Candidates for Member-in-Training Trustee-Elect: Chris E.M. Esguerra, M.D.

As psychiatry residents, we face the everyday tasks of patient care, practicing and learning psychotherapy, mastering psychopharmacology, didactics, and leading balanced lives. We also will be or are already dealing with issues related to the end of and post residency such as the boards, career options, financial management, and maintaining professional connection. I believe that we as residents and soon to be independent psychiatrists can and should play a greater role to advocate for our patients, our profession, and our communities. As your member-in-training trustee-elect on the APA Board of Trustees, I will strive to advocate for the issues that we as members-in-training face.

This position requires vision, collaboration, and innovation. My experience in nonprofit boards honed the skills needed as your representative on the APA Board, specifically with the Gay Asian Pacific Association (GAPA), the California Bay Area's oldest and largest gay Asian/Pacific Islander organization, and Asian Pacific Islanders for Human Rights (APIHR), a Southern California organization supporting LGBT APIs. My work in both involved teamwork, consensus building, presenting ideas clearly, and implementing decisions and actions. As your representative, I will strive to take in and listen to your concerns, bring them to the Board, and find ways to develop solutions to your concerns. Furthermore, my current experience as treasurer/secretary of the San Mateo Psychiatric Society has been one of reviving a once-dormant organization by identifying and addressing the needs of our members, providing unique programs, and thus fostering community. In order to succeed in this effort, we also are recruiting local residents to participate and have their voices and ideas heard.

Our daily concerns as residents encompass the greater issues of maintaining our training standards, learning more than just the practice of psychiatry, and developing a sense of community even in this nascent stage of our professional lives.

As your representative, I will work closely with the Board in efforts to ensure that we receive the most effective education so that we bud into skilled and confident practitioners. In addition, I plan to work closely with the Committee of Residents and Fellows (CORF) and the Board in developing a seminar series on the skills needed after residency such as lifelong learning, self and practice reflection and evaluation, building a private practice, and such others. Of course, upon becoming independent psychiatrists, we also have to deal with the direction of our careers, maintaining our ability as M.D.s to prescribe medications, the boards, and, most important, building and sustaining a professional community. In order to address these issues, I will work to enhance the APA Job Bank as well as further develop mentoring programs. Furthermore, I will work with the CORF and Board in scope-of-practice efforts as well as ensure resident input in any developments or changes regarding our board exams. I will strive to develop ways to make APA relevant and tangible to us members-in-training so that we not only identify APA as our national network that addresses national issues, but also actively involve ourselves in our local chapters to address local concerns.

In summary, as your representative on the APA Board of Trustees as member-in-training trustee, I will