Watch Your Career Like You Watch Your Money: Minority Tax Mitigation Strategies.

Abstract

Academic medical center faculty members from historically underrepresented backgrounds in medicine in the United States face multiple factors that limit their recruitment, retention, and advancement in academic medicine. Although high-level system changes are needed to achieve an equitable and diverse academic workforce, academic health systems do not change rapidly. Faculty from minoritized backgrounds must learn how to continue working in the system while advocating for and implementing system redesign. One approach to career utilizes the metaphor of personal finance management. The authors identified 10 areas in which personal finance and career management overlap: get organized (learn requirements for success in academic medicine); establish goals (identify your career aspirations); craft a budget (link your actions to the goals); maintain a diverse portfolio (participate in activities that meet all academic missions); invest or save? (saving is citizenship tasks, while investing is accepting career-building assignments); keep good debt (minimize minority tax activities or use them to fuel your scholarship); check balances and run credit reports (evaluate your career progress often); meet with an expert (learn from mentors and late-career faculty); refinance or seek credit line adjustments (negotiate the terms of your job to concentrate on career-building activities); and change institutions (align your mission with your institution, sometimes by changing institutions). Although there may be many more pieces to a financial management plan, the illustrated steps can help those who are new to academic medicine.