Dr. Rasim Arikan is balancing the need to have a broad training experience with the pursuit of his interests in the subspecialty area of law and psychiatry. My view is that it is very valuable for residents who are headed for academic careers to get a firm toehold in their area of particular interest during their residency years. This can include structured reading, participation in ongoing research, development of original research, and production of review articles in collaboration with a faculty member.

Of course, none of this can preempt a thorough clinical training experience. Hence in Rasim’s typical day, he spends time in the outpatient clinic with his longer-term patients, many of whom require medications as well as psychotherapy. Moreover, as the chief resident on the inpatient unit, he is intimately involved with inpatient care on a daily basis and receives supervision from the unit’s medical director.

Teaching, as Rasim’s account suggests, is both a skill to be developed and a way of encouraging one’s own learning. He supervises medical students and residents on the inpatient unit, and has taken the initiative to develop the twice-weekly teaching sessions to which he refers, each focused on a particular topic of interest. I believe firmly that residents who learn how to teach during training will be better teachers when they join the faculty. Hence, we try to maximize our residents’ teaching opportunities and hold a yearly teaching retreat for the residents, where we address the skills they need to become excellent teachers.

Rasim took the initiative to approach me about working with him on a project related to law and psychiatry and sought general advice about his career as well. He seemed almost surprised to find himself interested in legal issues in psychiatry, since his Ph.D. work was in biophysics. But he decided to follow his intellectual interests wherever they led. It takes some gumption for a resident to approach a busy department chair seeking this kind of mentorship—but it is the residents who display this self-confidence and focused interest who are worth investing in. So Rasim and I have been working on a paper describing a proposed civil commitment statute in Turkey, where he was born, and expect that we will soon have a manuscript ready for submission.

How determined is Rasim to develop an academic career in law and psychiatry? Determined enough that when an opportunity arose for him to work on a second project in the area about which none of our faculty have particular expertise, he sought out a mentor at another program in our region to help with that project. This is the kind of effort on which academic careers are built.

Next year, Rasim will join our fellowship program in forensic psychiatry, the next step on his career path. He has already been selected as a Rappeport Fellow of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. I look forward to the day when I welcome him as a colleague in our field.

Drs. Arikan and Appelbaum are affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA.