Meet Alex Nourian

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alex Nourian a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Alex, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

My strong work ethic comes from a combination of my background and personal experiences. My parents are immigrants from Iran, and fled their homeland at a young age to escape persecution. Because of this, I was brought up with an appreciation for the endless opportunities present in America, and they taught me the value of hard work and perseverance as essential tools for success.
I was always a hard worker growing up in school, but I point to my experience making the varsity basketball team in high school as a defining moment in developing my work ethic. After spending most of the year riding the bench on the junior varsity basketball team in 10th grade, I was told that my chances of making the varsity club the following year were bleak at best. I began participating in six in the morning workouts at school, and after a few months had been given a spot on the varsity basketball team. By senior year, I was a captain and made one of the all-league teams. From this point on I became committed to always put my 100% effort in any endeavor, with success to follow.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I work as a urologist in West Los Angeles. For those who do not know, a urologist a doctor/surgeon of the urinary tract and male reproductive system. The most common conditions I treat are prostate/bladder issues, kidney stones, erectile dysfunction, and cancers of the genitourinary tract. What I love most about my profession is the ability to discuss with patients details about their most intimate health problems, and to forge those connections into partnerships for better care moving forward. Also, as a surgeon I take pride in being able to directly fix issues with my hands, through procedures that are most commonly minimally invasive and with good outcomes moving forward.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three most important things which helped me get to this point were work ethic, resilience, and compassion. The road to becoming a physician is long, redundant and requires a lot of patience. Having a strong work ethic throughout the way is a necessity. However I think resilience is even more important. I can’t even list for you the number of challenges I encountered in my journey- moving away from my family for five years, training during the COVID pandemic, taking care of patients in a safety net hospital in Philadelphia, being yelled at in the operating room countless times during my training. Having self-confidence and being resilient allowed me to learn from each new experience and made me a better person and physician. And finally, compassion. I think it’s always important to remember why you put yourself through such an arduous journey, and it’s because at the core of it all I genuinely wanted to help people. Having that reminder consistently along the way reinforced why I did certain things: staying up for 24 hours straight at the hospital, sleeping an average of 5-6 hours per night, being woken up numerous times a night by nurses or patients who needed my assistance.

My biggest piece of advice for those who are entering a similar path as myself is to remember why you are going on this journey, and to never forget those reasons as things begin to get challenging. Holding on to these core values will always make the harder parts of the journey easier to persevere.

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?

It’s normal to become overwhelmed. Sometimes, a lot of information is thrown your way and you are expected to solve a task which appears insurmountable. While I was in residency, my first day on a new rotation always seemed to be the most overwhelming. Several strategies helped me survive in these key situations. Prior to my first day I would reach out to others who had already completed this rotation for advice about how they found success in their roles. This would help give me an idea of what to expect, however being handed nine new patient consults in addition to taking care of a census of 20 patients, whom I knew very little about on the first day, was still a lot to process. Mistakes are inevitable, but learning from each mistake is necessary, and I tried my best not to repeat any mistake I would make. For the first several days I tried to be a sponge and learn the most about everything-who to call when I needed something, where everything was, what to prioritize, how to work the electronic medical record, what the chain of command was. And finally, at the end of the day it’s important to have outlets that help you relax. For me, exercising and speaking with my family helped me reset at the end of each day so that my mind was fresh and ready for the challenge of the next day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nourianurology.com/
• Twitter: https://x.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Falexnourianmd