Hi, I’m Shaun.
I’ve spent about fifteen years seeing patients in emergency medicine, urgent care, and occupational medicine, and the last twelve teaching full time. These days I’m an Associate Professor and Director of Curriculum in a doctoral program for practicing PAs, and I’ve taught faculty development nationally through PAEA since 2017. I also have a PhD in Educational Leadership, and what I study is why capable educators slowly lose control of their work.
My doctoral research looked at why PA educators leave academia and go back to clinical practice. Over half the faculty I surveyed had considered it in the past year. They liked the work itself, the teaching and the students and the clinical side. It was everything around the work that predicted whether they were thinking about leaving. Starting with how they were supervised.
I write for mid-career educators who are good at their jobs and have ended up responsible for more than they ever signed up for.
I was inside it too
For years I built work that ran predictably. A course I could teach without much preparation. Clinic days that followed a familiar pattern. A calendar I mostly knew how to navigate before Monday arrived. I built it that way on purpose, and for a long time it felt like progress.
Then a health event slowed me down enough to see what it had been costing me. The work still looked successful from the outside. It just no longer fit the person doing it.
The part that stayed with me was how long it took to notice. I had spent three years studying this exact pattern in other people. I was living in the middle of it and still missed it.
How I work
Most of the advisory work comes down to one decision.
Someone reaches out because something has been sitting there for months. A committee they meant to step off two years ago. A conversation with their chair they keep rescheduling. A responsibility that arrived as temporary and quietly became theirs. By the time we talk, they’ve usually settled it privately three or four times and still haven’t moved, because the next step isn’t obvious or because the conversation it would take feels harder than living with it one more month.
So we work on that one thing. The rest of the role can wait.
There’s a reason I keep it narrow. The people I work with aren’t indecisive, and they don’t need someone talking them into being braver. They’re protecting something that matters to them, whether it’s a reputation for being dependable, stability at home, or an identity built around being the person who handles things. Pushing harder rarely moves any of it. Closing one decision usually does, because once it’s closed there’s less left to protect.
I’ve had to do this in my own work more than once. It has never been the part I looked forward to.
The other thing we look at is what you can hand off. Plenty of what fills a week doesn’t need your training, and you already know which parts those are. Drafting a policy. Reformatting a document. The fourth version of the same email. Some of that can go to AI now, and it probably should. But interpreting an accreditation standard for your own program, or deciding how to handle a student who is struggling, is a different kind of work. Tools only matter if they make work lighter. Judgment matters more.
Outside the work
I’m a husband and a parent of three, a first-generation college graduate, and a North Carolina coast native. I still love a long run, which took some negotiating with my body to get back.
Most of my writing starts early in the morning before anything else in the house does. Lately I’ve been circling a bigger question about how institutions build overload around their most dependable people, which is probably where the next few years of my work are headed.
Written by Dr. Shaun Lynch
Clinician and professor. I write about work, identity, and time in mid-career.