those companies are. And otherwise maybe you wouldn’t have remembered that. And so, these are really where you can kind of pull together a somewhat disparate data points to create a narrative arc that people are going to remember.

This is, oh, I remember Abby Lott Limbach. She’s the one who did this, that, or the other thing. It’s also where you can give context and impact to the data in your narrative.

Because if I told you I’m speaking at the ICC, what do you, you don’t know, you don’t even know what that means. Like, what do you care? But if I told you I’m speaking at the International Congress of Cytology, which is the largest gathering of cytologists across the world and based on my expertise and had a neck cytology, I’m asked to speak on this topic.

Suddenly you understand why that statement, I’m speaking at the ICC really matters. And so, this is also your chance to give context, and impact is to what you do, which may not otherwise be obvious to other people.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. And you may have a long list of things under each of those, you know, that teaching research and service. And so if you, you know, if you really want to pull out the things that are the most important and I love that you said it was a highlight reel and to some respect, the each of those subsequent narratives are sort of highlight reels also for, you know, for teaching and then for research or scholarly activity and then for service.

So, we, and the storytelling part of it really makes sense. Now there are a couple of ways to tell a story, one being a more formal report, which on the surface would seem like that’s more appropriate for a promotion dossier, but it could also be told like as a more personal, informal story. Is there a place for that as well or should these always be sort of more formal reports?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
No, I agree. So, I’m going to say you can pull from both. What you really want to think about is how does this element I want to talk about impact my, my quest, which is to, to get promoted.

And if I, you know, pulled in the story of, you know, my, my daughter plays travel ice hockey, that really doesn’t have much to do with getting me promoted. Like that, I can’t tie that in anywhere. But if I pulled in a story about, you know, a family member say I do research in breast cancer and a family member dear to me passed away from breast cancer and they had this mutation.

And so now I work on this mutation. Suddenly now you’ve created context for that. So, I think you can do both.

I think you can, if, if it’s not particularly relevant, like ice hockey, then don’t mention it. But if it’s relevant, sure. Be a human, you know, we’re all human.

Let’s, let’s be a human. I look at it kind of from the perspective, if you’re sitting at the Thanksgiving table and you’re sitting next to an uncle you haven’t seen in years and they sit down next to you and they’re like, so what do you do? And you’re like, I’m a physician.

Okay. But what do you do? You know, I’m a pathologist.

Well, how do I explain to somebody, what does it mean to be a pathologist? What does it mean to be a head and neck pathologist? What, you know, maybe if you do research, what does it mean to be a running a lab and what does that all entail?

And that’s really your chance to kind of give things context. So, I look at it from the perspective of if you can tell a story, however you tell that story is great. As long as it goes back to what’s your ultimate goal promotion and how does that tie into your promotion?

Yeah.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. So, if you’re a sports medicine doc or an orthopedic surgeon, you may be able to somehow get it that your, that your daughter does travel ice hockey, especially if she’s had an injury or something. Right.

You really want it to be relative to your, to your career. Now you mentioned the narrative as kind of a superhero origin story. Can you break that down for us?

What do you mean by the narratives are superhero stories?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Yeah, absolutely. So, you’re kind of thinking about how this goes back to my previous points. If you’re thinking about how, say, I always think of Superman, that’s kind of the one I think of or not Superman, sorry, Spider-Man.

And if you think about Spider-Man, Spider-Man got bit by a radioactive spider and then had these changes. We won’t think about it too hard being physicians about how this happened, but now he can shoot webs out of his wrist, and he has different strength and blah, blah, blah. So, he had that one point in time where something, something, you know, changed for him.

So, I like to think of, if I did this as an audience interactive activity, when I did a fame talk about writing your narrative, because I really wanted people to start thinking about how have you gotten to where you are? And maybe not all of it’s relevant to your promotion story, but I think that’s also very relevant to how you’re going to start to put everything you’ve done into context. So, I use myself as an example.

I went to medical school because I wanted to be a forensic pathologist. That was what I was going to do. And I got into residency and went, whoa, I had not really paid much attention during my pathology electives to academic pathology.

This is super cool. Like you get to teach, you get to teach high school students, medical students, other residents, you know, now later in my career colleagues, I was like, this is super cool. And I had some really fabulous teachers who helped me kind of work on my education.

And I actually changed my mind during residency about my subspecialty and decided, nope, I’m not going to be a forensic pathologist. I’m going to be an academic pathologist. And my road was set.

But thinking about that helps kind of explain why I do what I do, you know, how much I enjoy teaching my residents, how much I enjoy, you know, teaching my colleagues. And so that was really kind of my, my goal with that was to get people thinking about why do you do what you do and how can that inform, you know, you writing your narrative.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Now, when you are writing the narrative, we think about it’s a story, but there also should be some structure to it. And I think back, you know, like to my English classes and I was actually an English minor. And so, you know, writing a good essay, so to speak, you know, you have an introduction, you have three supports and then you have some supports of your supports and then you wrap it all up with a conclusion.

Should there be some structure to the narrative as you tell your story?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Yes, there, there really, there really should be. And it’s funny that you say that because like my daughter is right now learning to write a five-paragraph essay. And so, I was putting together this talk for fame while she’s learning to write a five-paragraph essay.

And I was like, huh, there’s a lot of overlap here. Like you’re really calling back to that. Who knew my English teacher was right.

I actually use that later. So, you really want to start your, particularly your biographical narrative with an introduction. Who are you?

What are you looking for? Where, orient me in space and time to who you are and where you are because I don’t, I don’t know you. So, as I’m reading it, tell me who you are.

So that’s your introduction. Then you want to focus on, again, your highlight reel, your three pillars of promotion. So, your research, your teaching, your service, the order you talk about those and how much you talk about those.

Depends on your tracker pathway. So, I’m a on the clinician educator pathway. That means once I introduced myself, I’m going to leap into what have I been doing education wise.

Then I’ll touch on research. I’ll touch on my service, and I move on. Well, say I was on, you know, the tenure track and I do research, I run a lab.

So, you’re going to introduce yourself, tell us what you do. And then you’re going to focus on your research. What does that mean for your research?

And then you’ll touch on your teaching. You’ll touch on your service because you got to include those. And the very last thing is you want to tie it all together at the end.

What’s your conclusion? How have you met the criteria for promotion? Where do you think you’re going?

You know, what’s your trajectory and what does all this mean? And, and so really it, it is essentially a five-paragraph essay in, in the broadest, most general sense.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yes. Yes. And, and again, each of those big pair, you got your introduction, you’re going to talk about your research, your scholarly activity, your teaching service, all of those things, research and scholarly activity are together, but just like a normal essay that we learned to write in high school even.

So now I have seen dossiers that the biographical narrative is all paragraphs. And I’ve also seen where some folks have put sort of bullet points as they kind of introduce each of those three. So rather than traditional paragraphs, it’s more bullet points is there.

And I’ve seen folks who have been promoted with both of those types of, of narratives written is one preferable over another. And I imagine that’s also kind of dependent on the reviewer, right? Like some reviewers might like to sit down and read a story and others might want to see those bullet points.

So how do you know what the best way to go is?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
I think, I think it’s entirely personal. I, I tend to be somebody who likes to read narrative and I, I, when I teach my residents, I present them. There are two good textbooks in head and neck pathology.

One is all narrative. It’s paragraphs. You read the paragraph.

The other is outlining form. And I give them the choice. I’m like, I don’t care which one you read.

They’re both going to give you plenty of information, but it’s just what style do you prefer? Do you prefer to look at an outline and bullets or do you prefer a narrative in a story? And so, I think when it comes to how you’re going to structure your narratives, I think as long as you can provide the context and the impact for what you’ve done, you can do it however you want.

And, and it’s because you have to remember, I think the other important thing to remember about, especially the biographical narrative is that is how your external letter writers are going to write your letter. They’re going to pull information right from that biographical narrative. And so, however you can make that easiest for them to do, absolutely go for it.

I don’t think there’s, I think there’s a personal preference on my end, but I think that’s just my own biases. But if you can get in all the information, you need with context and impact, go for it. However, that works best for you.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
And some, for some folks writing narratives may just come very naturally, you know, maybe they’re just natural storytellers. They like to write, you know, it’s a passion for them, but there are folks who really struggle at writing and the default may even be, I’m going to write like I would write a journal article. And this is quite different than, you know, than a peer reviewed paper.

So, do you have any tips for folks who might be struggling to write in a narrative style?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the first thing to do is take a deep breath and okay, you can do this because remember a lot of people get promoted and you, you can do this. I think the next thing to do is pull together your AP&T doc, your document and your CV.

And hopefully you’ve been keeping your CV up to date as you, you’ve gone along because otherwise you’re gonna have to go back and do that first before you can move on to the next step. Read your, so what I did when I did this was, I read my AP&T document, which I will put a plug in for is available at the office of academic affairs website for the university. You click on the college of medicine, you find your department, that’s where your most up to date document is.

Read that first. Okay, now you know what criteria you’re trying to highlight. Look at your CV and can you pull specific things out of your CV?

If you’re an outline person, start with an outline, you know, start with introduction. Here are my three bullet points. Here’s what I do.

Here’s where I am. Here’s what I’m looking for. Then, you know, your next bullet point, what to you was the most important thing within say your research portfolio.

Pull out those things. Okay. Education.

What do I want people to know about me? Educational. I pull those out.

And once you kind of have that outline, it gets a little easier to then write in narrative form. Okay, I published X number of journals in, you know, published X number of articles in these journals with really high impact factor for my field. And this allowed me to get this grant.

And so suddenly you can start to see the narrative emerge. I also recommend if you’re a verbal person, like maybe you like to talk to people, that’s how you process things. Try voice recognition.

Like pretend you’re talking to that uncle at the dinner table or your best friend and just start talking, have, you know, your CV in front of you and just start talking with voice recognition, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And suddenly now you’ve got your narrative. So, there are a lot of different ways to go about it.

And I think it really just depends on what dial do you work with best.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
But yeah, this is a point that would not even have come up in this podcast two or three years ago. And that is the use of AI to help write these things. Is that something you’ve come across?

Do you recommend it? Do you say stay away from it? Does it really just depend?

What are your thoughts on using AI for helping you with your narratives?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
So, my biggest concern about using AI is that if I dump my CV into say chat GTP, it’s no longer under my control. And, and admittedly, yes, my CV is out there and like, you know, you Google me, I have a web, you know, I have a page on the department website. So, like, it’s no mystery who I am, but that, not knowing what where that information goes makes me a little nervous saying that if you’re comfortable with that, go ahead and try dumping it into GTP.

I honestly have never tried dumping that into AI and asking it to write for me. Now that you say that, now I’m going to go home and I’m going to try that. Yeah.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Well, and it may be then, cause that might be like too much, like, okay, it’s not going to be able to tell what the highlights are, but maybe if you write an outline first where you’ve handpicked what your highlights are and maybe feed that in, you know, then maybe you’re going to get something that back that is more a proper narrative that really highlights what you do. But you do have to be careful because sometimes, you know, AI has a tendency to maybe not speak in your voice and then you, but that’s at least a starting point and then you can edit it to get it to your voice.

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
No, I agree. And I think, I think if you’re really struggling, I think that’s a great option. Just be prepared.

You may have to do more editing than, than you really like. Cause I agree. That’s something I’ve noticed using chat GTP for other things is it doesn’t come out in the voice.

I necessarily want it to, but if you’re struggling and you aren’t sure where to go, maybe you don’t write a lot. Maybe it’s just not your thing. I’d say try it.

I don’t know that I do it without editing and without showing it to people to edit, but like, I don’t see why not.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
And you can refine those prompts. So, like if it comes back, you can say make it less formal and if it’s campy, you know, this is not good. Let’s go, let’s, let’s ramp up the formality a little bit, but you know, don’t go into the other ditch.

So, you can refine those and then that might get you closer to something that you could edit yourself. But again, it’s not necessary if you feel comfortable writing. I mean, and it may be something that’s enjoyable for you to do.

Maybe.

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
I think it totally depends. But yeah, I, I think that’s an absolutely a great option, especially as we start seeing AI creeping into other areas of our lives. It, if, yeah, I don’t see why not just be prepared to do some editing.

And I also caution people to keep an eye out for hallucinations. You know, does it invent a publication for you that you haven’t actually done? Cause that would be a huge red flag on your CV.

If you’re saying, oh, I published this nature article. And then they look at your, your publication list and there’s nothing in nature and somebody is going to go, wait a minute, this. So, I would, I would, I think it’s definitely usable and I wouldn’t knock anybody for using it, but I would say be very careful and do a lot of editing and just make sure there aren’t any hallucinations.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Cause we are responsible for what we put out there writing wise, regardless of the tools that we use to help us. And so that actually would be an academic problem.

Yeah. I mean, if you put something in your narrative that you didn’t actually do, that could be taken very poorly. And so, we, we definitely want to, you know, really look through it and make sure everything is accurate.

And of course you’re going to, hopefully you do that with anything that you use with AI, but it’s particularly important here. We spent a lot of time talking about the biographical narrative, which like you said, that highlight reel really pulls, you know, your whole career journey into the most important pieces. And you tell your story as we think about the three other narratives that are important.

So, the, the teaching research and scholarly activity and service, you know, for many of us, we aren’t exactly balanced in those three areas. So, I mean, you may be a primarily a researcher, you may be primarily a teacher, you may be, you know, an administrator and most of your stuff is more service. How do you approach the narrative for these, particularly if that that area is not your strong suit?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Absolutely. I think, I think it leads to a lot of anxiety in people working on their dossiers. Like you, you know, we’re all somewhat high achievers because we went to medical school and like, we all feel like, oh, we should do everything really well.

And, you know, maybe you have a little bit of imposter syndrome about one of those areas. Like, I don’t, that’s not, that’s not my thing. I don’t do that.

Right? What you’ve done, you know, I guarantee you’ve done something in teaching. I guarantee you’ve done something in research.

I guarantee you’ve done something in service and depending, at least in the clinical pathway or in the clinical track on your pathway, it it’s not that it they’re important, but it’s understood that maybe you won’t have, you know, if you’re like me on the clinician educator pathway, grant funding is not an expectation of that pathway. And so just write about what you, what you’ve done, however, you’ve done that, whatever you’ve done, do that. And maybe that narrative isn’t as long or as involved.

So, like on my dossier, my teaching narrative is like, I used all the words, all the words, but then my, my research narrative, I actually used it to tie back to my teaching because the research I do is a way for me to mentor my residents. And so that’s what I talked about. I said, look, I, you know, have done, you know, the minimum number of papers, whatever, but this is how I mentor my rent.

And so, I tied that back into my teaching, you know, my service, I tied it back into, to education. The committees I serve on are education and mentoring focus committees. So that’s how I kind of tied it back into this.

So, say you’re a researcher who doesn’t have, say you’re on the, you know, tenure track, research track, and you don’t do a lot of teaching. Well, I guarantee you have people in your lab, you mentor, you know, you had to teach somebody how to use that specific piece of equipment. So, talk about that.

Talk about in your everyday interactions, how do you help your lab members do things? How do you educate, you know, for service? What, what have you done for the university?

I guarantee there are everybody in that, you know, who’s listening has sat on some sort of committee for something, you know, pull that in there, use that. As, as I’ve heard a number of people say, everything counts. And so maybe it’s not as robust of a narrative as another part of your dossier.

You, I guarantee you’ve done something, talk about it. And if you can tie it back into what your primary focus is.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
And I think that’s where the document really comes in handy and probably ought to be looked at early, early, early in this process, or really even early in your career. Because if you know what’s expected to be promoted and being promoted as your goal, then you should start to think about how can I, like my everyday lab life, how can I pull in teaching? And then that’s actually going to make you a better educator as you journey through your career.

So, it’s not really like doing it for the test. It’s really doing it because we want to be teachers and we want to be involved in research, whether that’s conducting the research or helping write papers or conceptualize projects or dissemination. You know, for my own promotion to associate professor, a big part of my research and scholarly activity was dissemination, you know, getting research results out into the public, out to colleagues.

So, all of that, you know, counts as you say. And you know, for me, teaching is way stronger than the research part, but we can always find ways that we are involved in our academic life. And if you’re going up for promotion, you have to have done some things in all of these, or you’re not going to meet the criteria to go up for promotion.

Right?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Right. I agree with you a hundred percent. And I really want to echo the read your APT documents early and often.

When I was going up for associate professor, I actually printed them out and like taped them to the wall above my computer. And like he’d highlighted, what do I think is important? So, I knew what I was doing.

And it is, like you said, it helped focus you on will this count for P and T? How might I, how might I document that? How might I demonstrate impact?

And I think knowing that before you decide like, oh, I’ve been here six years, I should probably apply for promotion. And that’s the first time you read your promotion document. That’s a problem.

What’s some of the best advice I got before I started my very first job 10 years ago was from a senior faculty who said, when you walk in the door day one, read that promotion document. He also told me to read the faculty handbook, but that doesn’t matter for this conversation. And, and so I did, and I read the promotion document, and I went, oh, I don’t really need grant funding on the scholarship pathway.

Rock on. Like writing grants is not my thing. And, and I get it for other people.

It is. And I give them mad props for that. And, but like knowing that relief, some anxiety for me of like, what should I be doing with my time?

So, I, if you haven’t read them yet, read them. If you don’t know where to find them, find either a senior person in your department, or you should have someone in your department that handles promotions, ask them where they are and read them, highlight them, cut them out, tape them to your wall. So, you know what you’re, what you’re looking for.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. And we will put a link in the show notes to the website where you can find all of those, all of those documents with the office of academic affairs, I believe.

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Yep. Office of academic affairs.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. And again, there’ll be a link in the show notes. So, folks go over to famecast.org.

This is episode six and you’ll be able to find those pretty easily there. One of the things in my own promotion pathway requirements is a peer teaching evaluation for each year. And so that’s something, you know, it’s a little difficult now with podcasting, it’s a little easier because I can go back and, you know, pick a podcast from each year and have someone listen.

But if your teaching is didactic, you know, classroom, more, you know, traditional instruction, that may be difficult to get a peer review after the fact. And so that’s something too, to be thinking about if that’s a part of your promotion pathway.

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
I agree. And I think that that’s an important point to, to let people know is that the med center, at least does require you to have one peer evaluation a year for people who are giving courses at national meetings or something that it’s easier to obtain that. Or even if you are giving a course at OSU, say you teach something in the fame series, you’ll get evaluations from that.

Say you teach something at a departmental retreat, you get evaluations from that. How some of my colleagues have handled that is they have asked me to come sit in on a lecture they’re giving the residents. And, you know, they said, hey, I’m giving a lecture on Thursday.

I need a peer eval. Can you come sit in briefly on that? Sure.

Not a problem. I can, I can sit in on that and do a peer eval. So, there are, there are a number of different ways, but I think knowing that ahead of time, it makes it a lot easier than realizing it six years in.

And you’re like, oh my God, what am I doing?

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. So, do you recommend peer evaluation of your narratives?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Yes. Yes, I do. The more people you can show those narratives to the better.

Start with like a trusted mentor who knows, who knows you, who knows what you do and who can read it with an eye towards, okay, have you highlighted everything you should, if you’ve been given context and impact, I will tell you, I, my narratives, my husband read, my husband’s a historian here at OSU. So yes, he’s gone through, he, you know, was with me through medical school and residency. So, he has a fairly good idea what I do, but he’s not a physician.

And so that was helpful to have him read that. And then I also had my mom read them, which sounds kind of ridiculous, but she’s a social worker. She has no idea like kind of what I do without knowing context and stuff.

And so, she was able to read that and then asked me questions and she had actually some pretty good insightful questions about, I don’t understand this. And I went back and read it, and I was like, oh, I didn’t really explain that. Well.

So, the more people that can read it, give it to a trusted friend, give it to a trusted relative, have your neighbor read it. I don’t know, whoever, whoever you can sit down long enough to read this thing, because this is how you are telling people who don’t know you what you do. And so, for me as a pathologist, what I, most people think I sit in a dark room in the basement and do autopsies all day.

I haven’t done an autopsy in 12 years and I obviously, you can see me in the studio, but I’m not sitting in a dark basement. And so how do I convey to people who that’s their image of a pathologist, what I actually spend my day doing. So, the more people that read that for you, the better off you are.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
And even though the audience is fellow physicians on promotion and tenure committees, you know, medicine is so in buckets, right? And so, we know a lot about what’s in our bucket, but we don’t know much about other people’s bucket very much at all. And so, it’s unlikely.

In fact, the final reviewers of our dossier on the P and T committee at the college level can’t be in our department. So, I mean, it really is other buckets looking in on us.

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Yeah, very much so. And so, the more you can help them understand what you do, the better off you are. So, like every time you put something into a narrative, regardless of the narrative, whether it’s your teaching narrative, your biographical narrative, your research narrative, you want to be able to give it context.

What does this mean? Always spell out your acronyms. Please, please spell out your acronyms.

Give it context. What does this mean? And then give it impact.

What change occurred as a result of this? And I think if you can do that for pretty much everything you put in there, I think you’re going a long way towards that. Cause yeah, like you said, at the college level, it can’t be anyone in your department that’s reading that.

When it goes to the university level, you have people like my husband who are historians who, you know, they have a lot of historical perspective, but they don’t know what you do every day as a physician. They don’t know what it means to, you know, institute a QI program in your department that decreases central line infections. You know, there there’s a lot they don’t know.

And so, the more you can kind of explain and give context and impact the better off you are. Yeah.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
As we, as we wrap up, what final advice do you have for faculty who are writing their narratives?

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Absolutely. So, the first one is read your APT document, read it, read it, read it. If I say nothing else and you take away nothing else and you haven’t read it yet, go find it and read it or find someone who knows where it is and read it.

Next is always think about context and impact. So, if you are going to talk about something in a narrative, you have to be able to give it contact and you have to be able to give it impact. And the last thing that we just briefly touched on is you need to show your narrative to other people.

You can’t just write it and walk away. You need to show it to other people. I will, to illustrate that point, I’m also the associate program director for our residency.

And so, I help screen applications for, for residency interviews. And I can almost always tell when somebody has shown their personal statement to other people versus just writing it and dumping it into, into, into Aris because there’s a focus and there’s a kind of arc to it that makes a lot more sense. And you can see that in narratives as well.

I can tell no one else has read this because I don’t understand what you’re saying. I don’t know what this means. And so, it really is important to, to show your narrative to other people.

So those are my three things. Read your APT document, context and impact and show your narratives.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Very, very important. Well, we really appreciate you taking time to talk to us and to educate us on writing our narratives.

So hopefully they’re a little easier to do in the future. We’re thinking about them as we go along. And you know, again, we, we think about the context of what we’re doing, the impact that it’s having and explaining everything we do kind of in plain language, since the end reviewers are not going to be experts in our, in our particular field.

You mentioned, you know, not using acronyms and spelling it out. Is it okay to spell things out and then put the acronym in parentheses? And then from that point forward, use the, because you know, if I write American Academy of Pediatrics out every time I want to say AAP, like that gets a little, you know, verbose.

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Oh, absolutely. You just, you have to spell it out at least once. I would also recommend just for the sanity of the reader of your dossier, spell it out every time you change a section.

You know, I know writing out the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology five times is kind of annoying, but just for the sanity of your reader. But yeah, absolutely. If you spelled it out somewhere in your document once before, by all means use the abbreviation later.

[Dr Mike Patrick]
All right. Well, thank you again so much folks. Be sure to check out the show notes again.

We’re going to have a lot of resources there for you over at famecast.org. Again, this is episode six. We will have links to the promotion and tenure process at the OSU College of Medicine.

They actually have a website with the expectations and requirements for promotion, the promotion review process, the APT toolbox at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. We’ll put a link to that in there as well. And of course, the office of academic affairs, which we had talked about all of those links.

We’ll also have links to our first two episodes in this series. The first one was episode four, preparing for promotion, intentional planning. And the second one was episode five and that one was on the P and T process.

And then this episode six, this is our third in our series on writing your narratives. So, they kind of all go hand in hand. Hopefully you can take a listen to those other two if you haven’t already done so.

Once again, Dr. Abby Lott Limbach, associate professor of pathology at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Thank you so much for stopping by today.

[Dr Abby Lott Limbach]
Thank you so much. This was so enjoyable.

[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. Really do appreciate that. Also, thanks again to our guests this week, Dr. Abby Lott Limbach, associate professor of pathology with the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Don’t forget, you can find FAMEcast wherever you get your podcasts. We are in the Apple podcast app, 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 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, reviews are helpful wherever you get your podcasts, especially for a new podcast like this. And we always appreciate when you share your thoughts about the show.

We’re not only here for faculty members, you know, our target audience is faculty members at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. However, we also, a lot of the topics we talk about are very supportive of faculty in any of the health professions at Ohio State. And then also beyond Ohio State, a lot of this stuff really does transfer over to other institutions as well.

You know, the specifics of things may be a little bit different, but I think the big topics are the same. And so please do share this podcast with your colleagues, even if they are at an institution that is not Ohio State. We also have some additional resources that you can find on our website.

If you head over to famecast.org, click on the resources tab at the top of the page, a couple of links to faculty development modules on a thing called Scarlet Canvas. One group of modules is on advancing your clinical teaching. And another one is faculty development for medical educators or FD4ME.

And you’ll find those again, both at the famecast.org website. Again, click on the resources tab and you’ll find them there. So, scores of learning modules on Scarlet Canvas with those two links.

So be sure to follow those. And again, they do specifically target academic medical faculty, a couple of other podcasts that I host. If you are a pediatric provider, I host PediaCast CME.

It is a podcast for pediatric professionals, and we do offer free continuing medical education credit for those who listen. Nationwide Children’s is jointly accredited by many professional organizations. So those podcasts are also great, not only for physicians, but also nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, social workers, and dentists.

Shows and details are available at the landing site for that program, pediacastcme.org. You can also listen wherever podcasts are found. Simply search for PediaCast CME.

We also have a podcast for parents. And if you’re not a pediatric professional, but you have young kids at home and pediatrics is not your bucket, that may be a helpful program for you. And also, lots of pediatricians and other medical professionals also tune in.

We do cover pediatric news. We answer listener questions and interview pediatric and parenting experts. Shows are available at the landing site for that program, pediacast.org.

Also available wherever podcasts are found. Simply search for PediaCast. 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.