In the last one year, my “cool Dad” points have taken a real surge upwards. How can I know this without being a Dad yet, you may ask? Well, I’ve had the honour of having multiple young medical & dental students reaching out to me for advice. And when I say young, it is with no exaggeration…these are young adults who I am certainly old enough to be their dads and they sit firmly in ‘Generation Z’.
Okay, but why is this making the ‘Impressing Doctor Uche’ segment? It sounds like I’m impressing myself…well…no. My conversation with the young healthcare science students revealed something interesting to me – Gen Z are thinking far more about how they can empower themselves throughout their career ladder and are not afraid to see their qualification as a ticket to ‘wherever’ rather than ‘a box’.
So the sceptics among you might say, how can you generalise to Gen Z, this is a self-selecting group of students? I agree that the personality traits in a population may not have changed much but I think social media and greater exposure has meant medical and dental students, more than ever, don’t feel the need to utilise their vocational skills in a prescribed way. In my time at medical school, as part of the self-selecting “outside-the-box” crowd, I hadn’t met so many young students thinking about unique ways to bring value to the world via their medical knowledge. Ways which will leave them wholly empowered; something our older generations unfortunately, are not used to, especially in the UK.
So, this is an ode to Gen Z, who often get a bad wrap…you guys are certainly impressing me!
Dr. Uche
