All right, well, we'll go ahead and get started. I'm sure some more people will trickle in here. I am Amy Finolio, and these are my friends. We are all part of the Young Members Steering Committee. We were fortunate enough this year to actually have a handful of submissions, and they're all kind of catered to younger practitioners, so we're happy to be a part of this. I'm going to go ahead and let everybody introduce themselves, and we'll get started, and I think James is going to come in later on. I think he's in another meeting right now, so he'll come in at the end as well. I am Amber Elise. I'm a residency program director at UC Irvine. I'm a plastic surgeon. I've been in practice for, I just hit my seven-year anniversary. I'm Bea Grassu. I'm from Baltimore in private practice. I am coming up on four years now. Ellen Satteson. I'm in practice at the University of Florida and just hit my three-year mark. Ramesh Srinivasan from the Hand Center of San Antonio Orthopedics, and I think I've been in practice nine years. And if we can get, hopefully we can get it to work. This year they're doing it with questions where you can actually do questions within the app, so if you pull up the session on your app, you can actually submit questions without having to go up to the microphone. All right, so we have broken up this talk into a couple different elements, and what I will do is I will focus on things that are really helpful for residents that are in that application process, kind of the application time, and for current fellows for what they need to be thinking about as they move forward into the next stages of their career. And so the goals for this element are just going to be really about reviewing those important timelines, looking for some of those important resources that you might not know are available, and really helping you not miss opportunities. There are definitely opportunities provided by ASSH that I missed in the first few years of my practice because I just didn't know they were there, and it's a really busy time in your life when you're trying to figure out your practice, how to bill all these things, settling your life, and so it's easy to miss some things, so we're going to really try and highlight those. So if you are a resident in the audience, I don't know if any of you are residents, but the first and probably most important step in your mind right now is actually getting into the fellowship, and so there is a very important deadline approaching for you. The fellowship portal is opening in just a few days, and then the deadline for that is November 15 of this year. If you are a resident a little bit earlier on in your training, you might not be quite as worried about this right now, but it's really important to know where to find the resources to learn about fellowships to start thinking about that next stage. And so ASSH, a few years ago, I think this was Dr. Chang's presidential mandate was to make a universal application. In olden days, this used to be a very haphazard mix of like sending files to all these different places on paper. Now we have a great universal application available on the ASSH website, and if you do a simple Google search for ASS universal fellowship, you don't even have to type application, just aptly will get you there. It'll bring up the right page for this, and it's going to give you a full list of all the fellowship programs, contact information, relevant details about them, who they accept, but there are universal requirements for applications, so this is a really great resource to look on that website. If you're doing this on the website also, just going from the ASSH homepage, you can just open up this menu up at the top and look for member resources, and you'll find the fellowship directly in the fellowship application system, so just take advantage of that. It's really easy to navigate to from the website. One of the other things you might notice as you're going through this fellowship application is they're going to give you an opportunity to apply for candidate membership there, and candidate membership is really awesome. If you are in your training, so the last three years of your residency, regardless of which track you're in or you are in your fellowship, you get to do this for free, zero whole dollars during your training years, and what you get in exchange for that is a subscription to JHS. You get access to Handy, which is a phenomenal resource, and we're going to look at some of the things you can do with Handy, and then you also get the opportunity to apply for grants, serve on committees. There are scholarships that are available to you, and there are some other ways that you can get involved that we'll talk about with some of the other talks a little bit later, but I really encourage you to take advantage of this if you haven't done it already, and this is also very simple from the website. Just go to the Join AHS tab on the top there, or pardon, A-S-S-H, under Become a Member. So, all right, so you're in this process. You're applying for fellowship. How do you get ready for your fellowship? This is probably the thing that once you've gone through the application and interview process becomes the next most important thing on your mind. No one is expecting you to enter fellowship being completely ready to be a graduated hand surgeon because that's not the purpose of doing a fellowship. Everybody knows you're not ready to be a graduated hand surgeon. You're there to learn that in fellowship, but it can be really nice to go into that with confidence, feeling like you've built up a skill set to be really strong in your fellowship. So, if you're not strong in micro, this is a great time to focus on micro skills. There are some incredible opportunities. This is one in Beaumont for a grant. You can spend a week with one of the best microsurgeons in the world learning to do microsurgery, so if that's something you're not good at and you'd like to be better, that's a great way to do that. Work on your anatomy knowledge, get good at casting and splinting, go to all the courses that you can that your residency will allow that are local for you, and you can use AO or industry for any of those things, but get comfortable going to the literature also. I think that's a skill that a lot of people need to work on developing because it will help you throughout the rest of your life. All right, so you've become a candidate member. You're getting all these JHS fabulous magazines, and you would like to learn more about getting comfortable critiquing the literature. What are ways that you can do that? There is a great resource through JHS. If you're active on Twitter, and I will admit I am not very active on Twitter, but I do log on to do this. It's like one of the few things I understand how to do on Twitter. You will just log into a specific platform that allows you to have these monthly communications with the authors, with the editor of JHS, with leaders in the field of hand surgery, and just go through a journal club with selected articles, and it's a really wonderful way to start getting comfortable dissecting research topics and learning more. Remembering that anatomy is the A, the B, and the C of surgery, no matter which specialty you're in. I was old school and went to residency at a time when these were things I learned and took notes in paper. You probably have a better version of doing this now, but something like this. You're going to want to spend a lot of time studying. And what are some good resources? There are so many resources. How do you navigate what's available to you and figure out how to sift through what's in front of you to really distill that down to what's critical? I would highly recommend that you take a look at Handy, and you're going to find Handy on the website. Again, from that menu, going through education. Education is going to take you to the Handy tab. And from here, this is hand education. From a resident standpoint, this is going to be great for looking at lectures and surgical videos, but I want to highlight there's a tab down here on the bottom that says for residents. If you go into that tab, what that's going to do is take you to a series of broken down topics, each one of them very applicable for what you need to know for your boards, for your in-training exams. And if you open any one of those out, what it's going to do is give you a list of seminal articles. This is basically a reading list to help you get the foundational knowledge to be a good doctor when it comes to taking care of hand patients. And you can do that from the website like I just showed you, but there's also app available. This is the Apple App Store, which is obviously what I use. I'm sure there's something similar for Android. But if you were a candidate member, you have free access to this. You just use your ASSH login and password to access everything. And the next thing I would recommend is going to the meetings. This is valuable because you learn things, which is really nice, but it's also valuable because you're going to meet and make friends with your future colleagues. This is people going through the fellowship application with you, people who will become your support network for the rest of your life. So I really encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity to connect with one another. This is actually a letter, which you cannot read at all, from Hill Hastings, who I met when I was a PGY-4, who wrote me this incredibly sweet letter after we met at one of the meetings. I have saved that and treasured it every day of my life, but it is just a really wonderful time to meet people, so take advantage of this time and go to the meetings. Meetings are expensive, so maybe you need a scholarship to get to the meeting. ASSH offers tons of scholarships. This is the scholarship I got, but there are a lot of really wonderful opportunities through scholarships. Again, through the website, you're going to find this through the annual meeting tab. And through the annual meeting tab, you'll be able to take that down to registration, and registration will then offer you discount programs like the scholarship programs. ASSH offers a ton of scholarships. There are also some really nice named scholarships in honor of different demographics or people with different needs or coming from different kind of military background, for example. If you apply for the scholarship, period, there will be an opportunity to apply for those within that same application. So just take advantage of these things. They are great ways to save money and make sure that you get time to go to the meeting. And if you're in residency, I'm sure your program director will be really excited that you got a scholarship and they don't have to fund your travel. All right, so let's say that we're now in fellowship. How do we thrive in fellowship? Again, let's go back to the Handy. It is an incredible resource for you for surgical videos. I'd like to point out the Hand 50 specifically, and I do like to laugh because if you search Hand 50 in Handy, you get 111 results, so clearly there are more than 50. But theoretically, these are the 50 most high-yield topics for you in fellowship. And this is going to be an assortment of videos that may be lectures taken from some of the conferences. They may be specific, well, it's an unfortunately poorly playing video, submitted content from experts. They may be surgical videos that demonstrate techniques, but this is a really wonderful consolidated resource from you. It is curated and reviewed by staff from ASSH, so you know what you're getting is going to be high-quality content. And again, candidate members, free access. You just need your ASSH login. Investing in fellowship, again, goes back to that community, going to the meetings, going to every single opportunity that you have to connect with other people and learn from them. You have one year to absorb this phenomenal amount of knowledge, take advantage of it, have fun though, take funny pictures of your fellowship director wearing stupid hats that some patient gave him, and just really treasure the relationships that you build. After fellowship, don't miss the opportunity to get involved. We'll learn a little bit more about young leaders and committee involvement from some of the other speakers tonight, but also once you achieve your active membership, go to the business meeting, get involved in the governance of your society. This becomes all of ours together. There are some awards, and these are the things that I missed, and so I really want to point this out to you because some of these things have very short timelines. So if you are on the ASSH website, you're looking under grants, awards, and programs, and from here, you're going to see a long list of all kinds of different scholarships that are available to you at different stages of your career. We'll focus on the ones that are most relevant, but as a disclaimer, these are not required for you to travel. I have not successfully achieved any one of these fellowships, and I have traveled to Canada and Shen Gong for opportunities for learning. So even if you don't ever get one of these travel awards, still travel. Still make those connections, still learn about the way surgery is done in different parts of the world. They will give you really short pants if you go to China, and it's kind of embarrassing, but you know, it's still fun. So the first one I want to focus on is the Richard Gelberman Scholar Award. This one, you have to be within four years of fellowship. Guess which award I missed the opportunity to apply for? This one. You need to be a candidate member, so you've gotten that paperwork and that step together already. You need to be in a teaching practice. This doesn't mean academic. This means teaching practice. So if you're in a private setting, that's totally fine. You just have to be working with residents and fellows. This year, the award gave $12,000 for travel. It goes up every couple of years, but that's where we're sitting right now. And then you get to give a presentation at the annual meeting. So one of the other things I would encourage you to do is go listen to the other Gelberman scholars talk about what their travel experiences have been like, where they went, what they learned. It can be really inspiring to see the different connections that people make around the world. And there have been some really notable members of ASSH who've been past recipients of this award. There is an International Hand Surgery Fellowship. This is another really spectacular opportunity, now less than five years from your fellowship. Have to be at least a candidate member, and you get, at least this year, it was $14,500 for travel. And this one you're going to spend three months in either China or India in a specific number of hospitals. And so if you have an interest in nerve surgery or microsurgery, this is an incredible opportunity. Guess what other scholarship I missed the opportunity to apply for? This one, because I didn't know about it. So you guys now know, so take advantage of these things. There is the Kleiner Traveling Fellowship. This one is going to be a little bit more tailored to someone who's from a non-North American country. And so this is going to bring someone from one of our maybe international partnerships into the United States to travel with a conclusion at the Kleinert Institute. So if that's you or if that's one of your friends, encourage them to apply for this. These are great opportunities. And then the Bunnell, this is starting to get towards the some of the later years in practice. This is like the ones that Ramesh and I need to be really thinking about. So you're less than 10 years in practice, less than seven years as an active member, but you get a really substantial travel award. And if you look at the list of past recipients of this, these are past presidents, major contributors to the society. These are things that you really want to be looking towards as you build your career and make connections in the world of hand surgery. And then lastly, donate. So in addition to this very cool pin, which I have two of now, you get access to the VIP lounge, which is a really nice place with good food and good coffee. You get the opportunity to decide where your financial support goes. So you can pick scholarships, you can pick research, you can pick whatever you like. And it really gives you the chance to give back to the programs that supported you in the beginning of your career. Specifically, I would like to point out the Order of Accomplice Manus. This gives you perks until you've been an active member for eight years. So it sticks around for a little while. It gives you a discount on your pre or post-course registration, gives you an invitation to a special VIP cocktail party, access to that VIP lounge, and special recognition. But this one is only available to candidate members who pledged $1,500 or newly active members who are less than three years from their becoming an active member who pledged $3,000 over three years. And so if you want to become part of this organization, you have to do that early on in your career. And you just need to know that that's a missed opportunity if you don't get it. So pay attention to those things. And then this is the kind of flair that you get in exchange. Also, three of those ribbons, which I'm wearing today, three, three of them come from donating money. So in exchange for giving money to the organization, they reward you with colorful flair on your badge, which I really like. So the summary is that there are abundant resources. Most of them are clearly delineated on the website. Just go to the website. You'll be able to find them. There is an educational goldmine on handy. Do not miss it. It's a great, great resource. Download the app, get your candidate membership, and be able to use that. And then take advantage of the amazing support network that you will build through this society and through your connection to the people that you meet here. And I will move this on to the next speaker, who I don't know exactly who that is, since we've changed the order. Okay, so I'm going to switch gears here a little bit and talk about the basics of applying for grants and ASSH role in that. So you've come up with a great research idea, you're super excited, but you need some money to do it. What are some options to kind of get the ball rolling and how can the Hand Society play a role in helping you get the funding you need? So certainly if you're at an academic institution, there are often seed money or startup funds available for you, so certainly look at those. Once you're moving on and maybe have a little bit of preliminary data, what are some things you can do? So through the foundation, through the Hand Society, there are a number of grants available and I'll go into the specifics of those. Certainly other similar societies, organizations within plastic surgery, orthopedic surgery and within other hand associations have similar grants and all of these are kind of working toward the ultimate goal of extra mural funding through the NIH or DOD. I suspect most of you in this room are in training or recently out of training and we have some advantages as recent graduates. There are certain grants that are only available to trainees, so certainly keep that in mind if you're still in training. And then there are a variety of grants that are designed kind of to kick start academic careers in young surgeons. So if you're looking at grants out there, look for terms like young investigator, early career, career development grants. These are going to be limited to applicants usually within the first five years from graduating and certainly that gives you an advantage in that you're not competing against the people who have been doing this for decades, who have a whole research fortress, you know, helping them with their grant applications. So it may be something that's a little bit more easily attainable as a new researcher. And again, the ASSH website is going to be key for all of this. Their website clearly goes through all the different grants they have and as Amber mentioned, it has a lot of other educational opportunities there as well. And having applied for and looked at grants with a variety of organizations at this point, some advantages specifically of the ASSH-related grants that I've found, one, they've recently switched to having a letter of intent process. So you submit a letter a couple of months before the full grant application is due. And if you're approved for that, then you know that they're at least seriously considering funding your grant and that you're not going to waste your time doing the whole grant application if it's something that's really not in keeping with what they're looking for. Number two, most of the grants follow NIH-style format, so your grant application then is kind of teed up, ready to go for other grants that are out there without having to kind of reinvent the wheel. And then finally, if you are not successfully funded, which I have not been successfully funded by an ASSH grant, but I have gotten a lot of great feedback from them. So they usually have three or four researchers or members of the research committee who review your grant, and you get to see their scores, their feedback on the grant that's really helpful in terms of revising your grant to try to reapply. And so I think that's a really helpful benefit of the grant process through ASSH. So in terms of the specific grants that are out there, if you're in training, there's a fast-track grant that's a great, you know, small amount of money to really do kind of a straightforward study, something that maybe in your one-year fellowship, you could actually see through start to finish. And with this, you actually can submit your letter of intent before the deadline and get committee feedback on it. So again, that's helpful to prepare. One, it's a great learning process, and two, you're going to have a much stronger letter of intent when you finally submit it. And then in terms of the clinical grants that are out there, the kind of startup grant that they have that's similar to the NIH R03, this is for pilot projects, again, trying to work toward more extramural funding. And similarly, again, they do the letter of intent. And with both the training grants and this startup clinical grant, they usually have a few special emphases that they've checked. And so just kind of take a look at the website. These are the ones that are currently, I guess, for the last grant cycle, they haven't updated them yet. But if you are interested in something that's within one of these topics, that's going to greatly increase your chance of getting funding through the Hand Society. And certainly for your basic science, they have an equivalent grant for that as well. Once you move on to these kind of more advanced grants are going to be for active members. So you do have to finish training, become an active member, and they're going to follow more of the R01 style grant. The two-year $100,000 clinical grant, they have a two-year cycle for what the topics are. And then by 2024, the next cycle, the topic is biologics and hand surgery. So if you've got ideas in that realm, certainly something to start thinking about. Similarly, they have a grant specifically designed for a multicenter trial. So if you have something that you're looking at collaborating with other organizations, this would be a great opportunity to look into. And there are further collaborations with groups outside of ASSH. So with the American College of Surgeons, they have a career development grant, which is designed for individuals who already have a career development award through the NIH, which is the K08 or K23 grant. And this kind of gives you a little bit of additional funding. They're really trying to jumpstart folks who they think have a lot of promise to potentially continue to obtain more extramural funding. And then if you have something that you can collaborate with a member of the Hand Therapy Foundation, there's also a specific grant related to that. And you have to have an active member from each society for that. As I mentioned, there are lots of other options in terms of grants outside of the ASSH. Certainly the American Association for Hand Surgery. As I mentioned, Hand Therapy Foundation has multiple grants. And then within the orthopedic and plastic surgery realms are lots of other options too. So I encourage you to look at those. And once you get to the actual grant writing, certainly that becomes a challenging process if that's not something that you have a lot of experience with. And the journal Hand Surgery a few years ago, Kevin Chung had this excellent article that kind of goes through the basics of writing a successful grant proposal. Obviously, he's had a lot of success with that, so this is a good starting point. And then ASSH actually helps sponsor individuals to go to the Orthopedic Research Society and U.S. Bone and Joint Grant Writing Workshops. So if you're interested in that, there's information on the scholarship page about that that they'll help pay for you to go and kind of hone your grant writing skills. The Plastic Surgery Foundation has similar options if you're a member of ASPS. And then as Amber had mentioned, Handy is very useful. Several of the leading researchers within the Hand Society who've had a ton of success with grants have lectures on there that are really, really helpful. And finally, the Hand Society puts on usually one or two research-related webinars per year. So keep an eye out for the emails related to that. I just recently that the one that's coming up this winter, they're actually going to have members of the Grant Selection Committee kind of live review a couple of grant proposals. So that'll be really helpful in terms of figuring out what they actually look at, what's important to them, and kind of help you prepare to put your best foot forward. So hopefully with these pearls, you will be swimming in grant funds soon. Hey, everybody. Sorry about that. I always feel bad. I don't want to disrupt the flow of things, but I really appreciate the flexibility. Thank you very much for inviting me to be here to share this perspective. All right, so let's see here. Perfect. All right, so we're going to talk about committee opportunities with the Hand Society. And so let's see here. These are a few disclosures that I have. All right, and a special thank you to Jim Chang. He gave this talk, I think, maybe a year or so ago. And so he shared with me his perspective, as well as his slides, which I really appreciate. I've made minor changes, but you all know how big a help that can be, right, when you just don't know where to start? And all my colleagues, of course, friends, but committee, co-chairs, just what's really neat about the Hand Society is that you get to meet folks that you just, every year, you get to be closer and closer friends. It's not just the work. It's the meaningful work, and it's getting to do it with someone else that you like. So we're going to go through a few things. Why should you care? How can you get involved? And what are the opportunities? So why care? Well, it's an opportunity to be part of something bigger than ourselves, right? When you look at a lot of the reasons for burnout, sometimes it's just because you don't feel connected. That's just one part of the puzzle, of course. There's other reasons. But some of the things that we can do to make it better is to connect with other people, to tie yourself to a bigger mission. It allows you to make a difference. What we get to do every day is incredible. We get to make a difference in a patient's life and in their family and their communities, by extension. But when you're part of an organization, you get to leverage the power of many. The power of coalitions is not to be underestimated. And to borrow one of his quotes, the ASSH is small enough to make a difference within it. You don't get lost, like you do in some of the bigger meetings. But it's big enough to matter, to have the outsized voice. There's career opportunities. You get to make so many connections with other folks. And so sometimes you're wanting to make a change from one practice setting to another or from one geographical area to another. And having those relationships in place can go a long way, or if you're looking for career opportunities for your mentees. Relationships, I'm going to talk a lot about this, because I think that's one of the best things about the Hand Society. Friendship, mentorship, whether you're the mentee or the mentor. Julie Samora gave a great talk a few weeks ago at the NOLC about this, that there is so much value for being the mentee, but also for being the mentor. And I think the ASSH is really good about fostering that. It's just sort of a natural part of being involved. This is a nice little diagram that, again, Jim Chang created. But what I want to highlight is where it starts, showing up. I still remember rotating at Northwestern Orthopedics, and someone told me that 80% of success is just showing up. And it was a Woody Allen quote, he said. But I think Woody Allen said just about everything, so I don't know if it's really a quote from him. But I think the point's the same, right? So there's three major steps for getting involved in committees and then kind of going through the whole governance structure. ASSH member to committee member, committee member to committee chair, and then chair to council. And so getting from member to committee member, which is probably the most important first step. We already said you got to show up to the meeting, and then next is just putting yourself out there. Here's just a general idea of the structure. Council is made up of the presidential line, the treasurer, members at large, which are about four, two over eight, and two under eight, and then practice directors. And these are all the different, excuse me, not practice directors, division directors, and these are the four different divisions. And each of those divisions has quite a few committees underneath it, so you can see that the structure is a bit layered there. I happen to think that the practice division is the most impactful, but that's my bias. But you can see there's a lot of ways to get involved that might match your interests. And the thing is that you don't have to be an expert in something. I think that is a little bit of, I don't think it serves anyone well to think that you have to hit a certain threshold to put yourself out there. Sometimes the value you bring is asking questions that we forgot to ask or that we somehow hustled through it. But asking someone six years into practice exactly what it was like, their first year of practice, we might remember some of it. But gosh, if you're in it, you're going to know it so much more intimately than we might remember it. And so sometimes that is the value you bring. And that's the beauty of this system, is that everyone has something to offer. I think sometimes when we're at work, we feel like we're just making widgets, and that anyone can do it, and that we can easily be replaced. But the thing is, is when you connect with each other, when you connect with your patients, or when you're connecting with co-committee members, you're offering something that no one else can offer. And that's yourself. I know it sounds really cheesy, but I happen to believe it. And so finding an area of interest, there's so many opportunities to contribute your perspective, or your questions, or your expertise, or your curiosity, or anything. Make sure, though, that you can fulfill those requirements and the time commitment. The application deadline is the spring of every year. Believe it or not, it is advertised in the emails. The trick is, is you've got to open up the emails. And I know it sounds like it shouldn't have to be said, but it's really interesting. One of the things in my purview is kind of looking at the listserv, and it's amazing how many times people say, why didn't they tell us about this? Well, there's actually three or four emails that said it, but I'm not great with email either, so I get it. You get to apply to more than one committee. If I remember correctly, you get three choices, and just keep applying. I think most people who want to volunteer get something. Here is a nice little video, again, Jim Chang, that kind of shows you how to get there under Member Resources. Click on the Get Involved. And let's see, it may stop there. Yeah, I guess I, oh no, here we go. I think he made it on a Mac, and so I think it's just revolting against the fact that it's on a PC at the moment. And so it's easy to get there, but if you have trouble, gosh, email me. I love to connect. So I'll just take you through it over the phone or Zoom. I promise I'm not that lonely. I just, you know, it's a tough crowd. Everyone wants to get to Hannah Palooza, is that it? All right, good. All right, well, it's a yearly process. There is a committee advisory group, typically chaired by the president-elect. And a little secret, you can make your preferences known. If you have a relationship or you know someone who's a committee chair, just let them know. Because there is a process for that, that if we know what people's preferences are and we're kind of hearing from folks, we can usually make it happen. But you just got to put yourself out there and if you know someone or you know someone who knows someone, make those preferences known. Don't be shy. Got to let people know what you want to do. I think Young Leaders Program is going to be covered if it hasn't been covered already. I think, Ramesh, you're covering that. So I'm going to kind of just fly through that. I think it's a great program, and his is the authority on that. So from committee member to committee chair. So again, showing up, 80% of success. Maybe 99% of success. Participate where you can participate. And when there is material, some of these committees are pretty busy, like the coding committee. Man, I sat in on one of their meetings this morning and it is run like clockwork. But you have to prepare for that to be able to contribute meaningfully. It's just like when you show up to a case. If you didn't read for it, there's not always a whole lot you can offer when you're young. And support different ideas. Be collaborative. Put yourself out there. Volunteer ideas or for assignments. When someone asks, hey, who wants to tackle this? And then it's quiet. That's really disheartening as a committee chair. But we remember the folks who volunteer to do things. And it's rewarded with more work, just like in residency and fellowship and everything else worth doing. Types of the assignments. I'm going to fly through these, but it just depends on the division you're in, the committee you're on. It might range from reviewing abstracts to survey assignments, self-assessment questions, attending meetings, fundraising, writing educational material. Submitting ICLs is a big function of a lot of committees. Now that we have hand P, a little plug there, creating content for hand P or hand E, ways to get your perspective, your experience out there. And again, sometimes it's just asking interesting questions that no one else on the committee thought to ask and coming up with an ICL around that. I can tell you, a lot of the ICLs that I would submit, it wasn't because I had an expertise in that area. It's because I didn't know. And so sometimes in practice, we would have a question that we were facing as a group. So I was on the business of hand surgery committee. And Ramesh and I were partners. Sometimes it was things that our group was going through or questions we were facing. And we had sort of part of the answer. But it was an opportunity to kind of ask your co-committee, hey, has anyone dealt with this? Hey, you know what? We're all kind of struggling with this. So why don't we put something together and we can answer it for our members? That's a great way to contribute. And it started with a question. You got to remember that no one's going to make you do anything. This is a volunteer program. And there are some folks that just kind of float through. You need to actively volunteer. Don't complain without solutions, right? So if you have something, if you have a critique, that's OK. But have a suggestion to go with it, or at least be nice about it. Don't ignore or mock other people's ideas. Do not not follow through on assignments. I know I hate double negatives. It's like very attorney-like. But I couldn't stop with a capital not. You understand. Just follow through on assignments. Remember, everyone's going to review each other. Everyone knows who does the work and works well with others. The more you do and the more you do it well, the more you're going to be asked to do things for better and for worse. From chair to council, so the chairs have direct contact with the division directors. And basically, that chair role, you're basically trying to harness the energy and the ideas of those committee members. But then you're communicating directly with the division director, who is then interfacing with council, getting ideas for understanding where the group is going to go from a strategic objective perspective. That really should be a two-way communication street. So your responsibility as a chair is to know the charges of your committee, plan goals, understand that you can't do everything right. So you've got to be realistic about it. One way that we used to approach it is that we had easy to accomplish goals that year, ICL submissions, articles, that sort of thing. And then we had a few aspirational goals, things that were sort of looking at the long term. This might take a few years. But gosh, every year, we're going to chip away at it. And you're going to coordinate with the division director. And you're going to work with the staff liaison. I'm just going to throw this out there, because we have wonderful staff at the ASSH. They're not our personal assistants. So this really is a collaborative thing. It's not like, hey, email this person, or hey, do that, or hey, pick up my dry clean. It's not like that. It is a working relationship. And we are respectful of each other. And you're going to organize meetings and tasks. Bring out the best in your team. This is an opportunity that if you have an interest in leadership and you have a leadership role wherever you are practicing, this is a great way to scratch that itch, to kind of learn about how large organizations work, and then just deliver. And it works itself out. Everyone reviews each other. Everyone knows who works hard. Eventually, directors present the progress from the committees to the council. But again, two-way communication, communicating strategic objectives and priorities to the committees, and reporting from the committees to the council. And then these are some of the current directors. Tamara Rosenthal, as you may have learned already, she is now our vice president-elect. And then she will be succeeded by Ryan Calphy as research director. And this is us. And applying for a council position, different ways to get there, either through the division director, the members at large, or to get into the presidential line, as well as a treasurer. But you've got to remember, when you get to this level, you've already kind of done a lot of the volunteer work already. What do you do on council? Lots of meetings. You identify, prioritize strategic objectives. One thing that's really neat is that when you get to know each other, you get to trust each other, this is an opportunity to make a difference. One of the things that we're really proud of is that one of our objectives is providing care for underserved communities, to find ways to decrease health disparities. And that's where one of us, two of us, even eight of us can only do so much in our community, right? But when you start leveraging the power, the strength of an organization, you might actually be able to make a dent in it. HandP was a big strategic objective coding app. You want to be good stewards of resources. You want to try to make life better for its members and their patients. That's ultimately what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to take care of patients, try to take care of each other. And this is another way to do that and create tools for accomplishing that. And then advocacy is another big part of it. So my path, how am I doing on time? I'm kind of racing through it a little bit. We have 2 more talks. Perfect, I'm going to wrap it up. So for me, I joined the Business of Hand Surgery Committee as a handful. I had no idea how much time I was going to have or what I could bring to it. But I just did a leap of faith talking to one of my mentors. And I just asked a lot of questions and put together a lot of proposals in the spirit that we just discussed. I volunteer to do things. So I was asked to be a vice chair and then invited to chair. And I wasn't sure that I had enough bandwidth. So I asked for a co-chair. And so we got to work together as co-chairs to really help work together. And it's a really nice, flexible way to do things, right? They tend to accommodate us. Invited to stay on another year, invited to apply for director. And so that's what I serve as right now. And it is so much fun to get to work together, to find ways to make things better for our members and for our patients and our communities. The relationships are great. We get to make a difference. I get to learn. I get to scratch that itch of being involved with a big organization. You get to understand the system. And you get to make the world a little better-er. I don't know why I said that. But 100% volunteer organization, you got to make sure you have the time and dedication. There's a lot of opportunities to make a difference. And a lot of those opportunities, you kind of make for yourself, too. But this helps to facilitate it and help give it direction and put resources behind it, which is pretty cool. Hard work leads to more work and responsibilities. But it's worth it. And I just think it's a lot of fun. But ultimately, what does it come down to is relationships, family, community, taking care of patients, and each other. So thank you all very much. I'm sorry that I went a little bit over. No, you must do a shameless plug real quick for Hand Pee. Because I think for these guys, it would be really helpful. Absolutely. So Hand Pee, I feel like we're all going to just dream of Hand Pee now because it's everywhere. But this is really, this is Jeff Greenberg's mega issue, his brainchild. Handy is amazing. I think we all know that. But as we also know is that it's often the practice aspect of what we do, the business side of our practice, our craft, is oftentimes what determines the quality of life, right? So one thing that we used to talk about in the business committee is that you want to punch past your mark. It's not about just being quicker, more efficient. It's about being more efficient so you can finish your notes, so you can be home with your family and be present, right? And so Hand Pee is an opportunity for us to create content, to share with each other different hacks, efficiency tools, education, so that we can practice better. And so it's a little bit easier. We don't have to reinvent the wheel in all our own silos. We get to share with each other ways to make life better, collect better, code better, get more efficient, that sort of thing. So please look at the website. If you see anything there that is missing or that could be done better, or if you have ideas that you want to contribute, please email any of us. I'll say to james at gmail.com or just find us. All right? Thank you all very much. I really appreciate it. So changing gears a little bit, we're going to talk about mentorship, specifically in ASSH. But I'm going to go to the basics as well, talking about being a mentor, being a mentee, and no disclosures here. So I'll define mentorship. We'll review some opportunities. And I'd love to engage in discussion as far as a future direction and how ASSH can help everyone a little bit more with mentorship. So defining mentorship, it's a relationship, obviously, where one individual with experience, more seniority, more knowledge and connections is able to pass on what they know and have learned to a more junior level. Some of you may be more in that mentee role, but it is certainly gratifying to assume a mentorship role for someone more junior than yourselves, whether it's a medical student, a younger resident, or your fellows when you go into practice. So with mentorship, you're sharing your experiences. You're guiding from the sidelines. You're trying to facilitate a personal and professional relationship with your mentee for their development. And it is definitely founded on open communication. University of Colorado School of Medicine, they actually have a mentorship program for their staff. It's not for their medical students or for those in training, but for their staff. And it helped them find experienced mentors who can guide them for their professional development. They found that with this formal mentorship program, they were able to increase their employee retention rate, boost workplace satisfaction, increase diversity and competency, leading to increased job satisfaction. I think mentorship is a huge part of ASSH. It's a huge opportunity for us to decrease the risk of burnout. And so I am internally grateful to my own mentors and now the satisfaction that I find in teaching and being a role model or mentor for others. So there are different types of mentorship. There's a traditional one-on-one, where it's you and your mentor, or you and your mentee. The distance mentorship, which maybe now we're more familiar with, since a lot of things went virtual over the last three years. And then group mentorship, where it's a single mentor matched with several mentees. The strengths of a mentor, their humility, owning up to their own flaws, perhaps, discussing their own professional success and intellect. It should never serve as an absolute benchmark for their success. Being an active listener is huge, and then recognizing talent. Someone with a different set of skills or a different perspective, you can learn from them, not just teach from your own personal experiences. So being a mentor, whether it's being a guide or a coach, a counselor, or a role model. Being a guide is offering your perspective and encouraging growth by asking the right questions. James hit on a lot of these concepts in his talk. Throwing out ideas and keeping the conversation as well as the creativity going. Being a coach, motivating, enforcing with positive feedback, reinforcing behavior, and constructive feedback to change behavior. As an advisor, you're going to develop someone's career potentially, maybe ask them specific questions on what's their plan, what specific skills do they need to harness and develop to reach their career goals. As a counselor, this is where we can develop lasting and open relationships. As an advocate, you're going to champion your mentee's ideas and interests, as well as create an opportunity to challenge them and set them up for success. And then as a role model, I strongly believe we need to teach by example. So then being a mentee, obviously the individual should be self-motivated, they should be committed to personal and professional growth, be eager and open to learn, be patient and responsive and respectful of their mentor's role and time. I think all of our time is extremely precious. And certainly asking for the guidance of a mentor, you should respect what they can offer you. You should definitely feel comfortable receiving objective feedback. And hopefully, again, it's that constructive criticism, work as a team player, and being comfortable being stretched out of your comfort zone, being curious. Dr. Dweck coined the term between this fixed and growth mindset. And again, with mentorship, I think it's an opportunity for more of a growth mindset. So this is where you study different kinds of praise to show, or not specifically praise, but sorry, a fixed mindset is focused on the outcome, whereas a growth mindset is like, how are you getting there? So when they looked at studies in children and they praised them that they're smart, that encourages more of a fixed mindset rather than praising their hard work and their effort, which cultivates more of a growth mindset and long-term a more successful and emotionally satisfying life. There is, you need to be inclusive in your mentorship. You shouldn't have boundaries or barriers. You should mentor, whether it's strictly diversity, you should ensure equitable access to benefits and recognize that stereotypes are certainly a threat to a successful mentorship and relationship. There are a variety of barriers. I'm just going to kind of run through those. The traditional view of success, specifically, again, that's more fixed mindset, focusing on publications or titles. But you should consider just the whole picture. And again, ask your mentee specifically what defines their success. Consider their external factors from their practice, family life, personal achievements, and creating an entrepreneurship or business model. Values of achievement, shake that designation of a young leader or potential superstar. Make it what you want. Be comfortable in your own skin. And again, the mentor should challenge the mentee on what their goals are specifically. Cognitive biases are confirmation bias, seeking out data to confirm pre-existing ideas. Establish your own ideas. Just kind of be confident in your own skin. And then I think imposter syndrome seems to be quite common the more you talk to people. And it can definitely be exacerbated when your own trusted confidence and mentors minimize your own experience. So specifically with ASSH, just like James was suggesting, get involved. I mean, this meeting is just a wonderful platform to meet new people, get involved in the committees, go to the cocktail and cases last night, or the women in hand surgery tomorrow night, the fellowship dinners if you are in a fellow. In a fellowship program. But I think that ASSH is just such a welcoming society. And it really, right there on its home page, talks about family. And the more times you come and these relationships that you're building, these friendships that you're making, you have an opportunity to grow both professionally and personally. So there used to be a formal mentorship program that hooked up, I think, within the first five years of your practice, a mentor with a mentee, whether it's a fellow or young early on in your practice. And unfortunately, that formal program dissolved in the last year. But they're talking about new opportunities, whether it's creating a listserv for younger members or on the horizon, hopefully, is a group to help young members with board collection and board passing and things like that. If you're a mentor and a successful one at that, there's an award out there that Bobby Chhabra won this year. And you can submit for next year for another mentorship. It's a pretty esteemed and privileged award. These are just a couple of the ideas that I could think of for an opportunity to make connections and talk to your mentors or, again, bring up your co-residents that are maybe behind you, junior to you, and be an opportunity for you to be a mentor to them. And then at our fingertips, we have this listserv. We have the membership directory. We have practices just all over the country and all over the world that are at our fingertips. If you go to this directory, you can find people all over the place and just ask them your questions and try to connect to them. I find that we are normally a pretty welcoming society and happy to help. So be intentional with your relationships. Embrace humility, encourage empowerment, understand your biases, and be authentic in your engagement. And that's how you can have a successful mentorship experience. I have tremendous thanks for this opportunity to talk to you guys briefly about this. I'm happy to talk more after the session as far as where I got some of my information from. You can see that. And then personally, I give a lot of thanks to my mentors from undergrad into my life experiences, fellowship, and now my partner in my practice, who is several years my senior. But I strongly embrace mentorship opportunities and just appreciate how much it has to offer. So thank you. Thank you. I don't want to do this. All right. So last one. You just click on the, uh. Yeah, and then it closed it. Closed it, uh-huh. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. It says close. I hit close, but now it's opening the file. Yeah. OK. It was scary. I didn't know. OK. All right. So I'll end. I'll be talking about the ASSH Young Leaders Program. So yeah, those are fantastic talks. Thank you all, because a lot of common themes that I'll sort of tie together, I guess. But it's nice when you're on an ICL, and it all kind of works out like that. So I'll do a brief overview of the program, description of the leadership and team-oriented skills gained, and then long-lasting benefits for having participated, things that continue to stay with us really for the duration of our career. So as far as the program goes, it's a three-day leadership development seminar that occurs in December of each year, so not a huge time commitment. There's an active, ongoing discussion, initially identifying key issues within the upper extremity profession that we want to address, that we want to fix, that we want to tackle. There's a training session on medical society governance, which was incredibly valuable. I did this, I think, my eighth or seventh or eighth year of practice. And I remember being like, boy, do I wish I would have done this before I started practice. Because the skills that I learned during this three-day program would have really helped me during business meetings, communicating with my partners, hospital administrators, fellows, residents, really everyone around me, even my family, just communicating better with my wife and my kids, because I'm still working on that. And finally, it ends with a team project completion and commitment to participate in an ASSH committee or task force. So there is a commitment. It's real. The good news, because you're committed to do this, there's a little bit of a fast track associated with that commitment. So there's some benefits with that. So the first day is pretty fun, to say the least. We had to do it Zoom, unfortunately, our year, which was kind of a bummer, Amber and I. But we still had a great time. But we got to meet with Dr. Boyer over the internet. And if any of you want to know, his favorite drink is a Negroni. So if you ever see him and you're like, man, I really want to talk to this guy, well, that's a tip. And you could use it. I'm sure it's true for a lot of these folks. But basically, we got to meet with him. And we got a deeper look into the history and the current state of the society. He was super funny, super entertaining. It was not boring at all. I remember a lot of laughing. And I still laugh about it. Day two, the work begins. So leadership and communication skills are outlined. And the team projects are introduced. The good news, it's not boring at all. They really go over these leadership and communication skills in a way that is not only authentic, but tangible for you. They give you examples. And it really starts to make sense. So some of the leadership skills that got introduced, obviously, the value of communication, mutual respect. It's something that I continually have to remind myself and be aware of, particularly when I'm talking to my kids. And then evidence-based decision making. This was so huge. I never really thought about evidence-based decision making in the context of leadership. But when you're tackling a problem, when you're dealing with an idea, what is the evidence to support any solution that we might propose? And so when you start to look at problems in that respect, you can start to take some of the emotions out of it, which can really detract from a discussion and a conversation when you're trying to solve a problem. But when you look at it like that, you can maybe, hopefully, start to make some headway. We also talked about the Toyota production system and real-life examples of corporations that work well. Two of the concepts that Dr. Murray brought up was continuous improvement, kaizen, change for the better. So Bea already touched on that in the context of learning. And then I love this statement, solve the root of the problem. Genshi, genbutsu, go see for yourself. So I tell this to my 10- and 12-year-old all the time. And initially, they're making fun of me. But now they say it to each other. And so clearly, something's happening there. And I think it is helping them. We move on. And each of our teams, there were three teams, were given a team project. Our particular problem that we were supposed to solve was recruitment and engagement of new ASSH members. And so the typical way you might want to solve a problem is you just want to come up with solutions immediately. Well, I think you should do this. I think you should do that. And somebody else says, you should do this, do that. But it turns out that they really focused on asking good questions first and foremost. And James touched on that earlier. I mean, if you can ask a good question before you get into the nitty-gritty of solving a problem, you can save yourself a lot of time and then really refine your solution in the long run. So it's so huge. So in our particular issue, they gave us a bunch of data to review to start. And then instead of just jumping in and saying, oh, well, these are the issues with ASSH. These are the things we need to improve, we actually got to see where the bottlenecks were. It turns out a lot of people become candidate members, but not everyone matriculates onto full membership. So we really drilled down on some of the barriers and some of the things that are hard about becoming a full member, passing the CAQ, putting together your case log, studying, et cetera. And these are the things that we came up with solutions for. As far as the after effects go, it's a constant ripple effect, and it continues. For me personally, I got involved with the Young Members Steering Committee, the Self-Assessment Exam Committee, Handy Editorial Board, and I became a reviewer for Journal of Hand Surgery, which has all been immensely productive and rewarding for me. During some of our side discussions, which we had a lot of them, and there was a lot of laughter during those as well, we actually talked about how many of us really wanted to shoot better surgical videos, like higher quality surgical videos. And so I was sitting there listening to everybody talking about it. I mean, that's such a great idea. Like, why don't we do this? And I went, and I realized there was an ICL on it. And I was just like, you know what? I'm just going to watch the ICL, and I'm just going to type this thing up. And so I did. I just wrote it all down, and I sent it to James Mullen, David Tuckman, and Dr. Hammert. And they liked it. They revised it. And then we actually got it published through Dr. Laporte and the Journal of Hand Surgery. And now there's a kind of a written record of how to do this, and hopefully it's helpful to people. And then potentially the most important thing, and I'll end on this final thought, and it's already been touched upon by my co-presenters, is the connections. The obvious ones, getting to connect with council members and the current leaders of ASSH. And these are relationships that I continue to foster, continue to learn, and gain from even years after completing the program. And then perhaps most importantly, I got to get to know my co-young leaders, who are incredibly talented people. I was humbled to work with them, laughed with them, learned from them. And I know that they're going to be super amazing, productive people in the society in the future, and the future leaders. So I hope you all will consider the program. It was really, in many respects, life-changing for me, and one of the best things I've ever done from a professional standpoint. So in conclusion, it's an outstanding program, potentially career-changing. Actually, probably definitively career-changing. It definitely was for me. I think it has been for all of my co-young leaders. So if you have the enthusiasm and the time, I absolutely would encourage you to apply. Thank you.

Young Leaders Program

leadership development

team-oriented skills

upper extremity profession

medical society governance

communication

evidence-based decision making

problem-solving

networking