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Anesthesiologists With Advanced Degrees in Education: Qualitative Study of a Changing Paradigm.

BACKGROUND: Anesthesiology education has undergone profound changes over the past century, from a pure clinical apprenticeship to novel comprehensive curricula based on andragogic learning theories. Combined with institutional and regulatory requirements, these new curricula have propagated professionalization of the clinician-educator role. A significant number of clinician-educator anesthesiologists, often with support from department chairs, pursue formal health professions education (HPE) training, yet there are no published data demonstrating the benefits or costs of these degrees to educational leaders. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to collect the experiences of anesthesiologists who have pursued HPE degrees to understand the advantages and costs of HPE degrees to anesthesiologists. METHODS: Investigators performed a qualitative study of anesthesiologists with HPE degrees working at academic medical centers. Interviews were thematically analyzed via an iterative process. They were coded using a team-based approach, and representative themes and exemplary quotations were identified. RESULTS: Seven anesthesiologists were interviewed, representing diverse geographic regions, subspecialties, and medical institutions. Analyses of interview transcripts resulted in the following 6 core themes: outcomes, extrinsic motivators, intrinsic motivators, investment, experience, and recommendations. The interviewees noted the advantages of HPE training for those wishing to pursue leadership or scholarship in medical education; however, they also noted the costs and investment of time in addition to preexisting commitments. The interviewees also highlighted the issues faculty and chairs might consider for the optimal timing of HPE training. CONCLUSIONS: There are numerous professional and personal benefits to pursuing HPE degrees for faculty interested in education leadership or scholarship. Making an informed decision to pursue HPE training can be challenging when considering the competing pressures of clinical work and personal obligations. The experiences of the interviewed anesthesiologists offer direction to future anesthesiologists and chairs in their decision-making process of whether and when to pursue HPE training.

Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications.

There is substantial evidence of the relationship between household income and achievement on the standardized tests often required for college admissions, yet little comparable inquiry considers the essays typically required of applicants to selective U.S. colleges and universities. We used a corpus of 240,000 admission essays submitted by 60,000 applicants to the University of California in November 2016 to measure relationships between the content of admission essays, self-reported household income, and SAT scores. We quantified essay content using correlated topic modeling and essay style using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We found that essay content and style had stronger correlations to self-reported household income than did SAT scores and that essays explained much of the variance in SAT scores. This analysis shows that essays encode similar information as the SAT and suggests that college admission protocols should attend to how social class is encoded in non-numerical components of applications.