Extracts from Semi-structured Chats 3

Greetings, Reader.

It is another Friday and once again we get to feast on some uncommon sense from this blog. I do hope that you have had a good week and that you will have a restful weekend.

Those of you who have followed these reads for a reasonable period might remember the articles under the same title as the one above. If my memory serves me well (which it is), I wrote two of those articles and they were more of a lament on how we as a nation seem to be going in the negative direction when it comes to development despite the solutions to our problems being obvious to many. Those articles are among my personal best when it comes to Richie Online articles and once in a while I go back to take another peep. Tonight we are treated to the third of the series as we reflect on yet another chat.

About a month or so ago I attended the Annual General Meeting and Scientific Conference of the Society of Medical Doctors (SMD). To be honest, my attendance had nothing to do with the agenda of the conference as I had no intention whatsoever of contributing to the discussions at the conference (I somehow ended up contributing, anyway). I had gone because I had heard that the conference was going to take place at Sun and Sand Holiday Resort and I thought this was a good shot at spending my first night at the place (ndimafuna nane nditakagonako). On a more serious note I decided to head that side because I knew that the big people in the profession were going to be at the conference and that their presence provided a good opportunity for interaction. The other important reasons? Attending meant that I would miss work on Friday and that I would attend a cocktail party at Nkopola Lodge. Who doesn’t love a day off at work and an open bar, anyway? Of course there also was the possibility of reuniting with mates from the MBBS (Doctors) Class of 2016 ndi ziwanda zawo.

As per design, we arrived on Thursday, a day before the start of the conference. I found myself having dinner in the company of four young doctors from the my medical school class, a pack which was later joined by the young District Health Officer and District Medical Officer for Mangochi (Henz ndi Stallin). We had a long casual chat about a lot of things before Henry of them posed the question as to whether we (the five of us) were the only ones to attend the conference from the Class of 2016, the answer to which was a yes. Out of this chat came a long conversation from which I learnt a lot of things.

The very first important thing I learnt from this talk was the importance of finding oneself in places and with people that matter. As I mentioned previously, we had been asking one another about whether we were the only ones from the crop of young and recently graduated doctors. This question conceived a chat around the importance of networking in issues of career development. As professionals (or students) in various fields, we all aim for career advancement and more often than not, we tend to have people who have gone before us as pacesetters in the career. A once in a while chat with such guys comes in handy as you can tap into the wisdom of how they got where they are as you aim at crafting your own means of getting where you want to be, figuring out the do’s and don’ts from the stories of those who are experienced. In this regard, one ought to jump at every opportunity to interact with such experienced people in their fields in a bid to get some wisdom but there is a second catch to it. More often than not, it is these old gurus who have the best ideas as to where you can get the best when it comes to training opportunities and satisfying jobs. Back on that cold evening one of us once pointed out the importance of having a good network of people that matter. It is probably something that a lot of you (like me on that day) already know. What I had not given a serious thought was this thing about the difference between knowing people who matter and being known by people who matter. While most of us would focus on knowing people who matter, the more important thing tends to be being known, as such people can always have your back in your time of need; as opposed to when you just know them (in which case you only have a means of reaching out to them, with no guarantee that they will come to your aid).

Having talked of networking, we switched to something else important and this was about the choice of career paths.  As I earlier pointed out, this thing we were attending was the conference of the Society of Medical Doctors which meant that everyone who was in attendance was a doctor of some sort. The beauty of the conference, however, was that it brought together all sorts of doctors from different types of work environments. There were those who were in the academic sector, those who were in administrative posts and those who were in clinical practice. Of those who were in clinical practice, there were gynecologists, surgeons (those who cut people and patch them up again for a living), pediatricians, pathologists, physicians, orthopods and many other kinds of doctors along with undifferentiated doctors (those who are not yet specialists) like me. The lesson this intraprofessional diversity gave us was the importance of paying attention to the unlimited possibilities in our and any other career. Owing to our limited exposure and opportunities, most of us hardly think beyond the first degree and the civil service when it comes to education and work respectively. The discussion we had enlightened us to do otherwise and shed light on the importance of breaking the bonds of conventional career paths. Rather interestingly, the sentiments we shared on our chat were echoed at the conference when one of the most respectable doctors in the country rose up to point out that for the good of the health system, some of us needed to take off the white coats and drop the stethoscopes to explore other avenues like administration and management and economics. The rationale was simple. There is need for administrators and economists (among others) who have an understanding of what it is like to work in the hospital. I am pretty sure that the same would apply for the many if not all fields around. This speech also reminded me of how we had discussed the issue of the choice of a career paths with regard to the desired number of working days or hours, the returns, field saturation and job satisfaction as well as what it takes to get to one’s dream job. It was an interesting discussion after which we concluded that we all needed some serious reflection with the choices of our career paths before nose-diving into a lifetime of misery, dissatisfaction and financial trouble.

We left the restaurant for the bar at around midnight for our rooms having talked about our careers and other important things. I will be nothing short of a liar if I say the chat ended without some dirty jokes and the mention of a couple of girls and discussion of some college scandals, but to a greater extent we discussed things that mattered. The next day saw the start of a conference at which a lot of important things pertaining to your health were discussed. There was a lot of interaction and yours truly came back to Blantyre with a couple of important contacts having participated faithfully in the swallowship of the solids and liquids on offer at the conference. At the end of it all, it was a fruitful conference as it offered some lessons and reminders of how to build and use one’s network to the benefit of the career and pocket.

This was just a narrative, but I hope you have learnt a thing or two from this.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Namapopa Richie.