Interview with Dr. Bernard Maria, Pediatric Neurologist

For this assignment, I interviewed Dr. Bernard Maria. Dr. Maria is the executive director of the Children’s Research Institute at the Medical University of South Carolina, and he is also a practicing pediatric neurologist. I spent last summer working for Dr. Maria, and I am doing the same again this summer.

I began the interview by asking about what kinds of communication were important in his line of work. Dr. Maria commented that, in this line of work, all different kinds of writing and communication are necessary. Skill in technical writing is extremely important as much of his work focuses on submitting research articles to different scientific journals and submitting formal grant applications to different government agencies in order to gain funding for new research projects. The grant applications in particular require technical writing skills because of the structure they must be written in and the way they are very critically reviewed after being submitted. Within the institution itself, any new research projects must be reviewed by one or more committees. Each of these committees requires writing and submitting detailed research plans before any sort of review can take place. Again, technical writing ability plays a large role because each committee has different criteria for submissions that must be met.

On the topic of patient care, Dr. Maria described how written communication plays a large role as well. Written communication is one of the primary ways that different doctors communicate with each other. This is especially important when dealing with patients who normally see other doctors. Communication between different doctors is especially prevalent in pediatric neurology because some patients often require care from many different types of specialists.

I then asked Dr. Maria about what kind of preparation a person beginning a career in medicine would need. For research in particular, he described that a newly beginning researcher would need to develop good writing ability in order to accurately record experimental data and to prepare all different kinds of research and application submissions. For a newly beginning practicing doctor, focus on writing and verbal communication skills is very necessary. A practicing doctor must be able to interact well with patients and families, and he or she must be able to collaborate well with other doctors. This is especially true for doctors in private practice as their livelihood is dependent on the satisfaction of their patients.

Dr. Maria finished the interview with a description of how the field of medicine has a lot of focus around writing. He described how graduate and medical schools prepare you for this type of profession. Medical school in particular teaches you these abilities by placing you in the environment and requiring you to interact with patients and other doctors. This is very beneficial because it gives you practice in patient interaction, and it gives you the opportunity to gain a lot of valuable experience from other people who have had much more time working in the field.

P.S.-Thanks to everyone who wrote me back about posting on here, it was huge help.