Time for a Cool Change: Getting off on the Right Foot in a New Job

Abstract

As a Thoracic Surgery resident approaching the end of your training, you may well have been in a single training program, perhaps mostly in a single hospital, for nearly a quarter of your life at the time of your graduation from residency. In a few months you will be going to work in other institutions in which you, obviously, have never worked. This transition will be challenging at best, and discombobulating at worst. You have been ‘swimming in the water’ of one place, likely taking a lot of that environment for granted, much as the young fish, described by David Foster Wallace in his book entitled This Is Water, did not comprehend the ‘environment’ in which they were living. [Wallace, 2009]