Brief Bio
We’re asked to submit brief bios when giving a talk or writing a grant. Filled with scores—if not hundreds—of peer-reviewed articles and dozens of awards, these bios are meant to establish credentials and impress the audience. But they present only one side of the story. No one ever hears about the sacrifices, wrong turns, bad decisions, and outright failures that make up the substance of an objectively successful career. Bios gloss over how hard it can be, and how we all falter. In this way, our brief bios do an enormous disservice, in particular to our trainees, who today more than ever depend on us to be authentic and unafraid.
Brief Bio
David Muller, M.D. is the Dean for Medical Education, Professor of Medical Education and Medicine, and the Marietta and Charles C. Morchand Chair for Medical Education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His recent honors include the 2015 Alpha Omega Alpha Robert J. Glaser Distinguished Teacher Award and the 2009 American Medical Association (AMA) Foundation Pride in the Profession Award. Under his leadership, the Icahn School of Medicine was recognized with the AAMC Spencer Foreman Community Service Award in 2009. He was inducted into the Gold Humanism Honor Society in 2004 and into Alpha Omega Alpha in 1995. Dr. Muller co-founded the Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors Program in 1995. Visiting Doctors is now the largest academic physician home visiting program in the country. Dr. Muller has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in high-impact journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and Academic Medicine. Dr. Muller received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and his M.D. from the New York University School of Medicine. He completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, where he spent an additional year as Chief Resident. In 2005 Dr. Muller was appointed Dean for Medical Education and the Marietta and Charles C. Morchand Chair in Medical Education.
Real Bio
My parents immigrated to the United States when I was five years old. Neither of them finished grade school. I applied to college and was rejected from all but one: Johns Hopkins. In retrospect, I think Hopkins accepted me in part because I was the first in my family to attend college.
At Hopkins, I relied heavily on financial aid and worked odd jobs every summer to help pay for tuition and living expenses. Having no prior knowledge of Hopkins’s reputation—and even less understanding of how to choose a major—I was swept along in the University’s cutthroat culture and followed in the footsteps of my mostly pre-med roommates. In my four years at Hopkins, I did no meaningful research or community service, held no leadership positions on campus, and never shadowed a clinician. I survived because of my determination to prove to myself and others that I was just as deserving to be there as my peers.
As a mediocre test taker, the MCAT was the most stressful experience of my young adult life. I studied for months, obsessed over every detail of the exam, and recall this period with no fondness whatsoever.
I was accepted to the NYU School of Medicine, choosing to defer admission for one year to get married and work as a lab technician while my wife finished her final year of college. My first two years of medical school were miserable. I struggled academically and came close to quitting on two occasions. My wife and I had a son, the first of six boys, during winter break of first year. Having a baby at home was bittersweet. The baby made life worth living, but being away from my family for countless hours made life unbearable.
At the end of second year, I failed Step 1. It was a devastating blow to my confidence and self-esteem, and felt like a culmination of all my doubts and insecurities. I took this failure as a sign that I wasn’t cut out for a career in medicine; however, I had only failed by a few points and was allowed to continue medical school without having to retake the exam.
The clerkship year was a far better experience and restored my faith in myself. Some of the clerkships were a nightmare (OB/GYN), others were tolerable (pediatrics, psychiatry), and some were a joy (surgery, medicine). I excelled in my surgery clerkship and decided to apply to general surgery. Just before submitting my applications, I realized, with a toddler in my lap and son #2 on the way, that choosing general surgery meant putting my family on the line. Some of the training programs I most admired even bragged about their house-staff divorce rates. With all this in mind, I tore up the applications and chose to apply to my second favorite specialty: internal medicine.
In searching for the right residency, all of the internal medicine programs that offered me an interview fit into one of two categories: (1) outstanding academics with a rigid, hierarchical culture or (2) middle-of-the-road training with the flexibility to live a “normal” life outside of residency. The two exceptions were Mount Sinai’s Internal Medicine program in New York City and Johns Hopkins’ Bayview Primary Care program in Baltimore. My wife was hoping to return to Baltimore, her hometown where her entire family still lived. Her eventual contribution to my Match rank list was, “do what you think is best,” so I ranked Sinai first and Bayview second. When I opened the envelope with her, I realized that I got my wish but she did not get hers: one of the innumerable sacrifices she would end up making during my training and professional career.
Residency was wonderful and brutal at the same time. The hours seemed endless, the human suffering limitless, but every day ended with a sense of accomplishment. I performed admirably, rarely the smartest one on the team but often the hardest working and happiest to be there. As a PGY-2 I made it on the short list for Chief Resident but ultimately was not chosen, only to be appointed Chief a year later when one of the residents who had been selected transferred to an anesthesiology residency.
I had fallen in love with cardiology in my first month of internship in the Coronary Care Unit and was accepted into a cardiology fellowship during my third year of residency. By the time I was Chief Resident I was having second thoughts. My wife and I had three sons, money was tight, and I was tired of training. I still loved Cardiology but realized that as a primary care physician I would be managing plenty of heart disease without needing the extra training.
After a great deal of soul-searching, meetings with my cardiology mentor and the Chair of Medicine, I decided to give up my fellowship spot. My meeting to inform the program of my decision did not go well. The senior cardiologist was furious and told me that I was making the worst career decision of my life. The meeting left me shaken, but also relieved that I would not be working in an environment that treated people that way.
During my year as Chief Resident, I fell in love with medical education. In that same year, I counseled lots of residents who were burnt out and dreading a career that they feared could be worse than their training. During one of these counseling sessions, two second- year residents and I hatched the idea of incorporating more humanistic pursuits into the residency experience. Of the many ideas that we proposed—book clubs, museum visits, and lessons on the history of medicine - one caught on: seeing homebound patients on home visits. We knew nothing about grant funding and had no vision or strategic plane, but with guidance from the Little Sisters of the Assumption, an order of nuns who were registered home care nurses, the Visiting Doctors Program was born.
Towards the end of my Chief year I took, and failed, Step 3 of the boards. It was demoralizing but by this time I had developed enough confidence in my abilities that the failure did not completely derail me.
In 2005, about ten years after completing residency, I was invited to interview for the role of Dean for Medical Education at my institution. Although I had taught many medical students on their clerkship rotations, I had primarily been involved in resident education. I had no working knowledge of curriculum development, the student life cycle, budgets, hiring and firing, or accreditation standards. Being considered for this leadership role made no sense: I had never held a major leadership position and felt completely unqualified for the Dean’s position. My only major academic accomplishment in the first decade of my career was presenting a provocative grand rounds on the failure of professionalism in medicine. The talk itself was polarizing, garnering both standing ovations from some audiences and furious backlash from some faculty. When I asked why I was invited to apply, the committee told me that the Student Council requested my consideration for the position because I was a universally well-liked teacher.
Since 2005, I have been serving as the Dean for Medical Education. I continue to fail in large and small ways, make mistakes, and strive to learn from those experiences on a daily basis.
