Dr. Simone Thavaseelan
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Simone Thavaseelan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And we also do a number of small grants for both research projects and travel awards, which some people know about and others do not. And so we try to spread the message from a trainee perspective to residents to allow to attend our meeting through
Society of Academic Urology and program directors to be aware and know that we're interested in sponsoring the costs associated with the financial burden of making our meeting. But these are also, you know, monetary ways in which we're trying to support our membership.
We do some pretty deliberate mentoring at the conference, including one-on-one resident or student and practicing urologist pairing during the meeting, in addition to speed mentoring, in addition to kind of some pre-mixing prior to the meeting. So we do place a large emphasis on networking and that mentorship piece of it.
And I think for both students and residents who are looking to get involved in the organization, I think it gives you an early entry into professional society work, which for me has been really satisfying as I look over the course of my decade plus career.
Some of the work I've done within professional societies has been really meaningful because it's been an opportunity to enact change at a national level. And when things are sometimes difficult at home or locally, or you might be running into roadblocks, it's nice to have an avenue at the national level where you can have impact and Although maybe it's not clinically, but it is organizationally.
And I think for trainees and students building their networks, you know, identifying social resources, creating community, all of these will lay the groundwork for your future career, your future self.
Yeah, you know, Nancy Spector out of Drexel runs this executive leadership program called ELAM and she publishes about mid-career invisibility. And the need for women who are at their mid-career to get a leadership opportunity that kind of has visibility to allow them to develop the skill set to then apply for the highest levels of leadership within medicine, including chair, dean.
Chief Medical Officer positions. And so I think the needs at this point in career are vast. It's leadership training, it's preparation for transition or transition preparedness physically in terms of moving or perhaps seeking a different employment opportunity if the current one doesn't fit or is no longer right for you. It's strategic planning around your goals in your career.
It's self-assessment of your strengths and weaknesses and really figuring out what does one want in their career now that they have a number of years of experience. You know, what do they really desire? Where do they want to have impact and spend their time and efforts? And then how do you get there? What's step number one to step number five? And I think some of that includes building your career.
network around you of board of directors to give you that support to provide some of that guidance and sponsorship. And I think SWOO is early into doing this. Our cohort of late and mid-career women is relatively small, as is expected, because our organization is bottom-heavy. Whereas we might be 11% of practicing urologists, we're now 30% of trainees.
And so that's going to change over time, but it's slow. And so I think part of this is SWOO's efforts to make sure we are gaining effective allyship with leaders at the AUA so that the men in urology are poised to be successful allies for us. And the more we work with the AUA as an organization, the more I think the AUA sees the value of us as a method of making sure that
their work is properly diversified so that the voices of urologists are a diverse group. So I think in addition, our task force currently underway to help design initiatives and programming that's specific to mid-career will help us internally increase our offerings to this group of women.
But some of the work we're doing with the outside organizations, I think, is that advocacy piece that we're doing at the professional society level.
You know, the genesis of that talk, I had actually asked Dr. Green to give that talk in another meeting. I remember that talk too. I remember when I sent her the invite, she wrote back saying, are you sure that I'm the right person to give this talk? And my co-chair, Mark Litwin, who was chair at UCLA at the time, said, absolutely, you're the right person.
And I remember thinking how powerful it will be for her to stand at the podium and
and give this talk as one of only at the time five women chairs across the country and it was both for the women and the men in the audience and so it also shows you the seeds that we plant at these meetings you know the audience can take away what they will from it but it has legs it grows into something and it serves as inspiration you just never know who you're reaching at the time but i think that's also the fun of professional society work
I think it's imposter syndrome affects us all, right? And unless you have a cheerleader saying, yeah, you're absolutely the right person to give this talk or why not you, you have to have a kind of a continuous internal monologue that propels you forward sometimes. Especially to take steps where you don't feel ready to take and yet you take them not quite yet ready.
I found towards the late part of early career, I really had to push myself out of my comfort zone to be willing to give national talks on topics when For example, public speaking really isn't something I enjoy, and yet it has been an avenue of career advancement that I now, looking back on it, feel like I had a lot of growth from.
You know, I think of organizations in urology, we are the one with the largest amount of growth with the youngest members. And that is unique in a otherwise workforce that is really quite old. And so I think the incoming generation is going to innovate in terms of how they engage with each other.
I think they're going to seamlessly and effortlessly build community in kind of both virtual and in-person ways and that they're going to innovate around those connections. I think they're also going to envision a professional career in urology that's more flexible and kind of more adaptive than I might have seen over the last 10 years. So I'm excited for all of that.
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