Your second year of internal medicine residency is a pivotal one because you will have more clinical autonomy and added team leadership and teaching responsibilities. This year can be very rewarding and one of tremendous personal growth.
- Become a positive role model for every member of your team.
- Make time to build and reflect on your leadership skills.
- Make time to build and reflect on your teaching skills.
- Continue to invest in sleep and wellness.
- Actively solicit constructive feedback from all members of the team.
- Review the IM milestones before the residency year starts and periodically throughout the year to monitor your progress and pick areas to work on- use them to set learning goals for the year.
- Set clear expectations for all members of the team and follow through on them.
- Give the students on your team meaningful roles.
- Provide confidential constructive feedback to team members.
- Don't be afraid to ask for help or admit that you don't know something.
- Actively engage consultants by asking well-crafted clinical questions.
- Carve out time to build your knowledge and comfort in ambulatory medicine, invest in your panel of patients and build relationships with them.
- Critically review your clinical decisions and actively learn from your mistakes.
- Make time to read around your patients and elective topics.
- Seek out one or two clinical and research mentors.
- Explore career opportunities.
- Start your required scholarly project and quality improvement work- select a faculty supervisor who also might be able to serve as a job reference and/or write a fellowship letter of recommendation.