Academic Medicine is the official, peer-reviewed journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. The journal serves as an international forum for the exchange of ideas, information, and strategies to address the major challenges facing the academic medicine community as it strives to carry out its missions in the public interest. Areas of focus include research, education, clinical care, community collaboration, and leadership.
Mentoring in medical education helps students meet professional standards by providing constructive feedback and serving as role models. This benefits both mentees and mentors, promoting their development and enhancing leadership and teaching skills. This study explores the link between volunteer mentors' behaviors, as perceived by medical students, and their impact on students' experiences, including burnout and professional identity formation.
In medical education, mentoring fosters professional identity, professionalism, research involvement, career planning, and overall student well-being, particularly benefiting those underrepresented in medicine. This resource is designed for faculty mentoring medical students, offering tools and a framework for mentor-mentee interactions.
While the medical education literature lacks a standard definition of mentoring, the diverse goals and development of medical students demand personalized, flexible mentoring approaches. Key roles include coach, advisor, teacher, counselor, and sponsor. These relationships are grounded in mutual trust and enhance the mentee's psychosocial and career development. Mentees appreciate mentoring relationships for their positive influence on career planning and research, viewing mentors as counselors, idea providers, and role models.
An inclusive academic environment is crucial for student well-being and fostering a sense of belonging. Peer mentoring is an effective strategy to enhance inclusion, leading to improved retention and academic success. Mentors can guide mentees on diversity and inclusion topics like unconscious bias, self-awareness, and micro-aggressions. Through both formal and informal interactions, students and mentors build relationships that extend beyond career guidance and technical training, enhancing students’ well-being and sense of inclusion.
Medical education has had varied success in fostering professional identity formation among students. Recent data indicates that structured mentoring programs can consistently promote this development. A uniform mentoring approach, alongside personalized, longitudinal support and structured assessments, is crucial for effective mentoring. The focus should now shift to creating assessment tools, like a KPM-based tool, to enhance support and oversight of mentoring relationships.
Mentoring of medical students remains a core pillar of medical education, yet the changing landscape of medicine has called for new and innovative mentoring models to guide students in professional development, career placement, and overall student well-being. This review identifies & describes models of mentorship for US medical students.
Surgical subspecialties rank among the least racially and gender diverse of the medical specialties. This systematic review evaluates factors that influence female, gender and sexual minority (GSM), and underrepresented in medicine (URiM)-identifying medical students' decision to pursue a career in a surgical subspecialty. In an effort to understand why these inequities exist and identify areas for improvement, there is a growing body of literature aimed at understanding why medical students are encouraged or discouraged from pursuing a career in surgery.
Mentoring programs are one mechanism used to increase diversity and participation of historically underrepresented groups in academic medicine. However, more knowledge is needed about the mentoring experiences and how culturally relevant concepts and perspectives may influence diverse students, trainees, and faculty success. The use of cultural relevance indicators can inform the creation and evolution of mentoring programs towards holistic support of historically underrepresented trainees and faculty. Implications also focus on the development of mentors and championing the incorporation of cultural humility in the mentoring process.
Working with multiple mentors is a critical way for students to expand their network, gain opportunities, and better prepare for future scholastic or professional ventures. However, students from underrepresented groups (UR) are less likely to be mentored or have access to mentors, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Having multiple mentors at each training stage is critical for student success. Many students are knowledgeable of the mentee-to-mentor relationship; however, students often lack a deeper understanding of how to best foster this relationship for ultimate academic achievement.
Mentoring medical students with varied backgrounds and individual needs can be challenging. Mentors’ satisfaction is likely to be important for the quality and sustainability of mentorships, especially in programs where the mentor has responsibility for facilitating a group of mentees. Our findings suggest that mentors’ overall satisfaction is closely linked to their experiences of fulfilling mentor-student relationships and personal and professional development. Mentors’ satisfaction may be decisive for the pedagogical quality and the sustainability of group mentorship programs in medical education.
Efforts to support mentoring programs facing shortages of experienced clinical mentors have yielded an unexpected benefit. Introducing peer mentoring has not only filled gaps in practice, structure, support, and oversight but has also allowed mentees in peer-mentoring roles to gain experience under senior supervision. This study assesses the experiences of peer mentors within a local research mentoring program to enhance this initiative.
Effective mentorship is likely one of the most important determinants of success in academic medicine and research. Many papers focus on mentoring from the mentor’s perspective, but few give guidance to mentees forging these critically important relationships. The authors apply “managing up,” a corporate concept, to academic medical settings both to promote effective, successful mentoring and to make a mentor’s job easier. Managing up requires the mentee to take responsibility for his or her part in the collaborative alliance and to be the leader of the relationship by guiding and facilitating the mentor’s efforts to create a satisfying and productive relationship for both parties. The authors review the initiation and cultivation of a mentoring relationship from the perspective of a mentee at any stage (student through junior faculty), and they propose specific strategies for mentee success.
Research has shown that barriers to career success in academic medicine disproportionately affect women. These barriers include inadequate mentoring, which may perpetuate the underrepresentation of women in senior leadership positions. The purpose of this review was to summarize the qualitative and quantitative evidence of the impact of mentoring on women’s career outcomes and to inform future interventions to support the promotion and retention of women in academic medicine.
Research has shown the importance of diversity in improving patient care. Medical students from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine (UIM) face unique challenges, including minority tax, stereotype threat, and expectations to be the sole representative of their identity group. Mentors must be aware of these challenges and develop skills to address them.