A few days ago I was speaking with someone I had just met who asked me what I do. The conversation went something like this:

Her: And what do you do?
Me: I am in school.
Her: What kind of school?
Me: Graduate school.
Her: What are you studying?
Me: Medicine.
Her: Oh. . nursing school?
Me: No, medical school - I am studying to become a doctor.

This is a common conversation. I have it frequently and it made me think that, in a bit over a year, the conversation will be different:

Her: And what do you do?
Me: I am a resident. I am a doctor.

That's a big difference. . "becoming" versus "am."

This is going to happen to me very soon. In one day, I will walk up to the podium and receive a diploma and suddenly "I am becoming a doctor" will change into "I am a doctor." And yet it won't. Because getting the MD after my name won't make me any more skilled, competent, secure in my knowledge, or successful at healing patients. It's experience that does that (or so I am told). And skilled, competent, secure, and successful aren't points that you reach like mountain peaks. Instead they are paths that you travel on. Through experience you become more skilled, competent, secure, and successful.

Becoming. It may seem like a silly, or even obvious point to harp on, but I think it's an important one. Except in a few fields (the trades being some of them), in our modern-day society, we seem to have a binary approach to professions and careers. What I mean by this is that you aren't something, then you go to school to learn about becoming something, and then you get a degree and you are something. In many areas, we have lost the idea of apprenticeship. Without a doubt, school (especially the long road to the Ph.d. or the shorter road to becoming a teacher or therapist) serves as a sort of apprenticeship, but it seems like we have lost a structure for learning on the job. Everyone says that the most important learning occurs when you actually do something, so why don't we have any formalized structure for that?

Once you get your teaching degree and land a job, you are a teacher who is given as much responsibility and evaluated with the same criteria as a teacher who has been teaching for 30 years. No one expects you to be as successful as the teacher with more experience, but there is no allowance for that built into the system (except perhaps through pay). We suffer from the absence of mentorship. Pretty much everyone would benefit from a mentor, especially one who can evaluate your skills and say, yeah. . I think you are ready to try this.

One of the things that is often criticized in medicine is it's hierarchical nature. I am not 100% convinced that it is a bad thing. Doctors with more experience have seniority and are treated as such. Younger doctors should be able to speak up (and they are with more volume with the changing times), but in a field like medicine, experience should carry significant weight. It's a field where hierarchy appropriately refuses to die. It's a field that that seems to acknowledge that one is eternally becoming a doctor.