IT IS A LONG WAY TO BECOME A CARDIOTHORACIC SURGEON

During the week of October 31 to November 6, some of the main objectives that were learned in the Independent Study and Mentorship class was conducting the third informational interview, researching the cardiothoracic field of study more at length, and continuing to make phone calls to potential mentors for brief informational interviews. The first accomplishment that was achieved this week was successfully conducting the third informational interview with Dr. Richard Bowman. The interview was held wish Dr. Richard Bowman, who is a cardiothoracic surgeon at The Surgical Center in Plano. He provided me with a vast amount of knowledge about cardiothoracic surgery, starting with his initial plan for college, which wasn't to pursue a specialty like cardiothoracic surgery at all. During his schooling years, Dr. Bowman took off two years in college and went to serve in the Vietnam war, which sparked his motivation to become a doctor. While schooling, he realized that vascular surgery spoke to him and ignited a passion, and that is when he started to study and later on specialized in cardiothoracic surgery. This interview was an accomplishment because Dr. Bowman has been in practice for over 30 years, and the progression in technology that he had seen was very educational and also sparked the idea of what innovative technologies will be present in the future years. This week, the main focus of study was college path on cardiothoracic surgery, and through this I learned that during the undergraduate years, it is best to study something that will help with patient interaction in the future, such as sociology. Some of the challenges that I faced this week was contacting the professionals because doctors are incredibly hard to get in contact with because of their schedules. I now feel much more confident in speaking with professionals, and I see the growth from the beginning, where I used to stutter a lot, to now where everything comes with proper sentence flow. My future goal for the next week in ISM is to become more organized and refrain from procrastination.