gotcha, ok that makes me reconsider
Gotcha thank you for the detailed response and your thoughts. No, I don't have an influential relative or anything of the sort, I just got the position through applying and reaching out due to my work with a community population. Community partners told me to reach out to join the unique work in that dept. and I did so. I do believe the grant was not in my purview of things I was capable of even fathoming writing at the time, let alone reading the documentation and previous grant narrative to then apply it to this new one. Qualifications-wise I was lacking, I do admit. Yet, my supervisors did review the grant writing while I edited and sent them the final copy and we ended up submitting it and realized only that missing documentation afterward. Regarding the responsibility yes I took full responsibility and even ended up taking some time off of serious projects/proposals as such and repivoted into a new territory. Have I since gone back to grant writing, honestly the answer is no, not because I am scared of doing so, but because I have found value in using my own skillsets in connecting with other state health departments and doing smaller reportings of policy changes my dept. can model kind of.
I'm still not sure if a school would go so in depth to look at my experience moving from this "failure" in the way you excellently did, and I am a person who likes to take risks, but now I am debating whether it is worth it to write it like this. If you pm me I can give you way more details about this grant, since this is a public forum of course!
It's OK, the details don't matter.
What I hope to impress upon you is that you need to carry with you a protective skepticism and think critically about your own participation in systems you don't understand and cannot function adequately inside; systems that
do have the capacity to harm others materially. These are not learning experiences; they are games being played with people's lives.
This is going to draw at least a few cringe responses, but it's been my experience that physicians,
yes, physicians—under heavy workload can and will ask you to do things in the hospital that are inappropriate. It's 1000% your responsibility to have boundaries. Boundaries aren't for other people to "respect," they're internalized algorithms that you use to determine your
own behavior given some set of circumstances.
My first time shadowing in the ED, at ~19, I met the attending for the first time at the transfer bay, as a drunk patient was arriving with a laceration across his forehead, something like 6 or 7 inches across. The attending shuffled the patient into the hallway only a few feet away from the door, asked for a laceration tray, and asked me if I knew how to tie a surgeon's knot. I said no. My heart at this point is absolutely beating out of my chest: I had never seen so much blood before, and was trying hard not to pass out. Once he tied two or three knots, he looks up, smiles, and says "OK! Let me know when you're done," and drops the needle holder and forceps in my hands and just straight up leaves. I literally just met this guy. I was a stranger off the street, not even credentialed at that hospital—I made contact with him through a resident I knew who had rotated under him. I was in such disbelief I even stepped to the side to see if he had really rounded the corner, or if this was some kind of test.
Let's just say you'd think I had Parkinson's as I took hesitant bites out of this patient's face, who was wide awake and could see the sheer terror in my eyes, even through a mask. When I finished, the doctor pulled me aside and called me a plastic surgeon in training. I spent the next 5 minutes hyperventilating; and the next several months feeling like I'm playing a game of charades—performing procedures I shouldn't have, with only verbal instructions on what I should be doing.
10 years later, I have grown to see this situation differently. At the time, I thought I must have demonstrated a lot of competence for a licensed physician to trust me like this. I thought that the experiences I had were happening because I was just that smart and it must have been clear to everyone around me.
The truth was that I was being exploited. It was a safety-net hospital, and everyone there—the nurses, the doctors, the staff—knew they were dealing primarily with homeless patients who didn't have the wherewithal to even complain. Many of them were desperate for any treatment. It would be years before I'd come to realize what was really happening. It was funny to the attending: he had me slice open sebaceous cysts, debride osteomyelitis, and perform digital rectal exams. I was being hazed for laughs while I felt I was holding a life in my hands.
At the end of the day, you
must realize that your actions have consequences, even if your actions are performed under the pretense of learning. Though you may think anything you're asked to do is appropriate by virtue of who is asking you to perform it, it is up to you to uphold professionalism and think about the patient's best interest, even when the physician (or, I guess in your case, supervisor) you're speaking to is not.
