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Hello and welcome back to the Medical Mentor Coaching Podcast. I'm Stacey Ishman and today we're going to be talking about how to get to be a selected to be a speaker on the program when nobody knows your name yet. So you know the work that you're doing and if you have already done it you've figured out your niche.
What's the area you want to be known for which is hopefully known by one or two key words so people can really put it together. For me at the beginning of my career it was sleep and then eventually sleep apnea and then pediatric sleep apnea and I got more and more specific as time went on. But I picked the word sleep at the beginning to make sure there was something unifying to the work I was doing.
Well I was a couple years in but I figured it out eventually. Now what you want to do is you want to be presenting papers, you want to be putting in abstracts, but the problem at the beginning of your career is while you know that you need exposure to build credibility you also need credibility to get exposure. So I have a few tips and tricks that'll help you figure out how to get on that program.
You just need to be thoughtful, strategic, and consistent. And here's how to get selected to speak as you're building your reputation. Now the first is don't wait to be invited.
Build a panel. If you take nothing else from this I want you to remember one of the fastest ways to be asked to be on the program at a national meeting or a regional meeting is to build a panel. Especially as an early career physician I recommend that you become a moderator on a topic that you know is timely and interesting and in your area of expertise.
And then build a team of really fantastic top-tier people whose names you see on the program all the time, whose articles you read, whose information you want to learn from. Ask well-known voices in your field to be on your panel and serve as that moderator. Your name will appear on the program next to theirs.
It will impress your senior colleagues when you do a great job by making their life easy. And you want to unify that session with clarity and purpose. Sorry there was a bug in my eye.
Now the most important thing you want to do is ask those pressing questions that everybody in the audience wants to hear. But you need to take the lead on the logistics. You need to write the abstract, you need to invite those folks, you need to make the slides, and then you need to share it with them.
If they have to do nothing but show up and give you their expertise or maybe send you a case, that is ideal. And it will impress them so they want to work with you again. They're gonna be listening to the questions you're asking, which I'm sure are the ones everyone's asking, because the reason you're asking is because the literature is not clear, there's controversies, or they're new.
And at the end of the session, people will remember your name along the same with all those impressive leaders. Now the second is to pick the correct stage. It may seem like everybody should be at their big national meeting, but not every meeting is ideal.
You might feel like you get lost in that crowd. It might be better to be at a smaller meeting that's specific to your specialty or subspecialty or just your condition or topic. So start with conferences where your mentors or your collaborators or your colleagues are already presenting.
In an ideal world, their presence will give you credibility, they should show up for your talks, and often they know the people on the program committee or they are the people on the program committee. You may actually also ask your senior colleagues or collaborators to be on the paper with you or on the abstract, so that in your early career, their names will help get you on the program and give you the credibility that you're looking for. An example of this may be if you're a laryngologist and your mentor is submitting to the combined otolaryngology meeting or the fall voice meeting, you may offer to join their panel or offer a complimentary talk or just do some research together.
Another example is the American Pediatric Surgical Association that offers early career pediatric surgeons some pre-conference work and meetings and workshops where they often invite junior faculty and trainees to participate in coaching sessions, literature reviews, and interactive sessions. Step three is to play the long game with abstracts. Submitting them year over year may feel like you're throwing darts at a board.
You can't even figure out which one's going to be accepted. Early in the career, I started looking at what's getting people accepted. What am I seeing regularly on the program? Some of that may be a methodology, maybe systematic reviews, or maybe evidence-based.
For me, I found this best of, so the best of last year literature review. Didn't take any original research, but everybody found it interesting. I read through a ton of literature.
They got to learn from what I gleaned, and quite honestly, I caught up on all the literature every year, and quite honestly, it's still being presented. So, ten years later, as I start to pass it off to other people, it's still something people find interesting. Now, when I look back, the abstracts that were accepted weren't always the best ones, but they were ones that were written clearly, they were framed around a timely question, and they were easy review and easy to say yes to.
In addition, the strongest abstracts don't just summarize, but they build trust, so people are going to show up and listen to what you have to say next time. So, I have a few tips. The first is to lead with clarity.
Make sure your first sentence is understandable, and have somebody outside your group read it so that they can tell you if it doesn't make sense to them. The second is to use language that aligns with the meeting. If it's about, you know, innovative approaches, then you want to write about your novel approach.
If it's about clinical relevance, you might want to talk about practice-changing findings, but try and mirror the language. The other is to include at least one sentence on why this work matters. You may assume everybody knows this, but oftentimes program committees are not going to be in your specialty or subspecialty, so you need to tell them why it's important.
And then please try and avoid jargon or overloaded statistics. I also find it incredibly hard when people put a lot of abbreviations in the methods and then use all of them in the results section. You're probably only using 250 words.
I do understand the need to want to try and limit, you know, how much you can fit in there, but it is hard to remember the abbreviation, and if I'm a reviewer that doesn't understand your field, it makes it one step less likely that I'm going to pick your abstract. So some of the other tricks are to actually look at old programs and say, well, what are the most common topics? You also may find in the solicitation for the meeting that they include topics that they want to hear from you on. I know the American Academy of Otolaryngology routinely talks about gaps where they want to hear more in the future.
And then the next one is number four. Use posters as a stepping stone. Now, many people say, I don't want to go to a meeting if it's a poster, and I know there's some places that limit your ability to get funds to go to a meeting if it's just a poster, but it is an opportunity to get your name on the program.
It shows that you've been selected by your peers, so it's a peer-reviewed abstract. It is also an opportunity to make some one-on-one relationships. And here's one of the things you may not have thought of, but you know who goes to the poster session? It's the people who are judging the posters are usually pretty senior and usually in your field.
It is the program committee who's selected you in the first place, and it's oftentimes the leadership of the organization. These are the people you want to meet. If you get an opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation, I highly recommend doing it.
I also recommend looking up who those people are ahead of time if you don't know, and even looking up their pictures, which is much easier in this day and age. It's also a chance to practice your message. If you have an elevator speech where you can tell people what your research is about in 30 seconds, that's fantastic.
If not, here's your chance to practice. It also becomes your visible contribution to the field, and as you have done this for a few years, it's easier to get on the podium if you've been doing posters and people can see your work. Now, what I didn't realize until late in my career was that list of people I told you about.
So do keep in mind that you may meet some of the people you absolutely want to meet at the poster reception, and sometimes they're also made a social event, and so if there's a glass of wine, even better. Now, my other strategy, don't just stand by your poster, but start a conversation. Ask people at the next poster what theirs is about.
Practice telling them what yours is about, and then follow up with a short connection or a DM or exchange phone numbers, and then keep in touch if you can. I also suggest using a QR code, especially if you have a lab or a body of work you want people to be able to see, and they can actually use that to connect with you later. Now, the fifth is to ask for an opportunity.
Some of the best talks you will ever give are because you asked to give them. Now, if you've presented a poster a few years in a row, or you've even been on the podium once, you publish a few solid papers, you have a niche people can understand, and you're showing up consistently, you are no longer unknown. You are a contributor.
So ask a mentor, hey, would you mind putting me on that panel, or recommending me for a symposium, or email the conference coordinator or the program committee and say, I'd love to be considered for a talk on this topic, whatever your topic of interest is. I know a friend who just did this to talk about environmental sustainability. You can even include some of your recent work or talk about the poster you presented at that same meeting last year.
And that's how you grow your network. Now, if you're nervous about directly asking somebody to put you in the program, you can always ask to help with the meeting, or provide recommendations for people who might be good in a topic area, and include yourself. It's not obnoxious to tell people like, I really find this area interesting, or my lab is doing some interesting research, or my group is actually looking at these outcomes.
And if they do ask you about topics, make sure you have one or two handy in your pocket. So for me, I might talk about persistent sleep apnea, or, you know, if we're doing a lot of things that have to do with technique, you could talk about a technique that people are using. There's lots of opportunities.
So my final thought on this is that getting selected is not about being known, but it's about being clear. So you want to make sure that you are providing value, you're bringing something interesting and timely. But I want you to think about how you get there without, you know, having the world's best paper already written because you're just at the beginning of your career.
So organize a panel, write the abstracts, keep writing the abstracts, present the poster, and start the conversation. Being great isn't about being everywhere. It's about showing up the meetings that matter with the people that you want to be seen in front of and who you want to be talking to.
That's how reputations are built, quietly and steadily with purpose. Thank you so much for being here. And I look forward to talking to you in a couple of weeks.
In the meantime, please rate, review and follow the Medical Mentor Coaching podcast, which you can find on your favorite app or on YouTube. And if you want to get in touch with me or share feedback or ask about topics, please DM me on at is S Sishman coach on Instagram or find me on LinkedIn or Facebook or go to my website at medical mentor coaching.com where you'll find our active academic Kickstarter course, which helps people start their career by thinking about their mission, their clinical setup, their research program, and their promotion plan. Thank you.
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