Your Unapologetic Career Podcast
Your Unapologetic Career Podcast
167 Coaching Client Spotlight: Deepika Slawek, M.D., M.S.
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We're thrilled to bring you an enlightening conversation with Kemi and Deepika Slawek. Dr. Slawek is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Montefiore Health Systems and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY in the Division of General Internal Medicine. She is board certified in Infectious Diseases, Addiction Medicine, and Internal Medicine and is the Co-Director of the Montefiore Medical Cannabis Program. Dr. Slawek studies how to reduce morbidity and mortality in people with HIV (PWH) and people who use drugs (PWUD) using a harm reduction framework. She aims to study solutions for PWH and PWUD informed by her clinical experiences and patient’s experiences. Dr. Slawek is the recipient of a K23 award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to test how different formulations of medical cannabis effect neuropathic pain and inflammation in PLWH in an innovative quasi-experimental study. She is leading groundbreaking foundation-funded research to determine whether medical cannabis is effective in reducing opioid analgesic use in people with pain and is an alumnus of our Get That Grant® coaching program!
In this episode, Dr. Slawek shares her passion for HIV research, the social justice aspects of her work, the transformative power of coaching and:
- The value of carving out time for self-reflection and understanding the "why" behind your actions.
- How stopping to evaluate your work can be challenging but ultimately leads to more effective and meaningful use of your time.
- The importance of aligning your daily tasks with your broader values and goals.
- How regularly taking the time to assess your work and its impact can keep you grounded and prevent burnout, especially when the world feels overwhelming.
Loved this convo? Please go find Dr. Slawek on Twitter/X and LinkedIn and show her some love!
And if you'd like to learn more foundational career navigation concepts for women of color in academic medicine and public health, sign up for our KD Coaching Foundations Series: www.kemidoll.com/foundations.
REMINDER: Your Unapologetic Career Podcast now releases episode every other week! Can't wait that long? Be sure you are signed up for our newsletter (above) where there are NEW issues every month!
Yeah. And you have kind of disparate areas of expertise, right? Even MDs, it's a lot of public health researchers as well. You know, I think that it put things into perspective for me where it's like, oh, I am not the entire problem. I thought I was the problem. I thought that I was like lazy. Hello,
SPEAKER_03:hello. You are listening to Your Unapologetic Career. Being a woman of color faculty in academic medicine who wants to make a real difference with your career can be tough. Listen, these systems are not built for us, but that doesn't mean we can't make them work for us. In each episode, I'll be taking a deep dive into one core growth strategy so you can gain confidence and effectiveness in pursuing the dream career you worked so hard to achieve. All you have to do is tune in to Your Unapologetic Career with me your host, Kemi Dole, physician, surgeon, researcher, coach, and career strategist for an always authentic, sometimes a little raw, but unapologetically empowering word. I keep it real for you because I want you to win. Hello, hello, welcome back to the show. I'm so excited to have you all join us today. We are going to be speaking to a lovely woman. Her research is fantastic. More than that, her energy and her personality are contagious. And I think that she always brings a level of vulnerability, grounding, and power to our coaching community in a way that I really appreciate and that I notice. So I am very pleased to welcome Deepika Slawik to the call. Hi. Hi. You have me
SPEAKER_00:blushing already.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, that was fast. So why don't you tell our lovely listeners who you are, where do you reside in the world and what good work do you do?
SPEAKER_00:So I am an associate professor of medicine, newly associate, and I have training in infectious diseases and addiction medicine. And my work revolves mostly around improving more and mortality in individuals living with HIV, as well as people who have substance use disorders are at risk for HIV too.
SPEAKER_03:How did you originally get into infectious disease?
SPEAKER_00:So my interest really started off with wanting to do HIV primary care. That has been my passion for as long as I can remember. I think it's kind of part of being a millennial and growing up seeing all these public figures living with HIV. And it's like literally I wrote like a mini thesis in high school on the HIV epidemic. So, you know, it's something I've been really passionate about for as long as I can remember. And that was really how I started out wanting to work in that population. I
SPEAKER_03:don't know if you know this, but like I wrote in my essay for medical school, like what I wanted to do. Like I wanted to take care of HIV positive individuals. Like my whole thing is I went to medical school. I was like, I love the equity in this. I like like the social justice. part of this movement. I had done like volunteered for like the AIDS walk in Atlanta in high school. And I was fully 100% planned to do internal medicine and then infectious disease so I could care for people with HIV. You know, things changed. But yeah, so I'm like, that's why I'm like smiling really big when you're talking about like, this is what drew me. I completely relate to that. For you, was there also that automatic draw of like the social justice aspect of it and like the stigma and like... came along with the diagnosis. Do you think that also appealed to you? A
SPEAKER_00:hundred percent. I remember like learning things like the president of the United States didn't utter the word until like so long into the epidemic and being like feeling so aggrieved about it. Like little baby me who did not understand like how unjust the world is. Right. I know. Shout out to our naive selves. I was like, this is crazy. How is this the case? And so, you know, I think that that really drew me into the field a lot.
SPEAKER_03:I love that. Okay. So in your work to reduce morbidity and mortality or morbidity in this population, as well as those with substance use disorders, what do you think is the least understood or maybe most misunderstood thing about the research that you do or the population that you work with?
SPEAKER_00:I think that we are very fortunate to live in a time where there's an abundance of research in the field of HIV. And there are people who work within the intersection of HIV and substance use disorders. But I think that kind of what you've alluded to about how I was drawn into the field of HIV by the social justice part of it, I feel like that's also what's drawn me into addiction medicine. And within the medical community and the research community, there a decent consensus of like these are individuals with a disease that need to be treated and treated with respect
SPEAKER_03:right yes
SPEAKER_00:that is not the case like culturally by any means at
SPEAKER_03:all no
SPEAKER_00:places where i would expect there to be more of an understanding like in pretty liberal works of journalism and stuff it's just not the case the language that's used is disrespectful i find that to be difficult and i think that eventually moves the needle on that i think through work like in the sciences. And I think clinician researchers play a big role in that because we interface not only with other researchers, but with people in the community, right?
SPEAKER_03:search especially where it comes to like where with respect to racial disparities and racial inequities and then specifically when it comes to respect with respect to i'm struggling today y'all black white disparities is that one of the hardest things is that everybody has access to the vocabulary that you're using like when you're talking when you're trying to talk about like different concepts and and harm over here or disparities over here or injustice or prejudice or bias or things like that these words are out there so the the challenge is that everybody thinks they're an expert. Everybody thinks they already know what you're talking about. They can't imagine complexity underneath it because all the words are in their vocabulary. It's not like when they sit down and listen to a lecture of which there's five words that are familiar and then somebody's talking about genes and proton pumps and it's gone. You have no idea what they're talking about. There's a natural respect for that work because you're sitting there knowing, I don't know what you're talking about, dude, but I guess it's cool. But when you research something that has such a in the culture where people are like, oh yeah, substance use, oh addiction, oh this, there can be this challenge to overcome in people thinking that the research A is either like simple, already done, there's nothing to see here. So I'm curious if that shows up in your work with HIV populations and with addiction disease at all, like just curious.
SPEAKER_00:I think it does. And especially, so a lot of my work is specifically in cannabis. So I've for the past seven years really been working a lot on cannabis in the scope of pain and cannabis, the arena of opioid use disorder too. And because cannabis is like this emerging field, everybody is newly an expert in it. But then if you PubMed it, you realize that 90% of the articles are systematic reviews. Right. So
SPEAKER_03:none of y'all are doing anything. Where is the original research? Okay, go
SPEAKER_00:ahead. Hard. It's so hard. Like getting a schedule one license, getting institutions to want to buy into doing the research because they're afraid of having federal funds taken away. It's so hard to do the research. So like what people are reduced to are survey studies, observational trials, and systematic
SPEAKER_03:reviews. Yep. I love that how you laid that out though, because it's like you, want to, how do I want to say this? I don't know how to say it. I like how you're laying out, like it's hard, which is why you see a bunch of systematic reviews and new experts. It's like, it's the easy to talk about, not easy to implement, not easy to do, but here you are positioned and you position yourself to be like, this is what I'm doing. Let's do it. Question. With this passion that you had, this interest that you had already at kind of, like you said, social justice informed lens, you sound very clear on like, you know, you came in knowing like, these are the people I want to serve. Can you tell us a little bit about where you were in your career and what was prompting you to seek out coaching as part of your professional development?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I had completed two years of an institutional K award and one year of a K-23 when I started the coaching program. And I was three years into the COVID pandemic. I was And
SPEAKER_03:you're in New York. I hope it's okay to say that. Yeah. I'm just saying like pandemic wise. Okay. You didn't, you weren't in the pandemic. You know what I'm saying? You weren't like in some suburban area where maybe there was some, you were in the, the heart of like serious, serious pandemic shutdown. I just need to give you that credit. I don't want people to think like,
SPEAKER_00:okay, continue, continue. It's hard for all of us, but I have to say like living in the city of New York and practicing medicine in the Bronx, it was hard. It was really
SPEAKER_03:hard. Yes. And it was hard. I mean, well, y'all can get mad at me. I don't know. But no, I can tell you as somebody who was practicing somewhere else during the time, I looked at what was happening in New York to my clinician colleagues and was like, oh my God, like I can't imagine how they are functioning. So I have respect for what you all went through.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And, you know, I think that for all of us who are scientists and clinicians and researchers, to me, like a big part of my higher power I'm not a religious person, but was believing that the people would do the right thing when the moment
SPEAKER_02:came.
SPEAKER_00:Right. You believe that. Oh, okay. I was going to do the right thing. Oh, place and safety nets. And we had built this infrastructure and to see it just like crumble was really difficult for
SPEAKER_01:me. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And like, again, little baby naive me. Yeah. Devastating. Even though like, you know, I was far enough in my career to know that I should have known that it was not as structured as I thought it was. I found myself not only really crushed by that, but COVID brought on this level of isolation and siloing that I did not think was possible. And so it was like, I think a lot of people at that phase in their career feel very burnt out because you're just coming out of clinical training. You're being told just to work, work, work, work, work,
SPEAKER_03:work,
SPEAKER_00:do as much as you can. And it's frankly, kind of a dysfunctional way of existing and you are never trained out of it. You're never told to stop or have boundaries. And so I was really burnt out. I was burnt out.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. So you, where you were mentally, you were like, I, obviously I just went through trauma with the rest of the city slash rest of the world. And I mean, you just, you said this casually, but you had been successful enough to be an institutional K and then an external K, which is like no small feat, something that takes a and years for people to accomplish. And so you have these accomplishments under your belt, but you're like, I have nothing left. I'm a husk. I'm burnt out.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Frankly, it was kind of a cry for help. I was like, I need you to help me because I don't know what I'm doing and why. Okay.
SPEAKER_03:So why don't you tell us about a moment and get that grant where something shifted for you in a big way? Just kind of share maybe some of those times in which you were able to move out of that place.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, I think Yeah. have kind of disparate areas of expertise, right? Even MDs, it's a lot of public health researchers as well. You know, I think that it put things into perspective for me where it's like, oh, I am not the entire problem. I thought I was the problem. I thought that I was like lazy,
SPEAKER_03:right? Yeah. It's so powerful. And it's also like, it's very hard to experience outside of what you said of outside of connecting with people because there's so many reasons why it can feel like you are the problem. It's very easy to be like, oh, well, evidence A, evidence B, evidence C in your own little micro environment. It's obviously me. I need to fix myself. And I agree with you. It is like a wild experience to get on a Zoom call and somebody is in a completely different context and they're basically telling your story. And you're like, wait a minute. So maybe I'm not the problem. We are not related. This is strange. And what does that do for you? What did that do for you, Deepika, when you were like, okay, so it's not that I'm the problem and I'm just too lazy and I'm just burnt out and it's me. What did that realization do for you? I
SPEAKER_00:mean, I think it helped me to take a step back and say, maybe I actually need to take the vacations I haven't been taking and the rest that I need and recharge and do those things and take a moment to actually understand where I am instead of just barreling Yes.
SPEAKER_03:Some people don't get that to their year six. They take four or five years to even get to the K award. And so I think the other thing that that pausing and stepping back and being in community lets you reassess and be like, oh, I'm actually moving quite quickly. It's like the frame of my career is moving very well. And then I'm inside it running like a maniac. And it's like, you don't have to run. Your frame is moving fine. You know what I mean? You're moving right along. That's how I see that. extra effort that just exhausts us where we can no longer see the momentum that we've worked so hard to create. And so we like add on and add on and add on. And I think it's until you kind of step back that you realize and maybe pull back that you realize, oh, things are still moving. Like the world did not end. There is momentum here. I don't know if that resonates with you.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, no, it does. It does. I mean, I think that it's between coaching and just the world being the world and me being in my stage of career and my age and everything. I have like forced myself into this place where I'm like, maybe I don't need to answer those emails immediately. Yes. Or like, maybe it's okay that that paper is not done. I have other priorities right now. And it's, you know, it just has to be okay because I have to be able to get through each day and not burn out and leave medicine.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, if the long-term goal is to keep working for this population and like developing ideas and interventions that are actually helpful, then it really isn't the most important thing for me to respond to that email right now. It's actually detrimental to the goal. And I think the self-leadership required to hold that is something that often does have to be developed in a system in our cultures and institutional cultures that like try to make it seem that the only thing that could possibly matter is responding to that email right away. You know, I like to think of us as like helping people grow into and then be comfortable with owning that responsibility of like, no, no, no, no, no. Like this is my career. And therefore I am actually the one that can tell you what's most important email to respond to. I am actually the one that can tell you like at what time that makes sense to do based on these other things that I have to do. And it's a new role.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And frankly, a role that I'm still kind of uncomfortable with and growing into, but I think it's necessary, right? I mean, I think I've seen so many people who are like either at my stage of my career or five or 10 years at head that are like, I'm out. And they leave entirely. And I don't blame them at all, but they reach their limit. They've reached their limit and they're done.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And I don't blame them either. I want people to walk away full, not empty. That's my thing. It's like, I have no problem with people walking away. I want you to walk away like, man, I did that. Check. I got everything I wanted out of that experience. I just feel done with faculty life. If there's nothing wrong with it, it's all good. I could keep going. for another 10 years, something else is calling me, that energy, I feel like you rarely see that. I feel like it's always like, I am leaving, burn it down. I can never be. And so I think that that is unfortunate because to me, that doesn't feel really like a free choice. That feels like to save myself, I must leave. And I want people to have a place of like, I could go, I could stay, like I'm good regardless. It's just like whatever preference that I have. So I agree with you. And I think you know, that self-leadership is a big part of it. Okay. So what do you feel like you have now that you didn't have before embarking on coaching?
SPEAKER_00:I definitely have a certain confidence now that I didn't have before. Like I can tell how I feel in this moment, what I feel if I'm tired, then I'm actually tired and maybe I need to just be tired. Yes. That's one thing. I feel like I've been told to deny all of those basic emotions and physical feelings for so long that it took a while for me to retrain
SPEAKER_03:myself. relearn it and notice, okay, I think my brain is slowing down. Or notice, for some reason, I picked up my phone for no reason whatsoever. And I'm like, oh, it's because my brain wants a break. That is trying to tell me, please, let's do something else. So it's picking up a phone, which is not a good idea. Instead, I should just go take a walk. You know what I mean? And just go do something else. So I relate to what you just said so much because I agree. I felt like I had to relearn my body. I had to relearn internal cues of hunger. I felt like I had to relearn in internal cues of like, I could go to the bathroom now and not have to run. You
SPEAKER_00:know what
SPEAKER_03:I
SPEAKER_00:mean? I feel like after completing training, there's like an element of like, you are still not a fully formed adult yet because you've just had all of your humanity broken down. I was going to say, you've been
SPEAKER_03:infantilized for so long. You could have even been an adult coming in. You will be a child coming out. No, like we will take over all of this. And you know, we should say we trained a while back. So, you know, people are in different places now. So like y'all don't come at me in the, sometimes they come at me, the GME folks, that's not that way anymore. I'm like, okay, I don't know how it is. I can tell you, I'm sure things are better, but I can tell you like my very first day of medical school was a fifth. I mean, first day on rotation on my surgical rotation was like a 15 hour Whipple. Yes. And I did not go anywhere. What biological needs?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, it's celebrated. I mean, I remember watching a surgery res when I was a medical student who was easily, easily 36 weeks pregnant, if not more.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, oh yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And through like a six hour surgery and everybody was like, oh my God, she's so amazing for doing that. And yes she is, but should she have had to do that?
SPEAKER_03:Right, right. Was that her choice? That was me. I was definitely 36 weeks pregnant. Like, you know, those really heavy end of the OR tables, like the ones, the OR tables were the bottom. You can pull the whole thing off. I remember I was like picking up that huge metal, like like putting it on. And somebody did come and take it from me. Like, what are you doing? Like a staff member or something. And I kind of was like, what are you doing? And now I'm like, what the hell? This is unnecessary. Okay. So can I ask you, I want to ask you a follow-up question, which is that if you had to try to describe, like, what were the prompts or what was the shift that allowed you like to do what you just said, which is like, I had to kind of be able to listen to myself. Like I'm more confident now, but I can also feel myself How do you think that happened over the course of being in the
SPEAKER_00:program? being really unsettled and unhappy with their current situation. I was in a situation where I was like, I want to make my situation better. I think we all do. And so I had to move myself into this mental space of figuring out how to do that. And so I basically had to start trying different things and new things, even if I was uncomfortable with it.
SPEAKER_03:than it should be. Sorry. But like you are in a place enough where you were like, well, I will, I will try new things. Even if I'm like, this is deeply uncomfortable and odd, but I'm going to try it anyway, because like something has to change.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I think that I felt deeply uncomfortable with sharing things like my feelings.
SPEAKER_03:I don't have feelings. We don't do that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And just like acknowledging, like, I feel like I'm not good at this thing
SPEAKER_03:right now. And I think that we train ourselves not to say those things out loud. And we're often protective at some point, right? I feel like another part of our community that does allow people to open up in a way that they probably didn't even expect they would. People tell me that all the time. They're like, I really didn't expect I would like really go there is because of that reality check that we have. Like we're not pie in the sky. We're not like everything is fine. You just need to have a great attitude. Like we're very real about like, we know what it's like to be in those tense environments, to be in environments where there is just inequity, period. to the point where like, this is, so we just doing this in 2024, we just have this kind of blatant inequity in our salaries or in how we treat patients or whatever. And my particular perspective is that like, we belong in all spaces. We belong everywhere. And like, if you want to be a clinician researcher, cause like, that's the thing that you love, then you deserve to be able to be in academics and like belong everywhere. And I'm so interested in helping people thrive in those environments, even though the environments are wrong. Do you know You know what I mean? It's like, I don't let the institutions off the hook, for sure, have a lot to say with everything that they're doing wrong. But also I don't want an exodus. So like all of a sudden we can't be clinician researchers. You know, it's like, F that. Like, no, we're going to figure out how to do it. Also, I just feel like my personal perspective is that this is what we have done from the beginning. Like it has always been trying to figuring out how to thrive, figuring out how to get what we need, despite the system not being built for you, despite this country being hostile to your community. And all those things, that is what my people have always done. So I'm not going to stop now. You know what I mean? You're not going to steal my joy. We're going to figure this out. So I love hearing that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And that takes a lot of strength. And I think that what I didn't realize until I started going on this journey and trying to figure out what I need to do to not be so burnt out all the time is that I've been told by so many people that I respect that being your authentic self as part of like doing well and thriving and continuing to be able to do this career or be in this career and I've never been able to really access that completely right and so part of that is actually being able to like talk to people and say you know like I'm struggling right now or this is a really difficult time or no I really can't do that thing because I actually have a million other things to do right now
SPEAKER_03:right and I am actually I am actually well-equipped and qualified to make that determination for myself. That like, oh, it's actually not ideal for me to do. Thank you, but I'm going to do this other thing over there. Radical idea in academic medicine. Okay. So what advice would you give a woman of color faculty like you who, I don't know, might've listened to the beginning of this and been like, that sounds like me. Burnout, husk of a person, I am done. What are emotions? Some So I think that what I would say is that it's just so important to actually carve out the time to do it.
SPEAKER_00:I think it's so easy to deprioritize it and say like, yeah, but this isn't as important as fill in the blank. And what I found is that the more time I put into it, the more time I put into it, the more time I put into it, the more time I put into it. into like understanding why am I here, understanding why am I spending my time a certain way, the better I actually utilize that time.
SPEAKER_03:Amen. Yes. The part you said is uncomfortable. Like, okay, I'm willing to do this weird thing. It's like, what's uncomfortable is stopping when you feel like all you should do is push ahead, push ahead. And like going through two hours of exercises to be like, what am I actually doing? Like, let's actually audit all of this. and then I think what I heard you say is that and then you use your time much better
SPEAKER_00:no I think absolutely and I there was a time where I was like working on something and I was like in the grand scheme of the world like why am I writing this paper right now or like why am I fighting over getting these like results collected really well for this study that I'm working on while the world is burning and having the ability to put it into context of like why I think this is important and saying it out loud to myself makes a huge difference
SPEAKER_03:oh my God, yes. I just wrote about this in a newsletter that came out where I was like, not everybody may feel this way, but to me, the work that I do, not actual work, that's not really what I meant, but the work that I do is a place, is like a bomb in a chaotic world. Not because the work I do is like sitting in a spa all day, but it's because it's a direct connection to doing something that I know is for the betterment of this slice of what I have impact on. And I think that that for me is really important when it feels like the world is burning. That for me really matters. And I think, you know, like multiplying that by as many of us as possible is what then creates a better world. Sorry to get sappy. So I agree with you. Like being able to connect with that is important. Otherwise we'll lose everybody who is doing good work. And then we are really hosed. Thank you so much for spending time with me today on the show. I'm curious if you have anything else to share before we wrap up. Not that I can think of. I feel like we've talked about a lot. Yeah, I think we covered it. Well, thank you so much for being here. I know that there are many people who resonate with your words. And even I am now thinking again about like getting back in touch with my early tired self, making sure that I'm stopping and resting at that moment and not pushing it. So thanks for that reminder. Of course. Take care. Thank you for tuning in to the Your Unapologetic Career Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode and want to keep the conversation going, here's what you can do. First, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you prefer so you never miss an episode. Your support helps us reach more listeners like you. Second, I'd love to hear from you. Text us any questions you have about this episode or just to show us some love. The link to text is in the show notes. Don't be shy. If you're interested in gynecologic health, make sure to sign up for my newsletter, Dr. Chemidol and the Womb at www.chemidol.com slash womb. It comes out once a month and it's packed with valuable insights. For those looking to enhance their careers, you can join our career foundation series for exclusive tips at www.kemidol.com slash foundations. This also comes out monthly and is a great way to keep your career on the right track. And finally, if you're a woman of color faculty in academic medicine or public health, definitely get on the Get That Grant coaching wait list. That's at www.kemidol.com Thank you again for being part of our community.