Who am I? (and who I used to be?)

Through the years, I´ve been many things. I´ve been an artist, a student, a doctor, an anesthesiologist, a teacher and now I´m trying to be a researcher.

As a kid, I was an amateur musician. I learned to play the flute when I was 10, but then I quit it for good during my adolescence. Then, I dedicated myself to becoming a good doctor. Thanks to all my efforts, I graduated with high honors. In the early 2000s, evidence-based medicine was in vogue, and it had a great influence on my teachers. I guess it also had a great impact on myself, because I worked the last six months of my internship in the Clinical Epidemiology department. I can say that the tenures of evidence-based medicine really captivated me. Perhaps it was only me being naive, but I liked the thought of creating information, instead of only replicating it; It was nice to think I could´ve transformed my field of practice through original research, instead of only consume such research. I guess I could say that I had at that point a very post-positivistic view on research, which was mostly quantitative driven. Love doesn´t last forever, and I quickly became demotivated about following on that path. I was successfully admitted to an anesthesiology program at the same university, and it became increasingly difficult for me to be involved in high-quality studies. I didn’t have the time to do it, neither most of my teachers. It was difficult to find a grant or to find the protected time I need it to get it done. It was also tough to come up with an idea and get the whole research process done. So I also quit it too, just like my flute.

Once I got my Anaesthesiologist degree, I started working at the same teaching hospital. Teaching has been one of my passions throughout my whole life. I used to help both my high school and medicine school friends with those things that appeared difficult for them, but easy for me. I´ve always been comfortable with having students with me, helping them with their struggles and watching them mastering the tasks that initially were deemed as impossible. During the first year of work as attending/teacher, I got caught up in the challenges of teaching and supervising students of all training levels. I wasn´t sure if pursuing a fellow training would be a good idea, but I definitely want it to learn something more. As it was important for me to refine my teaching skills, and my faculty was going through a curriculum redesign and implementation process, I decided to apply to Maastricht University´s Health Professions Education Master programme. And I must say, what a change!. My interests were nurtured and developed by experts in their fields. I received the attention that I would love to have in the biomedical research. Also, I was lucky enough to have found great teachers that also loved to research. So I was lured into qualitative research in medical education, or what my supervisor and I call “the dark side of the force”. I understood that most of my challenges as supervisor needed immediate answers and that it was a field still under study. I also realized how insufficient was (at least at this stage) to keep looking at those problems with a post-positivistic lens.

Most of my research is driven by a constructivist paradigm. I believe that learning is participating, and that learners acquire a great sense of their reality by being part of a community, where knowledge is generated by the relationships and dynamics of their participants. Most of this vantage point have been influenced by the works of Stephen Billett, Michael Eraut, Renée Stalmeijer, Pim Teunissen and Tim Dornan. Fascinated by the idea of becoming a real researcher, and being able to produce knowledge that could change other teachers and supervisors practices, I decided then to embark on this new adventure of becoming a Ph.D. in health professions education. I should say it is a lot easier that I thought, thanks to the excellent support of my supervisors, Diana Dolmans and Renée Stalmeijer. It is funny, but I often can´t help noticing the parallels between the type of supervision I´m researching (medical supervision) and the one those two are providing me. After all, teaching and learning are almost universal concepts, which are present in most of our social dynamics. In that sense, I feel lucky to have found such a good research nest. Let´s see who I become next.