By: Dr. Shaun Lynch • September 15, 2026 • Read Time – 5 Minutes

For five weeks during PA school, I slept under a Hannah Montana poster in southwest Georgia. Another classmate and I were staying in a house about two hours from home while we finished our Family Medicine rotation. We never quite figured out who lived there. Whoever it was seemed to have stepped out for a few days and left almost everything behind.

The bedroom made the whole arrangement feel even stranger. Two bunk beds took up most of the space, with stuffed animals still sitting on them and a Hannah Montana poster watching over the room from the wall.

I lived out of a large duffel bag and spent most evenings doing some combination of eating, reading, studying, and sleeping. By Friday afternoon, I was usually ready to make the drive back to Atlanta.

I still have a notebook from that year with my clinical rotation schedule taped inside. Looking at it recently, I noticed I’d circled the final date of that rotation.

A few weeks ago, my college roommate came to visit, and I handed him an old photo album I’d found while cleaning out the attic earlier this year. We sat there for about twenty minutes looking through 35mm photos from our freshman year. Thirty years ago. Flipping through the pages we saw people we remembered immediately, some we’d completely forgotten, and plenty of photographs neither of us would have taken if we’d known they might survive this long.

Several photos caught our dorm room in the background. The cinderblock walls, two small desks, institutional furniture, and twin XL beds looked about like you would expect in the ‘90s.

We’d taken the door off one of the storage areas so the speakers from our five-disc CD changer would fit. Above one desk hung a large “Procrastinator’s Creed” poster that made both of us laugh.

What the photos didn’t capture very well was the heat. Our dorm had no air conditioning, which is a fairly important feature to omit from student housing in eastern North Carolina.

I remember moving in during August and waking up that first night in a pool of sweat. Eventually we developed what we considered an impressive ventilation system using two large box fans. One pointed in and the other pointed out. We were convinced we had lowered the room temperature by at least three or four degrees. Maybe we had.

Late August now brings a different version of those dorm rooms across my social media feeds. Friends and acquaintances I’ve known for years are dropping their own kids off at college. I’ve watched some of these kids grow up in photographs, and suddenly they’re standing beside twin beds in rooms that don’t look all that different from ours.

The decorating has improved considerably. The rooms in the photos have coordinated bedding, area rugs, temporary wallpaper, and string lights. I even saw a full coffee station on top of a dresser. The cinderblock appears to have survived, though.

Between the dorm rooms, the apartments, that kid’s bedroom in Georgia, the hotels during work trips, and a new clinical site every few weeks, I lived in a lot of places I knew I was leaving. Some were comfortable. Some weren’t. Even when I unpacked, I knew when I’d be packing again.

I finished another informal mentoring call a few days ago with a faculty member I’ve gotten to know over the past year. We meet virtually every few months after an initial email turned into another conversation and then another.

On our last call, they seemed a bit stuck. They were three years into a job and doing well, but some of the work had started to feel routine. Nothing appeared to be obviously wrong from the outside. Still, I could hear some frustration underneath the conversation, and a sense they had outgrown parts of the work without quite knowing what to do with that.

This time was different. I was at my desk with the door closed, watching them talk about a stress management workshop they’d been to a few weeks earlier and the research idea that came out of it, and somewhere in there I stopped taking notes because they didn’t need me to say anything.

The conversation took up most of the hour. I listened, asked questions, and offered whatever perspective I could. When I closed my laptop afterward, I felt pretty good about it.

I like this kind of work. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t thought much about when it would end. We never agreed at the beginning that we’d talk for six months or a year. This wasn’t part of a formal mentoring program, and nobody had put a final meeting on the calendar.

One conversation simply led to another.

I’ve thought about an ending for my part-time clinical job a few times over the past year. The work is convenient, and there are reasons I still keep it, but I’d be lying if I said some part of me wouldn’t be relieved to let it go. That makes the missing end date easy to notice. I’ve never thought about the mentoring call that way.

You don’t think about putting an ending on a conversation you enjoy having. No one circles a date on the calendar for helping someone when you still feel useful. Why would you even think about stopping?

Maybe you shouldn’t be.

Nearly thirty years ago, I knew exactly when I would move out of that hot dorm room.

Fifteen years later, I had a circle around the date when I could pack the duffel bag and leave southwest Georgia.

The work I care about now doesn’t come with a schedule taped inside a notebook.

We’ll probably have another mentoring call in a few months. I hope we do. I just noticed, for the first time, that I have no idea when it ends.

Until next time.