Welcome to this new section of Interventional News focused on the life, ambitions and opinions of young interventional radiologists in training and early practice.

Let’s take a minute and think about the words that define the core culture in interventional radiology (IR). I’ll bet that words like groundbreaking, bold, disruptive, energetic and novel made it onto your list. Curiously, if you were to do the same thing and find words that describe youth, many would cross over.

That makes sense because, as medical specialties go, we are young; indeed, in the USA we are the newest recognised primary medical specialty. Our closest sibling is 35 years older!

But, as anyone who was raised in a big family can attest, youth is relative. The elder siblings yield all too quickly to the kids busy climbing the tall walls, challenging authority and changing things.

This new section of Interventional News is all about those pesky kids.

“It takes a long time to become young” – Pablo Picasso

We want to hear from those of you in training and early practice. Tell us about your everyday and your dreams—what is good, what needs to change? What holds you back? How do you view your future career as an interventionist?

While there is great variability across the world in the challenges you face, there is even greater opportunity. Once identified, solutions readily transfer across time zones and borders. Your world may seem unique to you, but most likely the same experiences are lived by some of your peers far, far away. We see it routinely when a touchstone article is published and cited globally. If it happens in the science of IR, what about the practice of IR, the economics, training, advocacy, device and patient access?

We hope that encouraging this sort of communication will help elevate practice standards and strengthen our global community.

Our first article in this series, authored by Monica Matsumoto, speaks to the experience of US IR trainees currently enrolled in dedicated IR training programmes. Their experience is an early indicator for how the future IR, trained primarily as a proceduralist, perceives the field as a primary specialty. Relevant outside the USA? Absolutely. The success story of this new training construct should help to inspire others climbing their tall walls toward a future where excellence is the first word you think of when you think of IR.

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