How to Maximize Your Residency Application Through the Power of Personal Branding with Dr. Andrew Lee

Resonance - A Baylor College of Medicine Podcast

Gianmarco Calderara:

Hello, and thanks for listening to Resonance podcast, a podcast run by medical and graduate students at Baylor College of Medicine, where we interview clinicians, faculty, and researchers about their work in an effort to promote health, education, and ingenuity. My name is Gianni Calderara. I am a fourth-year medical student at Baylor College of Medicine, and I'm going to be co-hosting this episode today with my co-student and one of my close friends, Ryan Sorensen.

Ryan Sorensen:

Nice to join you today, Gianni.

Gianmarco Calderara:

Ryan is going to be leading us through a conversation with Dr. Andrew Lee. I'm just going to give a brief introduction to Dr Lee. So, Dr Lee is the Herb and Jean Lyman Centennial Chair in Ophthalmology, and he's also the founding Chairman of the Blanton Eye Institute, Department of Ophthalmology at Houston Methodist Hospital. He's also a professor of ophthalmology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medicine, and an adjunct professor of ophthalmology at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas A&M, The University of Iowa, and the University of Buffalo. Dr. Lee has been an American Academy of Ophthalmology member for over 25 years. He has served in various leadership roles. He's also a past president and current chairman of the board of the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society. He's authored over 500 peer-reviewed publications, has written a few textbooks, and has given a whole bunch of named lectures. He also has a very large YouTube presence with over 80,000 subscribers. So, Ryan introduced me to Dr Lee. Ryan, could you tell us a little bit about how you first met Dr. Lee and sort of how this podcast came about?

Ryan Sorensen:

Yeah, Dr. Lee is one of my mentors. I'm interested in ophthalmology, and he's a neuro-ophthalmologist. I met him my first year of medical school, actually at an event that he was presenting on building our brand for residency applications, which is the

subject of our podcast today. And since then, I've been on multiple research projects with him and helped with his YouTube channel. It's really been a pleasure to get to work with him over the years, and I'm really grateful to have him as a mentor.

Gianmarco Calderara:

Yeah, and like Ryan said, this episode is going to be all about preparing for residency applications, which are coming up later in the fall. Dr. Lee's going to be talking to us sort of about building our brand for residency and how we can sort of sell ourselves to programs and what we want our message to be, and how we can go about conveying that message in the best way possible. I'm excited to hear from him, and I think it'll be a good episode. So, without further ado, let’s hear from Dr Lee.

Ryan Sorensen:

All right, let's get to it.

Gianmarco Calderara:

All right. Well, Dr Lee, thank you so much for being here and agreeing to do this with us. I was really excited to hear about this topic from Ryan because I know applications are kind of, you know, around the corner, and I'm very excited for my own personal learning and some strategies I'm going to get just from a personal point of view. So, thank you so much for being here and taking the time to do this with us.

Dr. Lee:

Thanks for having me.

Ryan Sorensen:

Yeah, we're excited. We were just going over the introduction earlier, and I told Gianni that this is a really special opportunity for both of us just to sit down with you and get some insight into applying to residency programs. So, if you don't mind, we'll just get right into the questions. First, if you can just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what got you interested in ophthalmology and how you ended up in Houston.

Dr. Lee:

So, I'm from Charleston, West Virginia, but I went to the University of Virginia for medical school and college, and then I chose to come to Houston for residency. I was at Baylor College of Medicine for ophthalmology residency and was the chief resident. And in my chief year, my chairman decided that I would come back and join the faculty when I finished at Johns Hopkins in neuro-ophthalmology. And so I did. I was on the faculty at Baylor for 10 years, and then we were 10 years at the University of Iowa before we decided to come back to Houston, and I became the Chair of the Blanton Eye Institute here at Houston Methodist Hospital.

Ryan Sorensen:

All right, thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about why you're interested in academic medicine and why you chose to do academic medicine over private medicine?

Dr. Lee:

So I think, like most people who choose academics, you're going into it for clinical care, education, and research. But for me, the thing that keeps me in academic medicine is getting the chance to work with wonderful young people like yourselves. And there's nothing more rewarding for a teacher than to see the success of their students, professionally and personally. And so that's what keeps me going every day and keeps me in the game.

Gianmarco Calderara:

And I know we talked a little bit about your YouTube channel that you have. I talked a little bit about how I watched some of those videos my first year of medical school. Where did that idea come from and how did that YouTube channel start?

Dr. Lee:

So, over the years I've learned that young people learn differently than when I was a medical student, and young people of today want things that are quick. They like video formats, they want the information now and on-demand, and they don't want to go to the library. And so for me, it was a learning experience of my own to reframe my teaching style to meet those needs of the modern learner, short, digestible video vignettes about focused topics that are less than three minutes. It turned out to be the most rewarding thing that I've done in the education space in a long time because that YouTube channel has 6 million views and 80,000 subscribers, which is way more than any paper or any book I've ever written in my whole career.

Gianmarco Calderara:

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about sort of your experience, you know, interviewing residency applicants and kind of just looking over applications over the years?

Dr. Lee:

So as an interviewer, what we're looking for is two things, "fit" and "fitness." They're not the same thing, even though they sound similar. Fitness is what you bring to the table as an applicant, your credentials, your scores, your grades, your CV, your extracurricular activities, and that determines your fitness. And because there are so many applicants to ophthalmology, almost everybody has fitness. What we're looking for in the interview is not fitness. We're looking for fit. And for fit, what we're looking for is alignment with our value system. But also, can I see myself working with this person every day for three years, and is this the kind of person that I would want to see out in the community and be proud of. So for me, our product in academics, and education especially, is people. And so what we're looking for is fit and a good product.

Gianmarco Calderara:

So I guess kind of what we're talking about today on this podcast is really fit. We're really honing in on how we can kind of optimize our fit as applicants. And I guess at this point, when you are, you know, applying, your fitnes...