Rantner: Welcome to a new episode of the DGG podcast, ‘Focus on Vessels’. My name is Barbara Rantner. I work as a vascular surgeon and senior consultant at the TUM Hospital on the Right Bank of the Isar in Munich. I’m delighted to welcome you back to the podcast today. This podcast is designed to offer you, dear listeners, a platform to delve deeply into the topics that shape and advance our field. Together with our guests, we explore the latest developments in surgical, endovascular and preventive vascular medicine and discuss current issues from science, teaching, clinical practice and the professional world. And so we follow our motto: We take vascular medicine further. The topic of today’s episode is intended not only to reach young specialists and, hopefully, to motivate and inspire them, but also to provide everyone with further insight into the work of our professional association following our discussion with Professor Dr Oberhuber last December. I am delighted to welcome Dr Johannes Hatzl here with me today to discuss a few points regarding our society’s Academy of Excellence. Johannes Hatzl works as a senior registrar at Heidelberg University Hospital under Dietmar Böckler and has been part of the DGG’s Academy of Excellence since December 2023. Johannes, thank you for joining me here today; I’m really looking forward to our conversation.
Hatzl: I’m delighted to be here too. Hello, and thank you very much for the invitation.
Rantner: Right, on to the topic of the Academy of Excellence. First of all, I’d like to give you, dear listeners, a brief introduction to the subject, as I don’t assume that any of you outside our professional society are familiar with the term. The Academy of Excellence was established in 2017 by the DGG Executive Board with the clear objective of supporting and advancing university vascular surgery as a scientific professional society. As you are probably aware, there are a large number of universities in Germany – 40 to be precise – yet we have only seven independent chairs in vascular surgery. And so, naturally, the Executive Board’s objective was understandable: first to identify promising young academics and then to promote and support them through targeted measures within the framework of this Academy of Excellence. The ultimate goal was to ensure that W2 and W3 professorships were filled and to prepare candidates for these roles as effectively as possible. Johannes, as I mentioned earlier, you applied for the Academy of Excellence in December 2023, and you’ve been part of the Academy of Excellence since December 2023. I’d be very interested to hear what prompted you to apply for the Academy of Excellence in the first place, what expectations you had, and how you approached the Academy of Excellence project.
Hatzl: Yes, it was my boss, Professor Böckler, who encouraged me to apply. And I felt that the fifth or sixth year of my postgraduate training was also a good time to apply for the Academy of Excellence. I was particularly interested in two things: firstly, the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas regularly with the other members of the Academy, and secondly, I also found the mentoring programme very interesting, as it gives you the chance to speak quite openly with an experienced colleague, in addition to the opportunities available within the department.
Rantner: You’ve already mentioned it – this mentorship, and I’ll come back to it in more detail later – it makes a major contribution and is a key part of the Academy of Excellence. Now, your boss in Heidelberg is very well connected. How did you go about it? I imagine you discussed it, but how did you actually choose a mentor and how does this mentoring work in practice? What have you experienced so far? How regularly do you now interact with your mentor? It’s supposed to be primarily about actual scientific topics, not so much about technical support – how does that play out in day-to-day life?
Hatzl: Yes, well, at the start of the programme, after being accepted into the Academy of Excellence, you can request a mentor, and then the selection committee assigns the mentors to the respective mentees as far as possible.
My mentor is Professor Hinterseer, whom I hadn’t initially requested. I hope she’ll forgive me for that now, but looking back, having got to know her, I’d say I really should have asked for her as my mentor from the start. I think it’s a very good fit. So far, we’ve mainly been in touch by phone, which has been sufficient for me. Of course, every mentoring team is different. And so far, our conversations have always involved a brief update on my progress in terms of clinical work and research. This ranges from general advice on useful additional qualifications to assessing my level of clinical training, as far as possible. And, quite specifically, it also extends to opening up additional opportunities for collaboration through my mentor’s network. And that’s where the personal relationship can also help to break down barriers to collaboration that might otherwise be harder to overcome, and open up new opportunities. Of course, as you said, these are all things that you can essentially get without the Academy of Excellence, but the Academy of Excellence is simply an additional opportunity that I do find very helpful.
Rantner: Let me briefly return to the selection of mentors. Is there a sort of register, so to speak, at the DGG where potential mentors can sign up? This might be of interest to some who are already working in academia and might wish to act as mentors. No, that you can sort of sign up for it, so to speak, to make yourself available and engage in concrete dialogue with the teams – with those selected for this Excellence Programme. Vascular surgery is, shall we say, a very close-knit community. That’s both the advantage and the disadvantage; we all know each other very well by now. And I can certainly imagine that this personal exchange in particular can be an additional asset, quite apart from one’s own boss. Alongside mentoring, however, the Academy of Excellence also offers a wide range of courses. It’s structured a bit like a modular programme; as you can see, we’ve already done some reading for our meeting today, for our discussion. Some courses are offered through the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers, others as part of the Summer Academy, and they’re meant to teach skills in team leadership, communication, networking and securing third-party funding. Does that look good on paper, or how have you found it so far? Are there really useful courses on offer, and what can you take away from them? As I said, is it worthwhile, or what’s the point if you’re already working at a university institution? Where do you see concrete incentives for personal development?
Hatzl: Well, at the moment, not all the courses have been personally relevant to me yet – for example, the courses on health economics offered there, and other content has, as you mentioned, naturally arisen within my own university’s medical faculty, such as teaching qualifications. I took part in the leadership seminar at the Summer Academy, for instance. That was very interesting. But even that could have waited a few more years. I think, ultimately, it also depends on the individual member of the Academy of Excellence. Colleagues at more advanced stages can then focus on health economics and leadership strategy. For me personally, the focus was more on research activities at this stage, and I’ll probably look into the other topics later. However, participation in the Academy isn’t just about these courses; it’s also intended to encourage involvement in the professional society’s committees, and I’m on the Research Committee and the AI and Digital Transformation Committee. And it was actually through the Excellence Academy that I really became aware of these committees.
Rantner: So, looking beyond one’s own horizons and then, as you said, really seeing this networking as a key benefit – and probably also actually applying for and taking an interest in the Academy of Excellence. I myself, and we’ve just revised the concept of the Academy of Excellence on the board – Alexander Oberhuber was heavily involved in that. Personally, I think the approach of really focusing on leadership skills is actually brilliant. Yes, we do of course receive specialist support for the most part, but there are few opportunities to develop as a leader and then move into a leadership role feeling more confident. How do you see it? You’ve already mentioned that you’ve been somewhat involved in this research focus so far, but how do you see it for yourself, and if you were to think through your personal development to its logical conclusion – if that were to culminate in a W3 professorship? How much emphasis should be placed on leadership skills? Or do you think that specialist qualifications in a surgical field should – and must – take precedence?
Hatzl: Well, I think the great thing about the Academy of Excellence is that you don’t really have to ask yourself the question of the fundamental focus. So that’s why I also find it difficult to answer how important these leadership skills courses are right now. You might have to ask someone who has a retrospective view of the matter – what would have helped them more in hindsight, whether more of these courses or this programme would have been beneficial. From my perspective, though, as all this is still quite, yes, a long way off, the courses on leadership skills currently on offer are helpful and actually cover the subject sufficiently, at least for me. Otherwise, the great thing is that the mentoring programme can provide targeted and individual support. So the focus then almost emerges naturally according to need. So the question of whether the focus should be more on leadership skills or more on technical expertise is, I think, one that needs to be answered differently for every mentoring pair. For those who are more advanced, perhaps in the application phase for such positions, it might be a very pressing issue. And for the others, who are still developing their careers, it might not be so relevant yet. So I believe that, in principle, the focus of this programme – and indeed the beauty of it, the individuality involved – is that the individual mentoring emerges naturally through the two participants.
Rantner: Yes, one can really only agree with that. It’s always a matter of viewing it flexibly, adapting it to the situation, so to speak, and tailoring it to one’s own needs. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that these leadership courses would be accessible to everyone, including non-Excellence Academy members, so to speak. We’re now planning the next course as part of the Summer Academy, where your boss will also be speaking, together with Farzin. And I think, based on my own career path and experience with increasingly diverse teams, that a focus on this development should certainly be placed on leadership roles even in surgical disciplines, and that one can gain a great deal of support through interactive exchange and within the professional framework that these courses and the Summer Academy can offer, so to speak. So, I can only invite and encourage everyone to find out more about it and perhaps sign up for one or two courses. Johannes, finally, I’d like to hear from you whether – and it has certainly sounded that way so far – you would aim to apply to the Academy of Excellence again. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that Professor Oberhuber has recently adapted the concept once again in line with the structural reform for the Academy of Excellence. It is, after all, a relatively competitive selection process, and applicants must, so to speak, demonstrate that they are suitable to become part of this team of excellence. Would you do it again? If so, what do you think could perhaps be improved in the whole concept? If you’ve managed to gain any insight into it at all so far? What do you think is still missing, what needs adjusting, what might perhaps be dispensable? How do you see this now, particularly given that most of us working at the Academy of Excellence are, of course, based at a university ourselves? And are there any overlaps, or are there aspects that might actually benefit from further support?
Hatzl: I would definitely recommend applying – you’ve got that right – particularly for colleagues with an interest in research and in getting involved in the professional society. Perhaps especially colleagues who aren’t employed at university hospitals, because the benefit for them through the Academy of Excellence is even greater, as they’ll definitely gain access to this academic perspective via their mentor. And because there isn’t much one can do within the university hospital itself. And if I were allowed to make one wish, it would perhaps be a rather specific point: exchange programmes with other research groups or even the medical devices industry. Nationally, internationally or even across disciplines, because looking beyond one’s own discipline is particularly valuable in research. And the Academy of Excellence would create the framework or points of contact to facilitate access to that. And that might also make the Academy even more attractive. But these are all just additions. Overall, I think the Academy is very good as it is now, and I’m also glad that I applied back then.
Rantner: And how much do you interact with the other members of the Academy? You mentioned at the start that this also seems to be a great enrichment for you. How do you meet up, or do you simply see each other within the context of these courses, or how does that work?
Hatzl: We mainly meet at the annual conferences; there’s usually a session organised there. Not everyone’s always there, but quite a few are. And what’s nice about it is that you can find out what the others are up to. You can discuss the problems you face at your own university. You might have had the same problems before, or the other person has had the same problems, and you then get ideas on how to solve such issues. And yes, for me that’s actually the main reason, alongside the mentoring programme, for being involved in the first place.
Rantner: That’s lovely. Yes, if you hadn’t enjoyed it so much, just between us, you could have said so, and I wouldn’t have passed it on to the board – don’t worry, of course. Well then, seriously, thank you very much, Johannes. You’ve given us some very charming and, I think, positive insights into membership of the Academy of Excellence. We hope we’ve perhaps managed to spark some interest; do have a look on the DGG website to see how the application process is structured. Johannes, I wish you every success on your journey and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you. I hope I’ll be able to continue following your progress, and I’d also like to thank you, dear listeners, for your interest. As I said, today’s podcast wasn’t a specialist one, but rather a conversation designed to give you a bit more insight into the activities and areas of work of our professional society. We always welcome feedback. Please feel free to write to us at podcasts@medizinkommunikation.org. And I’m already looking forward to the next episode with you. Until then, I wish you all the best, a lovely rest of the spring, and hope you stay curious and healthy.
