The annual meeting of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons attracts neurosurgeons of every stripe: participants practice in different specialties, hail from different home countries, and are at different stages of their careers.
This year, neurosurgeons just embarking on their careers had the opportunity to enroll in a course especially for them. Our own Dr. William Christopher Fox was part of that course faculty.
The course was called “So You’re Finally a Neurosurgeon…Now What?” and its attendees were neurosurgeons who recently finished training, or who will soon finish.
The journey to a seat in that classroom was long and demanding–each attendee had just dedicated more than a decade of his or her life to general medical education followed by specialty training in the field of neurosurgery. But they enrolled in this course for something a bit different: ideas and information on the practicalities of starting out in practice.
“Because of the technical rigors of neurosurgery residency training,” explains Dr. Fox, “teaching the more practical side of what it means to be a neurosurgeon is something that may have been underemphasized by many programs in the past. This type of knowledge is being recognized as increasingly important.”
Dr. Fox‘s lecture was called “Jumpstarting Your Clinical Practice.” After his talk, he met with small groups of attendees to answer questions and talk more personally and informally. “Passing along what we’ve learned is part of our duty to mentor the next generation of neurosurgeons. It’s also something that I greatly enjoy,” says Dr. Fox. “It was an honor to be a course instructor at the CNS meeting in Boston.”
