The time I spent as a Class Officer in college helped ingrain a lot of lessons in professionalism. A lot of what I know carried into medical school, such as open and honest communication, and trying to understand the other perspectives of coworkers helps to maintain the utmost standards of professionalism. This is essential in working together as a team towards a common goal, also helping maintaining public trust in the medical community.

In medical school, I had a situation where a resident assigned me a task of getting a full consult done for a patient and then to email the information to him. He was very busy when I got done with my task and only communicated in short sentences, barely even glancing my way. I felt uncomfortable with breaking protocol because my note was not being placed as a student note but copied and pasted into the EMR with some edits as necessary. I was early in my third year and really didn’t want to cause any trouble so just listened and emailed it when he said there’s nothing left for you to do so you can go home.

The following day I was told that I should have tried to discuss the note with him because it was poor and missing things. Looking back it seems obvious I should have overcome my initial feelings and just stated how uncomfortable I was to sending healthcare information. This was a professionalism lapse on my part. I remember feeling I was uncomfortable with everything most of the beginning of third year and didn’t know if this one situation was worth speaking up. In hindsight,  I also should have waited to go through the information with him even though I was dismissed. Since this situation I’ve gained more experience in knowing when things felt wrong that I had to speak up for myself.
The evaluation for that rotation stated “he does not understand his role in medicine and lacks professional responsibility in patient care” This was devastating to me because I wanted to be reliable and saw that my actions led to my characterization as irresponsible.

Moving forward, I believe that honest and open communication will allow teamwork to progress most efficiently without suppressing any of the elements of the team that could contribute fully to its successes like offering language such as I am uncomfortable with this situation to effectively communicate better. Throughout the rest of my rotations after this situation, I  have developed more of an instinct on when to speak up when uncomfortable and have done so in multiple points later in medical school.

One of the more positive experiences on what I want to model what professionalism looked like happened during my sub-internship. A doctor had a patient beg for more medications that was on the Beer’s list, the doctor caved and the patient wound up having a negative outcome. The doctor felt bad and took full responsibility for their action. I feel that being a professional is to take responsibility for actions and to take steps to ensure the best care. Sometimes this means standing your ground when you know a course of action is preferable even if it feels uncomfortable. This experience shaped my understanding of how to take responsibility for everything within my scope. I’ve taken responsibility for my failures including being brought to the professionalism committee and I never tried to state that I didn’t do it or anything else. I just want to improve and not make the same mistakes over again.

My evaluations changed from early third year “initially shy and reserved and if you didn’t ask specific questions, you would never know that Mengzhi would have a comment that could be useful. He should to speak up more” to “Valuable member of the group, consistently contributed to the team and brought relevant information that sometimes increased patient management”