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Email ThisAt the bottom of the hospital hierarchy are ER doctors.
I know this because straight out of college I dated two med-students back to back. Also, Belle’s boyfriend is a neurosurgery resident. He never lets me forget it. Which is fine because I’m not the one who thinks that great veins are a turn on.
An emergency room is open twenty-four hours a day, and responds to everything that comes in. ER doctors have no specialization. They know a little about everything, and so they also know nothing.
Generation Y is the ER doctor of generations.
We’re doing pretty darn good. We’re saving lives. But is it enough to live up to all the hype?
Not having a specialization means that we’re buying blueberry pies rather than making them from scratch. In other words, we’re not putting in the time to create quality, seemingly preferring quantity as proof that we’re a demographic force to be reckoned with.
What’s good about this is that we have the ability to respond quickly to issues that come up. The presidential campaign, for example, or the Virginia Tech shootings.
What’s bad about this is that it is an emergency room approach. We’ll fix things as they come along. Place a band-aid on and sing a song.
We’ve yet to look at the underlying structures of the workplace and the economy and cities and relationships, and therein lies the opportunity. It isn’t that we’re not making change already. It’s that we can be making more meaningful, more impactful change.
My own organization struggles with this. We often worry that in being everything to everyone in order to serve the varied tastes and interests of young talent, we are also nothing to nobody.
We also believe that we are doing many good things, and we certainly are. But we have issues. Issues that are symptoms of a larger underlying structure upon which the organization is built. And if you’re only addressing the symptoms, and not the underlying causes, you’re in trouble.
We’re scared to change, and indeed, we seemingly don’t have to change. We are a good organization. And Generation Y is a good generation.
But don’t we want to be great?
Without understanding, addressing, and changing our structure, Generation Y will forever be stuck in the emergency room.
We need not just to be the neurosurgeons of the world, but the researchers, the fearless learners, engaging in the constant “sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”
Ryan Healy of Brazen Careerist argues that “our fights and causes will be not to tear down established systems like the federal government and big business. Rather, we will strive to fix, repair and rebuild these broken systems, because history shows that the systems do work – if properly designed.”
And therein lies the point. The systems aren’t properly designed. If what we were doing was working, we wouldn’t have global warming, extreme poverty, and war.
Most of Generation Y is comfortable, yes, but the world is not.
Healy goes on to argue that our advances in the workplace are evidence of how “we aren’t revolting in the streets, but improving broken systems.” I hope that we don’t just improve, but redefine.
We do need to work within the system. It is only within a system that you will fully understand how to change it. It’s taken me six months at my new job to understand and grasp the intricacies of my organization in order to be in a position to actually address them.
It is only by being fully involved in the corporate cultures in which we work, in the neighborhoods we live in, and in the politics that govern us that we will be the civic generation of builders.
Generation Y is doing this already. As young workers enter the workforce, we begin to realize that life is harder than the sheltered life our Boomer parents led us to believe. This is good. We need to be a little surprised, a little incensed at what the real world has to offer. We need to test our idealism.
And then we need to use the gap between our current reality, and where we’d like to be, to not only fill the cracks in our foundation, but then engage in the often more interesting work of seeing what the foundation is made of.
Addressing the underlying issues, and not just the symptoms, is perhaps one of the most exciting things we as a generation can accomplish. Besides, we already have the passion and dedication.
Structural force.
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Rebecca-
You make a good point about needing to examine the intricacies of the structures we are rebuilding in order to rebuild them properly.
But I don’t think the extended metaphor about being ER doctors that know a little about everything, holds up. What, precisely, are you basing this on? Most people have to specialize to get a job. I know nothing about statistics, and quite a lot about the entertainment industry, which is why I’m not a statistician.
More importantly, what are you attempting to DO through this article? Addressing the underlying issues of something is not a revelation. In fact, I would argue that it’s how we work already. We don’t just perform tasks - we ask why we’re doing them a certain way. given enough time, this tendency is what will move mountains for us.
I feel like my general response to this article is “Try harder.” If you’re going to write, please MATTER.
@ Kristen - thanks for your comment. Most people narrow their interests to something more or less specific, in order to get a job, yes. But within each profession, say the entertainment industry that you’re in, or the doctor field which I described, there is a hierarchy of who’s who. In the hospital world, ER doctors just happen to be at the bottom because their residencies are the shortest and they don’t spend additional years focusing on one specific organ or disease, etc. This isn’t bad. It is what it is.
As far as addressing underlying structures, I think it’s a strength of Generation Y that we question everything. I mention in my post that Gen Y is doing good work already and over time will move mountains as you suggest. But I also believe that we need to do this more in order to create meaningful change. And questioning why we do something is only the first step in moving mountains. There’s a whole lot that comes after it.
Again, thanks for making me think harder!
I have recently tried to come to terms with the fact that I myself fit the “ER - doctor” profile perfectly. And I find that it sets me apart from many of my peers, many of whom are on the way to a high level of skill in a relatively narrow field. My intrestes and skills are very wide-spread, and my attempts to find a field to specialize in have so far been without results. My initial conclusion to that is that rather than specializing, I’d like to find a way to make use of my wide knowledgebase.(allthough trying to pitch that idea in a job interview recently might not have worked out to well) I guess my conclusion is that I feel (or hope, maybe it’s just wishfull thinking) that beeing an “ER - doctor” might not be a negative. Beeing a “neurosurgeon” does not automatically qualify you to reform the system. To understand how the system works and be able to make an impact, I believe you need a much wider skill base.
I actually had trouble coming to some sort of cunlusion here, but I guess what I am trying to say is that my experience is not that we are a genreation of only “ER-doctors”. But many of us posess a wide array of knowledge and skills, and we need to make shure we don’t loose the ability to “save lives” as some of us inevitably go on to excel in our separate areas.
Good post, Rebecca. However, I believe this is a universal human experience. Ten years from now, you’ll be reading the blog of someone ten years younger than you and you’ll think, “I remember going through that.”
I agree that one needs to learn to work within the system if she wants to change the system. I think that’s what you’re seeing right now with Gen Xers. Although a lot of people are crediting Millenials for the changes going on in the workforce (especially entreprenuership), I think it’s really Generation X who have worked for the last 15 years for these changes to come about - it really didn’t happen overnight. Even Penelope is a Gen Xer.
Ms. Thorman:
Can’t really speak to your comments about Gen Y. However, as an Emergency Physician for 13 years, I feel the need to defend my specialty. First, Emergency Medicine IS a medical specialty-has been for 29 years. It is also one of the most competitive residencies to enter.Its training programs are as long or longer than Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics (among others). While our training is more broad than deep, we are recognized experts in certain areas (toxicology, disaster medicine, environmental medicine, among others). Our emergency departments (”ER’s”) are egalitarian in that we see all comers, regardless of ability to pay-it’s the law. They provide the ever-thinning safety net for a fractured American healthcare system.
It disappoints me that someone who draws their “expertise” on Emergency Medicine from dating 2 medical students and a friend dating a N-surg resident can write an article disparaging my specialty, and probably have it taken as gospel by others because it comes from someone with a “cool” blog. You would do well to stick to what you know.
@ JB - It wasn’t my intention to disparage the ER profession. Emergency room workers have, in fact, saved my life, for which I am very grateful.
The perception with the doctors that I know (beyond those that my friends and I have dated) is that because the training is more broad than deep, as well as the anecdotal evidence that I heard, and then subsequently researched is that the residencies aren’t as competitive and are the shortest, which puts them at the bottom of the hospital hierarchy. None of that may be true where you live as each hospital is different. That’s the perception here, and may not be reality, nor is it necessarily a bad place to be.
The analogy was used to explore how Gen Y reacts to issues of the day, not to put down ER doctors. And just to be clear, my own position is definitely the ER doctor of my field, and I love my job. Thanks for your comment!