Preparing for Your Yearly Evaluation

July 1st can feel like New Year’s Day in academic medicine. As new learners take the place of the seasoned ones, it’s a natural time for us to take stock of what we’ve accomplished over the past year and think about what we’d like to do differently in the upcoming year. Yearly evaluations with division directors can serve as a jumping-off point toward achieving those goals. Here are 5 steps to your most successful yearly evaluation yet:

1) Once your appointment for your yearly evaluation is set, block some time off to prepare for it. Make these appointments with yourself for a few blocks of an hour or an entire morning/afternoon/day, whatever you think would work best. (And then keep those appointments with yourself!)

2) Update your CV, knowing that done is better than perfect. This work is tedious but not difficult, so plan to do this when your creative energy is low, and you can put on your favorite music and just update away with a cup of your favorite hot drink.

a) Scan through your calendar for the past year and find lectures you gave, meetings you presented at, appointments with learners you mentored, and the like. As you find them, scroll to the appropriate section in your CV, and for this first pass, just get them in there. Do not worry about grammar. Punctuation and standardized spacing can wait for another day. When your CV is complete, and it needs to appear its most professional, engage the skillset of your administrative assistant to arrange the information per your institution’s liking and fix spelling mistakes, grammar, and punctuation.

b) PubMed yourself to find your publications. Copy the citation directly from PubMed and paste it into your CV to ensure standardized citations:

3.) If you’re on a promotion track, look up the requirements for your next promotion. Highlight which requirements you’ve already met. For example:

4.) Look at your CV and get an idea of how much time you spend on non-clinical activities compared to how much you like doing those activities. This helps you gain some clarity, and clarity leads to agency.

Try graphing them out like this:

5.) Consider your goals for the upcoming year. For a primer on SMART goals, look here: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/smart-goals/

6.) Brainstorm some ways to ask your division director for help in accomplishing your goals. They could be introductions to people outside your institution, mobilization of funds to begin a project or identifying resources to allow you to take a sabbatical. Too often, we let the previous experience of hearing “there’s no funding for that” stop us from asking for things that would facilitate our success. You’ll never know until you ask, and even if your division director can’t give you exactly what you want, they may know of a workaround to get you at least part way to what you need.

7.) Have your yearly evaluation!

a) Once you’ve discussed your accomplishments from the past year, your goals for the upcoming one, and asked your division head for resources to help you achieve them, ask them what you may have not considered. Your division head can be an experienced “second set of eyes” when considering your career trajectory and help you avoid pitfalls you may not know to anticipate.

b) End the meeting by asking your division director some version of the question, “Given my goals and career trajectory, what could I accomplish in the next year that would just blow your mind?” If you have any hint of imposter syndrome (which many physicians in academic medicine do), the goals you’re setting for yourself may be too small. Your division director can take their experience in your field, and what they know of you personally and professionally to give you a goal you’ll have to reach to achieve. And even if you don’t achieve that specific goal by your subsequent yearly evaluation, you may find you’ll have achieved more than you’d initially set out to just by borrowing the belief your division has in you that you may not have quite had for yourself 