The Road Ahead Posted on January 20, 2009 Dr. Patricia Molina says that mentors can offer encouragement and also an honest look at opportunity costs.

What I do now was never what I had intended my life to be. I wanted to be a pediatrician. I wanted to be a clinician. And so, I guess that if somebody were to look at my career path and try to learn from it, the lesson to be learned is you have to be available to the outside world, molding where the future is going to be. And you have to be able to retool and to reevaluate where your strengths are and to pick what are the things that are important for you in life.

For me, my family was number one. And so at the point where I had my first child, I just could not understand how I was going to be able to split my time from taking care of this child and being at the hospital, taking call every three-four nights, working long hours. I didn't understand how that could be done. And maybe it can be done. And maybe some people out there are doing it.

It's just that at that time in my life, I didn't have anybody around me to say, "Let me show you. This is how you could work it out." Or somebody to encourage me and say, "It's okay. You're going to be able to do it. Maybe you're not going to be able to be an intensive care pediatrician. But you might be able to work it out this way."

So, mentorship, finding people whom you can talk to, finding people that you think that's kind of the life I would like to have. Let me find out how did they get there? How do they do it? What did they have to give up? Because a lot of times people see a successful face, but they don't understand and they have no idea of all the things that that person had to give up or had to change in his or her life to be able to get to where they are. Nobody's there without having had to sacrifice something.