Lessons from Dimitri Cassimatis, MD

Educational Landscapes

Dimitri Cassimatis, MD is a small-group advisor and course co-director for the cardiovascular pathophysiology course in Emory University's MD program. He is also Chief of Medicine at Emory Midtown Hospital. In this episode Dimitri talks about his journey from being a physics student to biochemistry student (working as a patient transporter) to pre-med student to internal medicine resident to cardiology fellow to ultimately his current roles as an attending. Dimitri also talks about his experiences being open to opportunities and enjoying the process of becoming the various roles he's taken on. His words of wisdom which include "I tell that to students that they should not stress themselves out about picking the one right thing that there are usually lots of right things. You just have to pick one of those right things and make the best of it and go with it."; "your job that you start out with right after training is just a starting point, and that from that you tailor that to where you enjoy spending time first by volunteering in those areas and then looking for paid opportunities in those areas to really shore up the amount of time you can spend there and that you can really tailor your career in many different directions depending on where your passions are." and "remember that education is a skill. You build it by practicing it and by paying attention to the feedback and trying to do things better, so look for opportunities to practice it. I would also remind everybody who's going to become a clinician that education is part of what you do every day with your patients. If you're going to be patient-facing, you're going to be educating your patients, and having skills to educate them is extremely important in being a good clinician for them. So even if you don't consider yourself an educator, if you're a clinician, you are an educator."