The Q-Kids: Career Lessons

By John R. Nocero, Andrea Bordonaro and Brittany Bonafide

JRN: Brittany asked us to collaborate with her on the biggest lesson we have ever learned in our career. I thought about many; but the one that I settled on was a phrase that my old research administrator used to use it often and it stuck with me:

“I don’t care about your labor pains John. Show me the baby.”

Now that I have achieved a modicum of success that is similar to hers I can finally understand what she means. Get to the point. Get it done. Tell me what happened. Have respect for my time.

Look, here is the thing that people miss: When you achieve a high level of responsibility and professional success, the time is not yours anymore, it is devoted to solving problems and moving at lightning speed, seven days a week. If you don’t like that, then you should not be in the chair. I love it and would not trade it for anything. The deeper meaning in this lesson is, I trusted you to do a job, don’t Joe Buck me and give me a play-by-play, if you need my help, ask. But if not, do your job, let me know what happened and don’t give me a blow-by-blow, just the knockout. It’s a lesson in learning how to manage up. If you have 300 things you are responsible for, I have 3000. Respect my time. Embrace brevity. Get to the point. That was in 2009. Still #1.

ALB: I have thought long and hard about this question because it's so important and so deep to who we are both professionally and personally. I like the idea that staying true to ourselves is of utter importance, in ANY career path. If we show up to work every day and try to be someone we are not, we will get burned out and we will not be successful, nor happy.

One of the biggest lessons that I have learned in all 25 years as an elementary educator is to maintain patience and leave my own personal struggles, concerns, thoughts, etc. at the door when dealing with children and other staff members,?honestly.

The ones who need the most love, attention, and my time are often the ones who act out the most...oftentimes the ones who test our patience on a daily basis, multiple times a day. I literally have to pep talk myself throughout the day to put myself in their shoes and be PATIENT. Try to remember that not every child comes from a loving, supportive, healthy home like my own two daughters. So many children come to school as a safe haven and I want to do my best to foster that with them, regardless of how they "ask" me for it or not - because they may not even consciously do so. I try to tell myself, too, to talk to each and every single child, as difficult as this is at times, as though they are my own.

This has been a valuable lesson for me. I always tell my students' parents at the start of every year that, of course, academics are important in first grade, but it's more of a priority to me that these kids ENJOY learning, like coming to school every day to be with me, and LIKE who they are when they look in the mirror every day. THAT is how I know that I am making a true impact as a teacher and helping them become lifelong learners. I work so hard to create an atmosphere where children feel comfortable taking risks and being themselves within my presence without the fear of being judged or criticized whatsoever.

Patience and making sure that I practice/model what I teach/preach on a daily basis is critical at school if I want to reach this level of success and happiness in my classroom. Lots of this commitment and dedication truly came from being a veteran teacher for over two decades.

BB: Even though I am the one who picked this question, it still makes me think as I don’t have just one right off the top of my head. I have many. But the biggest I have - I think that would have to be to stay genuine. That's really broad right? Yeah, I know. But here is why. When I say stay genuine, it can be applied to many different things, and it should be. Stay genuine to yourself. Stay genuine to your work.

BUT the one that pops in my head that I am most going to push on you is - STAY GENUINE TO YOUR MORALS/ETHICS. Period. Why is this relevant? If you are already working in research you understand that the work we do is important. We are trying to get new and successful treatments to patients who need them. We do our best to get these treatments to patients as safely and as quickly as possible. Here is where your morals will kick in. Our industry is provided a metric ton of regulations that we are supposed to follow, and for good reason (and also yes, metric ton is the official calculation I will be using for this.

It just is - go with it). These regulations are in place to, first and foremost, ensure patient safety. A big one we all know is Good Clinical Practice - or GCP. We know it. It's stuck in our brains like the lyrics to our favorite song, because we train on it yearly and it is our Clinical Research Anthem. There may or may not be times where your ability to follow GCP is tested. Pass the test. Follow the regulations and guidelines. I promise it’s not hard and they are there for a reason. I don’t care about whatever the reason might be. Keep your morals and ethics in place when it comes to this. Stay genuine. You will grow stronger and better for it. Professionally and personally.