A little too little, a little too late?

[cjsmith]

Had lunch with a friend of mine, a local emergency veterinarian and vet school classmate. She is sad that vet med is losing me and thinks I’m a great vet. (She said “ninetieth percentile.”)

I had to ask how she knows. The last time we worked alongside each other was before graduation.

I’d forgotten: I transfer cases to her 24 hour center all the time. She may not be the first to take them, but if they stay hospitalized, she will see the records. She sees patients who have been worked up and those who haven’t; she sees the medical records, indicating how the referring clinician was thinking; she sees whether the client was told what a 24 hour center would likely do and recommend and cost or whether the client wasn’t prepared for any of that at all.

Okay. So she has at least SOME basis for saying what she says.

I honestly am extremely poor at self evaluation. When I graduated as a veterinarian I thought I was bright and had pretty good potential. (Whether I was right, I have no way to know.) By the end of internship I thought I still had good potential but I thought I was too high strung to be good at emergency. Now... I’ve frankly had my self confidence completely and utterly destroyed by the past couple of years.

So a local emergency vet (whose cases I’ve seen come back, and I think she’s super) thinks I’m not just a good vet but a really good vet.

If I had known that six months ago, would it have changed anything? I’m not sure. Maybe. Maybe not.

I guess either way I need some income. :/

Comments

[zahraa]

That's really good to hear!

[cjsmith]

It is! It throws me into a little of a tailspin, though. Did I not spend enough time evaluating other options within vet med? Am I giving up too fast? I don’t know! How does anyone know the answers to stuff like this? I want a grownup to lean on!!!

[zahraa]

I thought the main reason why you were changing careers was that you wanted time for your social life, not that you thought you were bad at your career.

[cjsmith]

It's three things: social life, all self confidence destroyed, no money. The "no money" aspect was the one I leaned on when telling my boss I no longer had the option to stay. (Seriously, I was declined for a HELOC? SERIOUSLY? With THIS house??) But it's honestly all three, and in order for me to be happy in that career, all three would have to get fixed.

[zahraa]

You were declined for a HELOC? What!?!

It's really kind of disgraceful how work gets valued. I am continually astonished at how people whose jobs require so much more skill and training than mine make so much less money.

I only knew about the social life concern. I'm sorry about the self-confidence being destroyed, too. Wow.

[cjsmith]

Yeah, my debt to income ratio was too high. That was an eye opener. Time to move on.

Looking back, I feel almost foolish that I stayed as long as I did. Ah well. Lesson learned. Next! :)

FIVE MORE DAYS starting this morning!

[zahraa]

Wow. For someone who's owned a Bay Area home for a while, that is terrible. Skills like yours should be better rewarded. Lives literally depend on you.

[cjsmith]

I do wish we lived in an ideal world. :)

At least if I get the job I’m currently interviewing for, lives will still be saved by my work. More indirectly, to be sure, but still. I won’t be doing something useless.

[zahraa]

That's awesome. What I do is absolutely useless.

[cjsmith]

Oh I don’t know! You provide value to those you work with. In my old high tech days I didn’t even do that.

[zahraa]

I do a lot of emotional support.

[cjsmith]

That has very real value. And unlike many persons providing a ton of emotional support (*cough*: women) you’re at least getting paid for a chunk of it. Go you!

[zahraa]

Yesterday I got paid for providing reasons not just to off oneself right now.

[cjsmith]

Wow. All righty then. I’m glad you were there to provide those.

[zahraa]

Speaking of your illustrious career, could you answer a quick question? Zyxwvut wonders whether inhaled steroids would cause increased appetite, and if so, how quickly that effect could manifest itself.

[cjsmith]

In cats it seems to be minimal, and that’s simply because of the distribution of the drug - very little of it goes systemic, much like eye drops. I don’t know about any other species. I’ve never put anything but a cat on inhaled steroids.

[zahraa]

Well, thank you! Zyxwvut thought Forti was extra hungry after his first treatment. He has to be separated from Patience for a bit while they eat to give her a fair chance at the food first. He did not like the smell of the steroid medication one bit. He is super sensitive about smells, even for a cat. He really grimaces both at my hair conditioner and my toenail fungus medication.

[cjsmith]

Aw, poor Forti! Some cats do learn to tolerate it pretty quickly (especially if there’s a reward attached, such as food, to encourage them to keep trying). I hope he turns out to be one of them.

[hitchhiker]

it's a good reminder that you're better at things in general than you feel you are <3

[cjsmith]

Perhaps so. Installing that as a rule in my mental framework can be dangerous; I have seen unsupported overconfidence and it’s pretty ugly, and in some roles it could literally cost lives. But yeah, it does seem to be true a lot of the time that I err the other way.

[karenbynight]

TBH, I think almost all people who are perceived as women and so experience institutional sexism do err the other way. At least, the story of my career has definitely been a story of realizing in retrospect that those who didn’t appreciate me and whose opinions I was using to try to create a balanced view of my own competencies were largely just wrong, and often wrong with a subconscious sexist agenda (generally along the lines of “she’d CAN’T be as good at me in an area I care about, because she’s a she”).... modulo a few temporary periods of depression-based low performance on my part.

I think this is probably a place where gender differentiation is good: institutional sexism appears to be a very strong protector against unsupported overconfidence and if you’re a person who tends to experience sexism even if you don’t notice it regularly, you probably don’t have to worry about overconfidence; while if you’re a person who isn’t subject to significant institutional sexism, it’s probably a good idea to check in on the potential for overconfidence regularly.

[cjsmith]

I agree completely about every bit of this.