Today’s podcast is on academic life hacks, those tips and tricks we have seen and developed over the years to succeed in academic medicine in fields that are somewhat generalist in nature. While the podcast is meant for fellows and junior faculty, we hope some of it applies to the work that all of our listeners do, even in non-academic settings.  

Why are we doing a podcast on #academiclifehacks?   You will notice that at the start of the podcast, we spent a couple minutes to recognize my co-host, Alex Smith, for a particularly important award he received at the 2021 AGS meeting – the  Thomas and Catherine Yoshikawa Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement in Clinical Investigation.  As part of this award he presented a talk titled "Confessions of an Unfocused Researcher."  We (and when I say we, everyone on this podcast except for Alex who we kept in the dark) thought it would be a good idea both to celebrate Alex’s award and talk about some of the topics he brought up in his talk, as well as other tips and tricks.  

So we asked Lynn Flint and Ken Covinsky from UCSF, and Christopher Langston from Archstone foundation to join Alex and me to talk about our shared tips and tricks to succeed in academic medicine.  In particular we focused on several key issues that new faculty need to address as they start their careers including:

• Academic focus and goals 
• Mentorship (and mentoring up)
• Academic scholarship & writing
• Collaboration & Networking
• Work / Life Balance

We would also love to see your own academic life hacks by sharing them on twitter and adding the hashtag #academiclifehacks to the tweet.