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

[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.