WORKING AT A BLUE-COLLAR JOB CAN MAKE YOU A BETTER DOCTOR

THE ANESTHESIA CONSULTANT
THE ANESTHESIA CONSULTANT
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Medical students often spend summers doing research or clerkships to increase their knowledge. Can working a blue-collar job instead offer a preferred experience regarding development into a doctor? During my educational journey I worked five summers for United States Steel in iron ore factories, taconite factories, and open pit mines. These were the summers following my four years in college and my first year of medical school. I was the only one in my medical school class of 102 students who summers in a blue-collar job. Blue-collar work experience can help your application to residencies or medical school stand out when compared  others, because this background will be unique when compared to your competition. An internet search reveals instances of medical doctors who worked blue collar jobs prior to becoming MDs. One wrote, “I did a year of trucking. I’ve never appreciated med school more. Sure the money was nice but damn it’s a cruel field being on the road. Appreciate our truckers way more.” Another physician wrote, “Ranching in the summers for me. You really learn to appreciate being inside when you’re outside 12-14 hours a day 7 days a week.” Blue-collar jobs often involve manual labor in manufacturing or construction. The demeaning perception that blue-collar workers belong to a lower social class, and that white-collar jobs pay more, is not necessarily accurate. The term “blue-collar” originates from the stereotypic appearance of a manual worker’s attire, which may include blue jeans or overalls. Dark colors like blue hide dirt that can soil clothes as a result of physical work. 

What did I learn about life during my experiences as a miner, and how did this make me a better doctor?

I learned the following:

  1. A lack of entitlement. Working at a blue-collar job isn’t a golden path to success. Miners wake up before dawn, drive miles to their job, don overalls, a helmet, steel-toed safety shoes, and safety glasses. Miners take a shower after work, not before work. Miners are humble men and women who usually don’t have higher education, in contrast to my fellow medical students, interns, residents, and attending physicians who went to school for 20 years or more. Blue-collar workers don’t act entitled, while many highly educated people do, reasoning that the tuition they paid and the degrees they obtained somehow make them better than less educated individuals. As a physician, this is a despicable value. MDs train to heal others. It’s difficult to feel compassion for patients if you think you’re better than them.
  2. Empathy. The men and women I worked alongside in the mines were raising families on the income they were earning—a similar income to what I was using to pay for my education. At first it was hard for me to comprehend the lives of my coworkers, who lived paycheck to paycheck and had little job security outside what the union could guarantee them. Watching your fellow man cope with basic needs is solid preparation for seeing your patients become vulnerable later in life. “We all put our pants on one leg at a time” is an adage baseball coaches use to motivate players to step up to the plate against superior competition. The same adage applies to MDs and our patients. We’re all coping with the human predicament. We all face challenges, and we must rise to meet them.
  3. Learning to relate to all types of people. Working with a diverse cross-section of co-workers—many who have less education than you—helps one build the emotional intelligence which allows you to communicate more effectively with people from all walks of life. Many of your future patients will be blue-collar workers, and having worked side-by-side with similar individuals in manual labor jobs will help you relate to them.
  4. Tolerance for hard work. Working an eight-hour shift as a miner—from the time the first whistle sounds until the end-of-shift whistle blows—can be mind-numbing. On my first day on the job, I was assigned to hose mud off the floor of the Concentrator, a half-mile-long building in which taconite rocks (low-grade iron ore rocks) were crushed into black powder and then suspended in water, where the iron-containing elements were extracted by exposing the sludge to magnets. The foreman led me to an area between two large rod mills—spinning cylinders filled with rocks and steel rods which smashed up the rocks. He handed me a three-inch-thick fire hose and pointed to the floor covered with four inches of mud. He said, “Your job is to hose this here mud into that hole over there. And don’t get any water on these here rod mill motors. They each have 4000 volts running them, and the water might electrocute you.” With that, he walked away. The hole in the floor was about five inches in diameter, and was located some thirty feet away. I turned on the hose, aimed it at the mud, and commenced my job. Thirty minutes later, 10% of the mud had disappeared down the hole and the other 90% was on the opposite side of the hole. I disconnected my hose, hooked it up to a hose bib on the other side or the hole, and started hosing the mud from the other direction back toward the same hole. Ninety minutes later, it was time for the morning coffee break, and the area looked about the same as it had when I began at 7 a.m. Boring work, but I did it. Years later, as in internal medicine resident admitting my sixth patient at 2 a.m., I’d summon up the same work ethic and keep going. One’s work ethic is a valuable ingredient toward success in your job, and I learned mine when I was young.
  5. Respect for authority. As an iron miner, the foreman is your boss. We had to respect him, because he had the power to make our lives better or difficult, e.g. giving us an easy assignment or undesirable assignment for the day. As a medical student, the doctors who outrank you have the same power. Understanding respect for an authority figure, and learning how to work for and with authority figures, was a key development.
  6. Experiencing what a labor strike looks like. Three of the five summers I labored for U.S. Steel, the workers went out on strike. I was a card-carrying member of the United Steelworkers of America, so I had to walk out with them. This was a stressful time—the income you were expecting to earn was truncated, and your future with the company became uncertain. Going on strike is a gamble that the labor union will gain more money, better benefits, or superior circumstances after the strike, but it’s a humbling event that no doctor can relate to. In America, doctors simply don’t go on strike.
  7. An appreciation for the value of a dollar. When your income is based on your ability to pound a railroad spike into a railroad tie, you realize money doesn’t grow on trees. As a blue-collar worker, you sweat for your money. You stretch your income by shopping at Walmart or Target. This frugality helped later in medical education. A doctor may be $250,000 in debt due to the borrowing needed to finance his or her schooling. Living on a budget is mandatory.
  8. Understanding the mentality of the blue-collar workforce. On my first week of work, the foreman assigned a coworker and me to shovel a pile of rocks onto a moving conveyor belt. After the foreman walked away and left us two workers alone, I began shoveling in earnest. My coworker said, “Hey kid, slow down. You’re going to shovel yourself out of a job.” He leaned his #2 shovel against the wall, sat down on the business end of the tool, and handed me his pack of Marlboros. “Here kid, have a smoke. What did you do last night for fun?” I felt guilty because I wasn’t wired to be deceitful, but peer pressure reigned, and I sat on my shovel and lit up with him. Thirty minutes later the foreman returned, and we both stood up and started shoveling aggressively. What did I learn from this example? Was this a typical blue-collar episode, or a one-off example of one lazy coworker? I’m not certain, but I believe it’s human nature for some people to do as little work as they can get by with. This behavior isn’t a path for rising to a leadership role. I’ve often reflected on this value as I’ve watched my physician colleagues work for 80 hours a week or more.
  9. Ambition. When I started at the mines, the career steelworkers would offer unsolicited advice they seemed to think would change my life: “Stay in school, son. You don’t want to be doing this for thirty years.” I knew I wasn’t going to be shoveling rocks for thirty years, but the contrast of what a bad job feels like versus what a good job feels like was clear from the start. Medicine is not only a solid career, but it’s an interesting life in which you help people. You have to be ambitious to stay in training programs until you’re thirty-two years old.
  10. Teamwork. I rode to work in a carpool every morning at 6 a.m. with three other miners. I depended on them to pick me up at my house, and on my days, they depended on me to pick them up at their houses. Our jobs didn’t require a great deal of teamwork, but our access to the workplace was totally dependent on the reliability of the other three drivers/riders. Life isn’t a solo journey. As medical students we studied alone, but we learned together and we supported each other emotionally. As attending physicians, we depend on a whole network of colleagues in our clinics, hospitals, or surgery centers. No man or woman is an island.
  11. The value of education. It was my goal to rise above my blue-collar roots. Nothing gave me more incentive than seeing what life in the iron ore factories, taconite factories, or taconite mines looked like. I finished my formal medical education at age 32. I met many wonderful medical professionals in my career. A great number of them were smarter than me. I credit any success I’ve gained to two traits: I was able to memorize with the best of them (I didn’t learn this in the mines), and I was determined to work harder than anyone else. I believe I acquired this second trait during my time in the mines. Having a bad job leaves you thirsting for a good job. It’s a cliché but it’s true: Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.
  12. And lastly: I learned to swear, spit, and smoke. This is tongue-in-cheek, because these abilities didn’t help me as a medical doctor, but in the iron mines, the ability to verbalize multiple F-bombs per sentence gains you tremendous respect. A talented miner can utilize F-bombs as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or even syllables in the middle of non-curse words, and in the blue-collar world this can define one as a superior intellect. A man who is able to spit across the width of a conveyor belt, or able to blow smoke rings from the corners of his mouth, is a man with clear talent.

Can going to work wearing a helmet, coveralls, steel-toed boots and safety goggles make you better appreciate a future career in medicine?

Yes, I believe it can.

It did for me.

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