Background: Emerging evidence demonstrates that medical mentorship programs are beneficial in creating the ideal learning environment, in career guidance, and mentee wellness. The majority of current studies on medical mentorship are focused on relationships between resident and attending physicians in procedural-oriented specialties; there are minimal studies with the resident as mentor.
Purpose: With the goal of increasing interest in application to Internal Medicine (IM), a resident/student mentorship program in IM was created at a large academic institution to foster a positive perception of IM as a clerkship and a career. Residents were utilized in a near-peer, tiered mentorship program to provide a closer perspective than typical attending physician mentorship.
Description: Over one calendar year, twenty-five interested medical students enrolled in the core IM clerkship filled out a brief questionnaire detailing demographical data, future career interests, and a survey assessing their opinion of IM as a clerkship and a career. Survey questions were primarily 5-point Likert scale questions, though multiple choice and short answer were also utilized. The students were matched with an upper-level resident and a categorical intern based on future career interests. After the twelve-week core medicine clerkship, the students were assessed with a post-intervention survey, using similar questions. Following the clerkship time period, the mentoring relationship often continued, but assessment with follow-up surveys was not further utilized.
Conclusions: At the conclusion of one full academic year, the number of students involved in the mentoring program declined by a rate of nearly 50% from the first half of the year compared to the second half. Despite this, the majority of students did find the mentoring program helpful and noted that they would like to have similar mentoring opportunities in other clerkships. Early analysis of survey data showed that students became more confident with their specialty choice for residency training later in the academic year, which could partially explain the decline in participation. Students viewed IM in a positive light, both as a clerkship and as a career. It is unclear if participation directly altered these opinions, based on our initial data. Career advice and personal development were most often discussed among the pairings, and were well received. Though this study is small single institution study, this is the first such study on medical resident led mentorship in IM. Future efforts are planned to continue this project and enable residents to adjust from mentees to mentors for medical students in IM.