From OR to A&P: Two Docs, One Mission

In this inspiring episode of The Adjunct Files, hosts John Roth and Maggie Hohne sit down with two retired physicians turned FGCU adjunct professors: Dr. Lou Broslovsky (OBGYN) and Dr. Andrew Berkow (Radiologist). What began as a post-retirement golf friendship evolved into a shared passion for teaching anatomy and physiology to the next generation of healthcare professionals.

The duo reflects on:

• Their unconventional paths into adjunct teaching
• The challenges and rewards of transitioning from clinical practice to the classroom
• Active learning strategies like flipped classrooms, concept mapping, and clinical case studies
• The evolving preparedness of students entering healthcare fields
• The essential soft skills—like empathy, communication, and time management—that future professionals need
• The deep satisfaction of mentoring students and witnessing their growth

With humor, humility, and heart, Drs. Broslovsky and Berkow show how adjunct teaching can be a powerful form of giving back—and how lifelong learning never retires.

Theme music composed, performed and produced by James Husni.

Adjunct Nation is a collaborative podcast under the auspices of The Lucas Center for Faculty Development at FGCU. You can learn more by clicking on this link:

https://www.fgcu.edu/lucascenter/

Transcript

Welcome to the Adjunct Files.

We're a growing, diverse community who face challenging work in an ever-changing, higher education landscape.

Your co-hosts for this podcast are with you in this.

I'm John Roth, Adjuncts since 2015 and now a coordinator for Adjunct Faculty at Florida Gulf Coast University.

I'm Maggie Hohne, Adjunct since 2022 and currently work in the office of first-year seminars.

Together we hope to have conversations to empower, support, and elevate Adjunct Faculty.

This conversation today is one to do just that.

Welcome back to the Adjunct Files. John, how are you?

Good and boy rushed.

It's the second week now and we are moving at a very rapid speed.

Yeah, students are great. At this point in time everybody's great, right?

Yes.

It's been fantastic having the students back. We have a fantastic new cohort that's here on campus, that's really live in the campus up.

And I think it's only appropriate that we have our own set of dynamic duo Adjunct Faculty with us today.

Absolutely. What duo they are. We have two that teach here in anatomy and physiology and are just doing a dynamic job.

Dr. Broslowski, would you like to introduce yourself and then your recruit, I guess, cohort as well?

Andrew can come in after that.

Well, thank you for inviting us to this podcast. I'm Lou Broslowski. I'm a retired OBGYN 33-year clinical experience up in the Hudson Valley of New York.

Oh, wow.

And I retired in 2010. This is my 15th year teaching here at FGCU as an Adjunct.

An interesting little side-light story that goes with that and how I got here is that when we came down here after I retired in the fall of 2010, we came down and got our place all set up.

And I felt like there was something missing in my life at that point after 33 years of clinical practice.

It was difficult to get adjusted to not seeing patients and running around and having a full schedule.

So interestingly enough, our golf pro was at that time teaching in the golf management program.

And he said to me, why don't you get online and go to the human resources over at FGCU and see if there may be a part-time position, maybe teaching.

So sure enough, I went on human resources. I saw a position Adjunct Professor, Anatomy and Physiology.

So I call because I have no clue what Adjunct actually meant and what my obligation might be.

Right. Well, we still don't know what Adjunct is all about being here.

So the person who received my phone call said to me, oh, that's just part-time and no benefits. And I said, that's perfect.

I said, how do I set that up? And she told me what to do about getting my credentials in.

And she said, you'll be notified by the Dean of the Mirab College of Health Professions and the head professor that you would be teaching under.

And about a month goes by three or four weeks after I supplied them with all my information and application.

And I said to my wife one night, I said, you know, I haven't heard, I wonder if I should get in touch with them, but they said they'd get in touch with me.

Sure enough, the next morning I get a phone call. Are you still interested in the position? And I said, sure.

So we set up an appointment. I came in. The other cute little story was I came in for an interview dressed in a tie in a jacket.

And I walk in and there's the Dean of our college at the time. And on my head professor, they're in a pair of khakis and an open shirt, a golf shirt.

And they look at me and they go, oh, you're overdressed. And I said, well, I come to interviews dressed like that. Is there a dress code here?

So they said, we just want you to distinguish yourself from the students by not wearing shorts or sandals.

But that's about what the dress code is. So I had the interview. They offered me the job right on the spot.

I didn't have to wait. They just nodded to each other and they said, okay, would you be interested in taking the position? I said, sure.

So that was my beginning. 15 years ago. 15 years ago as a retired OBGYN teaching anatomy and physiology.

Andrew, so how in the world did you enter into this? You've been teaching the same type of course, right?

Lou and I were playing golf for many years. I was a radiologist and I practiced in Davenport, Iowa for 40 years.

And I retired in 2019. But I'd been spending the winters down here since about 2015.

And Lou and I became good friends and we played golf almost every day. And when a position became available, he recommended me to the program to take that position.

Wow. That's the way it works, doesn't it, Maggie? It's all about who you know. It is. It's all those connections and relationships.

That's why I told my students. I'm like, I'm not crazy, I promise. Talk to the people around you.

So my path has somewhat deviated from Lou's since we've been here. I started out just like Lou teaching lab.

About a year later, the course coordinator came to me and said, would you want to teach lecture instead of laboratory?

And I ended up now I'm teaching four CRNs of lecture. Wow. You're teaching 12 credits of lecture? Yes.

Wow. You're a rock star. Wait a minute. Yeah. You're like. That's crazy. High level.

And it's not like my fun SLS classes where I teach students how to write professional emails.

You're teaching some intense and depth content. That's amazing. Yeah.

Well, it's good to have the two of you here. What was it like Dr. Broslowski? Or should I call you?

Dr. B. or Lou? Dr. B. Whatever you like. Okay. I answered anything. Well, maybe not. Hey, you. But, Lou, what was it like at the beginning here 15 years ago teaching?

I mean, what resources were you given? What support?

Well, this is another cute little story. They told me that they would supply me a textbook and the syllabus.

And then it was up to me to present the information. Here's the syllabus. Here's the calendar. And this is what you have to do.

But that was the only structure that I had. So they said, well, you can use some power points and so forth.

And I have to tell you, embarrassingly, I never did a power point before I came here.

When I was in college back in the dark ages, we didn't have things like that. We had Kodachrome slides in a projector in a circular projector.

Right. But I never really created anything like that. So when I just kind of finesse my way through the interview and I said, oh, I'll take care of all that.

That's not a problem. And as soon as I got out, I have a son of 43-year-old son who is in IT, up in Massachusetts.

So I called him on the phone and I said, this is an emergency. I said, I need to have a tutorial from you about how to create power points.

He said, Dad, don't worry about it. Just go on YouTube and YouTube will tell you everything you have to know.

How long have you been down in Southwest Florida, though? You said since 2015-ish?

I've been full-time since 2019. We've actually owned a home here since 2007.

Oh, wow. Okay. From Iowa.

From Iowa. Wow. A New Yorker and an Iowan get together and play golf.

They meet on a golf course.

There's got to be a punchline. There's got to be some joke. He's originally a New Yorker. I was originally.

How did you end up in Iowa? That's a long story.

Okay. Maybe diverging from the topic today. It's fascinating. Our Merib College of Health Professions here has really grown a lot and needs to expand a lot more.

I think our next building is going to be the largest on campus and focused on medical health professions, etc.

You've seen a lot of students. Have they changed blue over the years?

Yes. I think that the quality students every year kind of self-select themselves.

There's always a handful of students that come through every semester that are just outstanding students and whatever their circumstances were, they wound up at FGCU. They would have been successful anyplace.

But what I've seen is over the years that the newer group, I would say the last five to ten years, the group of students that are coming out of the high schools are a lot less well equipped to deal with college level at least at the beginning.

They don't have the skill set.

That's what Maggie kind of works with, right?

That gets a little bit disappointing because their philosophy is that, oh well, if I'm not performing well, it's okay.

It's not okay because it's a health care field. I tell them that. One of the advantages that at least my sphere of friends are that we know from being successful practitioners what it takes to become a successful practitioner.

And these students don't have those qualities at the beginning. And I feel a need to give back and to make sure that they know what's involved and what their commitments need to be.

Andrew, do you see the same kind of factors in the students?

Yes, the students kind of fall into three groups. Maybe the top 20% are here. They know what they want. They know how to get it.

They have the skills that they've developed to study and to learn. And then the bottom 20% who don't have a clue.

And then the middle?

The middle, they're malleable. They're able to learn how to become a health care professional and the dedication that it takes.

A lot of students these days, they are all doing participation trophies throughout their lives. They don't know how to not be in the middle.

They need to learn how to excel. And a lot of them don't have that skill or desire to excel.

And a participation trophy is not what I wanted a nurse or a doctor.

More respectfully now.

I did okay. Most of my patients have lived. I'm being a little snarky.

Maggie, I mean, you are working with the students that might be not quite given the resources in high school to thrive in college.

What do you see that they need?

Yeah. So one of the courses that I teach is effective learning. So these students are taking one of our gateway courses this fall semester.

So maybe it's human systems, biology, AMP, chem, pre-calc, those gateway courses.

And these students take effective learning as kind of a supplement to the course. So we talk about active learning strategies.

How to stay engaged when your lectures feel like they're 10 hours long.

And we don't see each other every day like in high school. So we need to be really intentional about the time that we spend together in the classroom.

Talking about mindset, overcoming setbacks, and what do you actually want to do long term?

Do your goals and your values actually align with what you want as a career? Are you willing to do what it takes in order to get there?

And kind of just breaking down all the little details of is this actually what you want? Because it's going to be hard.

It's going to be hard. No, I'm not going to lie to you. It's going to be difficult. You're going to fail. You're going to learn.

But you need to be in it for the right reasons. Because it's a, I mean, I feel like healthcare is a lifelong commitment almost.

I spend about a third of my first lecture each semester talking about these exact things. How do I study? How do I learn?

How do I approach taking tests? What do I need to do to succeed in this class? I don't know if that message gets through.

But it's important for them to know that it's not just showing up. It's showing up and being present, right? Being involved and being aware.

And then taking the time on their own to do the work necessary to succeed.

That's a big disconnect that I've seen. It's that time they're so used to that hands-on. We're with you from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday.

So now that they're on their own, they're like, oh, I have to study by myself and learn all this stuff I didn't prep for before I went into class.

I have to re-teach myself now. I don't think they understand that it's a time commitment before class, during class and after class.

It's not just you swipe in for your shift in the classroom and then you're good to go afterwards. It's everything else.

One of the things we've strived to do in A&P 1 at least, and I know that this may be true also in A&P 2, is to kind of do a flipped classroom where our students are required to do pre-work.

Right. Yeah, I think Dr. Nick Colof was telling us about that. Could you just fan?

She was in a podcast with us on this. So go ahead.

So what we've done in A&P 1 is one summer I took my whole summer and took our basic PowerPoint presentations that are given to the students on Canvas and put them into a recorded pre-lecture.

And the students are required to watch that pre-lecture and then to do an activity. And my students either do a concept map or a study guide.

Those are submitted and graded. So at least by the time they get to the lecture, they will have been exposed to the material.

And then at the end of the lecture, there is a quiz. So they're prepared for that quiz because they've done the pre-lecture material and heard the lecture.

And I think Nicky had said...

You really improved your DFW rates for that course, right?

Yes, we have a very good DFW rate.

That is...and DFW just for people who might not know, it's D's F's are withdrawals from the course.

One of the things that was always a problem until we kind of developed this system was the students wouldn't prepare for the topic of the module that we're discussing.

And they'd come in cold. And we kept saying we got to try to do something to at least have them review and familiarize themselves.

They don't have to know all the detailed information, but familiarize themselves with it.

And we came up with this suggestion of preparation prior to class and make it an obligation where they also gain points for successfully doing it.

And it really has made a major difference.

I love how you all have that sandwich because yes, there's accountability before the lesson with the concept mapped in things, but you're holding them accountable with that quiz.

You may have some time in class to ask your questions about what you don't understand, but you still have to do a lot of that pre and prep work.

The other thing we've tried to do in A&P1, and I can only speak to the A&P1 that I teach, is that we are trying to make our lectures, which are two and a half hours long.

Oh my.

More interactive.

So I include in my lecture group activities, I have 64 students in a lecture.

So I divide them into 12 groups, and each group gets questions that each group has to answer and then present to the class.

Or we draw a picture, say, of a cell, and then I go around the room and say, okay, something on your picture, tell us one thing about the cell, and what does it do, and how does it work.

And we go around the room, and each group has to present.

Also, this semester I've incorporated something new.

I'm doing polls, group polls.

Kind of as an introduction to each section of the lecture.

I'll ask a question about that next section, see what people think, and everybody can see the answers.

And then we go through that section.

Cool.

These are all active learning strategies, Maggie, right?

Yeah, good stuff.

AP2, which I teach, is more the internal organs, and a lot of the clinical stuff that a lot of these students, you know, from a medical point of view are somewhat familiar with certain disease processes.

So what I do, I put out clinical scenarios of patient presentations based on the fundamentals of what we talked for the course.

Cool.

And we have groups in our lab, we have it set up as groups of four.

So I give a clinical scenario to one table of four and say, okay, you got the next 15, 20 minutes to apply what we've been talking about.

And you can now understand or explain to the person what their problem is and what the fundamentals are.

So we just finished concluding last week, we start with endocrinology.

So diabetes was a big topic.

So I said, you watch a television commercial for one of these GLP1 weight reductions, but also for control of diabetes.

Does anybody here know anything about diabetes in terms of how you control it and so forth?

And most of the students don't know anything about it.

And I talk about hemoglobin A1C, you hear it on the commercial.

Well, what is hemoglobin A1C?

So by the end of the class, they're able to explain what it is and what the norms or the ab normals are.

So that's the interactive stuff that I like to do.

Cool, that's case studies. This is truly a flipped classroom.

Well, the advantages were MVs that had a clinical career.

Yeah, so you've got a lot of case studies.

The beauty of the adjunct.

And this is the difference between lecture, which I teach and lab, which Lou teaches.

He's able to do things like that.

I don't, but I'm able to draw upon my clinical experience and tell stories during the lecture about different things I've encountered.

I've encountered over the years related to the topic of that week's lecture.

Do you find that students have a lot of questions about your career and experience working in the healthcare industry?

Just because your careers are double as long as these students have been alive.

Well, you were just a treasure trove of...

I'm laughing because virtually the class is made up mostly of nursing students, or let's put it this way.

Most of the class percentage-wise are females.

So knowing that I've been a career in OBGYN, yes, the answer is...

They bring to me privately some of their concerns along the way as well.

But I want to interject something.

Being a golfer, haolek, I read all these books on golf.

There is a gentleman from California, and I'm not touting his book or anything like that, but he's a guru on how people learn.

His name is Fred Shoemaker, and he wrote a book called Extraordinary Golf.

And I presented it on the board the first day of class, and I said, how do people learn?

Just generically, how do they learn?

Well, they learn what they want to learn.

That's the first thing.

So you've made a choice as a student to get into health sciences.

So that's your first choice.

And you want to learn about health science, okay?

But it also has to be relevant, and it has to be interesting.

And there needs to be this fascination about health care and health science so that when the days are tough, and the material is tough to digest and learn, you have this fascination.

So my job, and I tell the students this, is that on day one, I'm going to hold myself responsible for making everything relevant.

Whatever you're learning fundamentally, it's got to be relevant to the task at hand, and it's got to be meaningful to you.

So if I don't do that, then I haven't succeeded at teaching what I want to get across.

And you said the book.

It's called Extraordinary Golf, but it's really not about golf.

It's about learning.

Learning.

But tell me, how is your golf extraordinary now?

Extraordinary, man.

I would think the difference is a very good golfer.

You're such good friends.

Yes, we are.

That's also awesome because being an adjunct can feel very isolating, and to have someone who's like a compatriot to bounce ideas off of the world.

This is great.

I'd love to see this.

Well, we're unique in our department.

I don't know where you're coming from with being so isolated.

We communicate with each other daily, and we're talking about the entire anatomy and physiology faculty.

That is awesome.

So somebody throws out an email, then there's a whole series of emails in response.

So are you all, I don't want to say lumped in with the faculty, but they like the full-time faculty instructors.

But do they essentially treat you all like we're all on the same team?

We're all teaching the same courses and on the email or just kind of depends on the team.

Oh, well, pretty much so.

Our full-time, our full-timers, Dr. Weiss and Dr. Kay, there are really our full-time faculty.

Oh, it's just those two.

Yeah, that are full-time.

Everybody else's part-time.

Well, Karen now, she just came on this year as full-time, Dr. Polk.

Okay.

And Dr. Kay used to be at John.

Yeah, she was.

So she understands it.

I mean, I preceded all of these people.

I know.

You've been around.

Thank you.

You've been behind.

One topic I thought we'd really want to talk about, and that is just expectations of students as they come into the medical department.

And how you help them understand what the reality is these days.

What is expected of the professionalism and the commitment and the care that any health profession needs to do?

I don't know if many students understand professionalism in general coming in.

They want to do it because, well, they know somebody who was.

They've had experience because they needed it themselves or they saw the significance you can do with it.

So how do you deal with bringing them to the reality of the demands of the field?

Like managing their expectations almost.

I'm not sure that that is our job.

We are teaching foundational information.

Yeah.

And integration.

Okay.

So what we're doing is giving them the knowledge they need to get to the next step, say nursing school or PT school or sports medicine school.

And I believe that's probably where they learn the things you're talking about.

Okay.

The expectations of what it takes to be a nurse.

What does it take to be a physical therapist?

I'm commitment.

What mindset?

I don't know that that's really our job at the.

Foundational intro level.

But it'd be good if they learned it before they.

Like do they ask questions about it?

Like those students who they have known since they've opened their eyes what they want to be in their committed.

Do they ask about your experiences and just what it takes?

And we talk about our experiences and we relate our experiences to the material of that week.

But I don't know that we are actually kind of teaching them what it takes to be a nurse.

Right.

I think more like John is asking about those foundational skills, the communication, the empathy, working in a team if you might have opposing viewpoints.

I'm sure doctors don't agree with each other all the time.

Well, you know, it's interesting you say that.

Like more of the soft transferable skills.

For this semester I sat over the summer and I was thinking about what are the skill sets that makes a successful healthcare professional.

Whatever line of work in the healthcare field.

And I came up with a couple of things and I project this information to why some people are successful or not.

One is to be a very good listener.

You're going to be dealing with clients or patients and you better have a good ability to listen to patients when they tell you their story.

Whatever it is that's bringing you that they're coming to you for help.

So a listener is really important.

As Judge Judy would say, put your listening ears on.

Communication skills is the second thing.

A lot of students do not have good communication skills and it goes back, I think, even before COVID.

But certainly COVID completely crashed and burned people's abilities to have communication skills with everybody else because they don't interact with anybody.

But even preceding that a lot of them don't know how to communicate well with either colleagues, healthcare professionals and or their students.

So you need a good communication skill and that's where I feel an obligation to make sure that these people develop that.

I also interact with LAs that want to be learning assistants and some of them have turned out to be excellent and some of them just don't have that skill set of being able to communicate the information that I want them to present to the class.

The other one is time management.

Everybody has a problem with time management but it's a big obligation.

Whether you're learning it at the beginning now or if you're in a clinical scenario, you've got to know how to balance your time and to make it worthwhile.

If you're going to be in private practice and you have to see a patient every 15 minutes, you've got to make the most of your time.

So time management is important and it's also for your own personal time.

You've got to program in to make yourself healthy, both eating well, sleeping well and exercising just to keep yourself that way.

The other two things for a skill set for me are being respectful.

Even though you may not agree with what somebody's telling you or another colleague wants to represent, you've got to be respectful of their opinion, not that you have to agree with it.

And the other is you've got to show a lot of empathy.

And a lot of students just don't have that skill. They don't have those skill sets yet.

But to be a successful healthcare provider, if you can be a good listener, a good communicator, manage your time well, be respectful and have empathy, you're going to be very successful.

Maggie, these sound like some of our QEP, doesn't it?

They do, absolutely. Our transferable skills, digital badging, leadership, teamwork, communication.

But those are all things that the students can practice in both of your classes, like everywhere, every day. They're just good habits and good skills to have.

And this is why we've developed some of the techniques we're using, the group activities.

Right, you have them stand and present, right?

Yes.

When I got out in my profession, I found all this stuff I was never taught in school that I had all of a sudden be good at.

I have a feeling, even in the medical field, right, for doctors, you got out and you have residencies and all this stuff.

But what were the things that were missing in your education that you had to like figure out on your own?

The scariest day, the scariest thing I've done was the first time I was in practice by myself.

Yes.

And I had to read a chest x-ray all by myself.

Oh my goodness.

No faculty member sitting next to me. Nobody proofing my report. My name goes on the bottom.

So I stared at that thing for 20 minutes.

Which is something that would normally take you five.

Wow.

We never learn the responsibility of doing things totally on your own until you're out.

Wow.

I would say that that's probably very true. You learn all the didactics. You have a good fundamental of the knowledge base that you need.

But then all of a sudden you go, oh my God, I'm the last decision maker here and I have to make the decision.

It rests with me and there's nobody else.

But I don't want people who are listening to this podcast to think that they're really out there isolated on an island.

There's a lot of collegiality.

Right.

Always somebody to call to help you out. So it's not that way.

But at three o'clock in the morning when you're the nurse on the floor with a skeletal crew and a patient is going sour, going badly.

You have to make some assessments before you call in the troops because you want to make the correct assessments.

And that's kind of where you segregate the good from the bad as far as being a health care provider.

Can you stand on your feet, make some judgments? They don't all have to be correct.

And in fact, we alluded to at the beginning, it's a group effort.

I like to think as medicine, as a team sport in the sense that when you present your information,

respectfully say, okay, you have your opinion, you have your opinion, you have your opinion.

And at the end of the day, we have to come up with a decision and it rests with the person who's in charge.

It's almost getting comfortable being a bit uncomfortable about some of that.

Very much so.

Well, when you were saying I stared at it for 20 minutes, my stomach just dropped.

I was like, I can only imagine you've done all this work all this time.

You feel confident and you're like, hello?

Is there anyone else?

But granted, just within those first minutes, you explained that you're not actually alone.

No, you're never fully alone.

It's just like a sobering moment like, oh, this is real now.

I'm in charge.

Exactly.

There's always somebody you can ask.

Yeah.

I just wanted to, he talked about his scary moment.

Here's my scary moment.

The first time I did a major surgery for a gynecologist is a hysterectomy.

So the woman is in the holding area getting ready to go into the OR.

And she with her husband standing there says to me, can I ask you a personal question?

So I said, sure, fire away.

So they said, is this your first hysterectomy in private practice?

And I didn't know initially how to respond, but I was truthful.

I said, I've done a lot of hysterectomies, but with supervision, this will be my first

one that I am in charge.

And she then cutely said to break the ice, she said, when you were in medical school,

did you get an A in hysterectomy?

That's a valid question.

So I just wanted you to know, I mean, it's very intimidating when you're first starting

out and making decisions.

Now, maybe the flip side rewards, like just what have you gotten the most out of?

Tell me what some of the rewards have been for that.

And then also the rewards of being an adjunct because you could just play golf all day and

be fine with a lot of other people in this area.

Yeah, y'all moved here to retire the first time.

Something happened to me this week that made me realize how great it is to be a teacher.

Okay.

I was walking from my lecture to my car last Monday and three nursing students walked up

to me and said, oh, you are our A and P one teacher.

Thank you.

And I said, oh, you're all in nursing school now.

I'm so proud.

And that was such a warm and rewarding moment.

And that's what it means to be an adjunct.

Yeah, to be given back that way, because it ain't the paycheck.

Yeah, and they saw you.

They were like, we need to say hi.

That's right.

We made it to the other side.

Lou, you've done it for 15 years.

So what have been the rewarding things about being an adjunct?

Well, I started out really just with a desire to want to give back.

Yeah.

So I can remember my very first year, one of the students in the class was changing his

major to nursing.

And I said to him toward the end of the semester, I said, you know, I don't think that you should

just settle for and mind you, nursing needs quality people.

But I said, you have the ingredients here to actually, if you're interested, motivated,

and you want to devote the time to go a little bit, push yourself a little further.

So he said, well, what do you mean?

I said, you're medical school material.

Okay.

And he looked at me and I said, no, I'm being very serious.

I think that you could possibly be an excellent, successful physician at some point in time.

This is my first year, 15 years ago.

I said, think about it.

I said, discuss it with your family.

Obviously there's financial responsibilities, the time that you got to devote to go to medical

school and so forth.

So he came back the next week and he said to me, I did have that conversation with my

parents and they said, they'll help see me through and help me with loans and whatever

financially they could do.

He said, I think you really sparked my interest in wanting to do that.

So fast forward.

He just got married.

He is a board certified emergency medicine physician up in Tampa.

I follow him all the time.

It was just one of those kind of situations where he wasn't even thinking about it.

It wasn't on his radar screen and I kind of put the bee in his bonnet, so to speak,

to think about it.

And he actually went ahead and proceeded.

But over 15 years, I've seen a lot of successful nurse practitioners, nurse inethicists, other

physicians.

I must have in the 15 years, I probably have 10 or 15 doctors that came through anatomy

and physiology that evolved what they weren't thinking about doing being successful physicians.

Wow.

I love that.

You saw in them what they didn't see in themselves and they responded and what a difference that

has made.

One conversation, you changed the whole trajectory of his life and his family's life.

Yeah.

And just taking what?

15 minutes out of your day?

Right.

Yeah.

The other thing about the profession, people ask me all the time, what do they get out of

my profession?

Being a physician defines me.

It's not a job to me.

It's my passion.

And it really defines who I am by what I did rather than just simply say, well, you know,

healthcare, you can make a good living and don't have that passion.

And that's true.

Okay.

I also was involved with the PA program here for a number of years.

And it's the same thing.

These students at the master's level have already cast their a lot, so to speak.

And I do basically, I did the same thing with them talking about where their responsibilities

are as a healthcare provider as a physician assistant.

Cool.

Andrew, how about you, other rewards in your profession?

In my profession.

Yeah.

There were great rewards taking a patient who has a problem that needs to be solved.

Yeah.

And either doing a procedure to solve that problem and how you look at them and they look at

you when you're done, you say, we're successful, you're going to be fine.

The relief on their faces and the joy that they feel just comes right back at you or

taking a difficult diagnostic problem and saying, here's a person who has this problem.

They don't know what's causing it.

Do a few tests and solve the problem for them.

And then they know what's wrong.

Yeah.

And it can be cured.

Awesome.

Maggie, what are you thinking about all this?

I just think it's amazing.

You are the ultimate scholar practitioners and we're very lucky to have you here.

What's some advice that you have for our students who maybe are starting AMP one this semester?

And they might find their studies or trying to figure out what they want to do daunting

because healthcare is such a large umbrella.

You could do anything I feel like.

Ask for help.

Okay.

Don't just fold in on yourself and say, I can't do this.

Talk to your teachers.

Go to these SI classes.

Talk to the SI leaders.

They're here to help you.

We're here to help you.

I will tell you that what keeps me coming back is the students.

The students are a hoot.

They have fun.

They keep us young.

They're funny.

They do.

They keep us an old guy like me young.

That's awesome.

And there's so much positive energy coming towards the front of the room during those

classes.

Really building that community.

Absolutely.

We need, I think, to do a better job sometimes here of broadcasting just those kind of intangible

rewards so that others can get in on the fun.

You know?

Lou, you did it for Andrew.

Yeah.

I just feel the obligation to give back.

And it's energizing to be around young students who are actually forcing as physicians.

We're constantly reading.

We're trying to keep ourselves updated on information because that's just the way we

were brought up basically in our DNA.

And this opportunity gives us that ability to partake in being challenged for the information

by the students.

They come up with wacky questions that are perfectly okay.

And if we don't have the answer, we're going to find the answer.

Okay?

That's kind of the challenge.

But one of the cute first class students said to me one time, said, well, Dr. B, why did

you take on this teaching position?

You bored with your life?

I said, no, I'm not bored with my life.

It's just that I feel that I feel a need to have something that is challenging, constantly

challenging.

And I miss my patients.

I miss my patients.

So I've substituted my patients for you, the students.

Okay?

The other thing is as a physician, all of our lives, all of our professional lives from

the day we started medical school until the day we finished, someone was teaching us.

Some other person was helping us along.

And if you look at the Hippocratic oath, within the Hippocratic oath is the obligation to

teach.

And we have been presented with the great opportunity to fulfill that obligation by being adjunct

here.

Certainly, like you said, it's not the financial aspect of it.

But then again, we've had successful careers.

So it's not the interest in doing this wasn't for the job and an income because that would

be an oxymoron.

That wouldn't even come to pair.

It really truly is something of a passion.

Everybody that is working in our department, I can't say about all the other departments,

but for our department, it's really the passion of wanting to teach and imparting

this information to the students and having students success.

This has been a great discussion, right Maggie?

100%.

And now I'm like, wow, I'm interested in health care now.

I know nothing about science or math.

But if I'm passionate, maybe.

I've got a spot in my class.

Maybe next semester.

I'm already taking two classes.

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for being with us today.

I think a lot of people will learn not just about the medical field, but just about how

lifelong learning can be a part of anyone's DNA and also active learning that you are

bringing about in your classroom setting and the practical clinical experiences that you've

had really benefits the students.

You are a real perk to have here at FGCU.

That's a fantastic asset.

Well, thank you.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, this is great.

Thanks so much.

The music for Adjunct Nation was composed, performed and produced by James Husney.