I have no business being a researcher as far as I can tell. I have a medical degree and it totally did not prepare me to be a researcher, and so I think the career development activities at the University of Pittsburgh is what prepared me to be a researcher, and so I really came out of my medical training very well prepared to treat patients. That's what I was prepared to do and so it's continues to surprise me that I am a researcher, and I actually at this point am beginning to actually be able to say that I'm a researcher with some degree of confidence, but it's taken me some time to get to that point. So I think the process of becoming a researcher is really different than the process of medical training.

They're really very two different endeavors, and I think there may be some medical programs that do some reasonable job of teaching people some basic research skills, but I would say most of them probably don't. So when I came out of my medical training I really had no skills that would, or very few skills that would prepare me for a career in research, so it's been I think a long process and a slow process of remediation and I was talking to one of the scholars this afternoon about that. It's sort of in a way a bit disheartening because you graduate from medical school and you finish your residency and you start to feel like you have some competence and then you kind of have to start all over again and really recognize that you really have, you don't know very much about this. But so for me one of the big issues was a lack of knowledge of statistics and going back and taking coursework, and I still find that that's a weakness for me and I continue to need to work closely with collaborators as I look at my data, as I design studies.

That's an area that required significant remediation for me and was definitely a stumbling block for me at the beginning as I even looked at the literature, trying to really understand what was written, and then as I began to try to design studies and analyze data certainly. Designing clinical trials and that that methodology involved really mentorship primarily, so beginning to live through the clinical trials by doing them with my mentor and sort of taking some courses and then starting to design my own trials and watching some of them not go so well and actually starting to write up the data. Because when you have to go back and write things up you sort of learn what you didn't do so well in the first place and that actually then sort of in an iterative fashion I find is helping me then do a better job of designing the next trial.

And so it's been a process, an educative process kind of learning as you go and so it's not the medical degree has prepared me to take care of patients and I think to take care of patients in clinical trials and know what the issues around treating patients within the research setting and that my medical degree has prepared me well for that. But the methodological issues has all been new for me and it's really taken time for me to begin to learn how to deal with those issues.