Thanks for writing this up and for doing the fellowship! Would you mind saying a bit more about how participants' career plans changed as a result of doing the fellowship (if you know) and/or how you plan to monitor their plans going forward?
Thank you for your interest in the outcomes of the fellowship! We have ethics approval to study the outcomes of the second and subsequent cohorts more thoroughly than the pilot cohorts. Those outcomes will hopefully be documented in a paper that our team has just started to work on. So, although this post was mainly about the set-up of the fellowship and shorter-term satisfaction of the fellows, we look forward to sharing much more detailed information about the outcomes of the subsequent fellowship cohorts.
We have a range of both quantitative (Likert scale) and qualitative questions in our pre- and post-fellowship surveys; we can provide a copy of these questions to you if you are interested. In the future, we are also considering releasing case studies outlining the career trajectories of past fellows.
We’re always open to more ideas for ways to improve how we’re monitoring and evaluating the fellowship, so if anyone would like to contribute ideas, please feel free to reach out to us here or via highimpactmedicine [at] gmail.com. Thank you!
And what we learned from piloting it with two groups in early 2023
The Hi-Med Career Fellowship is a five-week online programme designed to help medical students and doctors to explore, plan, and begin to act on impact-focused short- and medium-term career goals. In this post, we explain the programme’s rationale, goals, and structure. We also explain how we set up and ran our pilot programme and what we learned from it.
We expect that this post will be most useful for you if you are:
If you are interested in becoming involved in future cohorts of the fellowship, or if you are considering running a similar programme yourself, we warmly invite you to reach out to us at highimpactmedicine [at] gmail.com. We would love to hear more about you and your interests. And if you have feedback or thoughts about this post or our fellowship, we would be very happy to hear them. If you’d prefer to submit feedback anonymously, you can do so through this form.
High Impact Medicine (Hi-Med) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to inspiring and empowering medical students and doctors to make impact-driven decisions in their careers and giving. Since our inception in November 2021, we've conducted various programmes, interacting with >500 medical doctors and students from around the world. Our activities include fellowships (>320 participants), coaching calls (>210 calls), setting up mentoring relationships (>33 pairs), producing a podcast (15 episodes), writing academic publications (1 published and 1 under development), and setting up a university collaboration. We've grown our community to >760 newsletter subscribers and >460 Slack members. Please have a look at our Theory of Change and our 2023 Impact Survey Executive Summary to get a better understanding of our work.
There are millions of doctors and medical students in the world, and many of them are (unsurprisingly) already motivated to help others (Győrffy, Birkás, & Sándor, 2016; Xu, 2014; Yang et al., 2021). There is a very wide range of positively impactful careers for which medical students or doctors could be a good fit if they choose to pursue them, and they do not all require specialty training or clinical work. Through such careers, it is possible to work on some of the major problems in the world, from pandemic prevention to reducing antibiotic resistance. Many of these career options can span multiple disciplines, including academic research, policy formulation and implementation, operations, advising, and advocacy. With sufficient forward planning, some of these paths may allow individuals to do far more good than an average clinical career; furthermore, many of these paths can be pursued alongside, before, after, or even instead of specialty training.
Despite this, medical career planning is often assumed to mainly involve selecting a specialty and progressing through speciality training. It is also common for career advice to implicitly assume that doctors will either be working in a hospital or a clinic/practice (e.g., this is implicitly assumed here, here, and here).
We have collaborated with Probably Good to produce a career guide that aims to make medical students and doctors aware of the wide range of ways in which they can have a high-impact career (including, but without necessarily limiting themselves to, the “traditional” options available to them). But when it comes to actually putting these principles into practice, we have noticed that many of the people we talk to who aspire to help the world are hesitant to spend time on career planning. Career planning can be a complex and challenging topic, leaving many people unsure where to start. Finding time for career planning can be difficult, and it's often a challenge to locate helpful resources.
Additionally, figuring out one's career path alone can be confusing, and you might not know who to talk to, learn from, or check in with. (In her 2022 post, “80k would be happy to see more projects in the careers space,” Michelle Hutchinson acknowledged the value that can come from planning one’s career alongside others, such as in a workshop setting.)
In summary, medical students and doctors face multiple barriers to planning positively impactful careers. Our five-week-long Career Fellowship aims to remove each of the barriers we identified. Participants are medical students or physicians who apply from around the world. They typically find the application form via newsletter updates, social media posts, or personal referrals.
In one of the appendices, we provide specific examples of how each of the problems described above translated into the specific career planning needs and desires of our pilot participants, along with the ways in which our fellowship seeks to address each of these areas. We also provide a very brief summary of the fellowship characteristics and goals in the table below.
Fellowship characteristics & goals | |
The Career Fellowship… | The purpose of this was to… |
Provided a structured curriculum that:
| Provide structured guidance (which many students and doctors have previously reported to us that they’ve been lacking when they face the prospect of trying to plan their careers) |
| Required fellows to commit to a dedicated time each week (for five weeks) for group discussions and for doing self-directed exercises before each of these | Create a mechanism by which people could spend more time on career planning than they otherwise would have |
| Paired fellows up with another fellow who then acted as their “impact buddy” throughout (or, depending on the cohort, beyond) the fellowship | Provide accountability and social support |
| Formulation of a specific near-term plan (by each fellow) that represented the culmination of the previous weeks of reflections and planning | Provide a sense of confidence and direction for fellows as they plan their next steps |
Since the pilot programme only involved a limited number of participants, we cannot draw any strong conclusions regarding the outcomes for participants. However, the feedback we received was very helpful in qualitatively identifying the ways in which we were creating or failing to create the outcomes we hoped for.
It seems that the programme was well-received by the pilot cohorts: they appeared to enjoy it (Figure 3) and were likely to recommend it to others with similar interests to them (Figure 4). This provides some tentative evidence that the programme was engaging and that it aligned relatively well with participants’ interests.
Figure 3: Fellows’ responses to the question, “How did you like the fellowship overall?” Available response options ranged from “Very poor,” 1, to “Excellent,” 10.
Figure 4: Fellows’ responses to the question, “Would you recommend the programme to a friend with similar interests to you?” Available response options ranged from “Definitely not,” 0, to “Definitely,” 5.
We provide the context for the first six lessons in the Appendices. The last lesson is expanded upon in the next section.
In this section, I (Markus) reflect on my personal experience with leading the planning, execution and evaluation of Hi-Med’s Career Fellowship.
Personally, I’ve struggled with vague ideas about my future career and the cause area I would like to work in. I never expected it to turn out so helpful to have a clear and structured way to sort through all my areas of interest and potential next steps. That was one of the main things I learned through initiating the Career Fellowship.
Helping to set up and run the Career Fellowship also helped me to test my personal fit for entrepreneurial roles. On this subject, I would like to share some insights regarding how I initiated and ran this programme, and what I’ve learned from it. I think that many of the points listed below could be helpful to others setting up similar programmes.
What I found valuable and can recommend…
… before starting the project:
… during the project:
… evaluating the project:
Finally, I would like to say that I am very grateful for what I have learned. I was surrounded by extremely warm people who helped me, supported me whenever questions arose or when I was struggling, and pushed me to make the fellowship what it was. In running this fellowship, I tackled a problem I had faced for more than a year. Running the Career Fellowship created a feeling of agency that I never imagined before.
Therefore, I would like to thank the organisations and the people without whom this programme would not have been possible. I was particularly inspired by EA Germany’s Career Fellowship to run the programme. We were also able to set up the programme quickly due to being able to build on resources from the Global Challenges Project (for our Week 1 working document), Clearer Thinking (for our workshops in Weeks 3 and 4), the Effective Altruism Forum and 80,000 Hours (for our readings), and Charity Entrepreneurship (for our Weighted Factor Model Template).
Personally, I would like to thank Louisa Rasp (LinkedIn), who worked with me to create the fellowship, including setting its strategy, putting together the content and its M&E, was a crucial co-facilitator and manager for me, and further improved the programme as a manager for our summer cohort. She covered the weekly monitoring and evaluation of the programme and gave helpful feedback on this post.
I would also like to thank Marie Firgau, Erik Jentzen, and Akhil Bansal for their ongoing invaluable mentorship, contributions and feedback on every aspect of the fellowship as well as Marie’s personal involvement as a facilitator and speaker. We were furthermore grateful to have highly motivated fellows. I give a special thanks to Sarah Gebauer and her insights from a senior professional’s point of view.
I also thank Clare Diane Harris for her significant contributions to writing this post. Finally, we both thank everyone who reviewed and/or edited earlier drafts of this piece, including Marie Firgau, Louisa Rasp, Sarah Gebauer, Akhil Bansal, Calvin Smith (who also created the charts), Abinaya Arulalagan, and Rafael José Vieira.
Győrffy, Z., Birkás, E., & Sándor, I. (2016). Career motivation and burnout among medical students in Hungary-could altruism be a protection factor?. BMC medical education, 16, 1-8.
Xu, M. (2014). Medical students’ motivations for studying medicine: changes and relationship with altruistic attitudes, expectations, and experiences of learning at university (Doctoral dissertation), accessed from: <https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/handle/2440/91873>.
Yang, C., Jin, X., Yan, J., Zhang, J., Chen, C., Cheng, Y., You, J. & Deng, G. (2021). An investigation of the intention and reasons of senior high school students in China to choose medical school. BMC Medical Education, 21, 1-10.
Especially interested readers can find detailed information here.
Thank you for your interest in our work! If you would like more information about any aspect of our curriculum, please reach out to us at highimpactmedicine [at] gmail.com.
Thanks for sharing! You may be interested in running a longitudinal study with a control group when you reach a larger scale, like ACC did.
Thank you for sharing this! We would definitely love to do a controlled longitudinal study like this when we reach a larger scale! We're very happy to see that ACC did that.