ABSTRACT
SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: This innovative program included Underrepresented Minority (URM) Medical students, faculty and medical student peer mentors at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) by using virtual platform of Zoom and communication through emails. DESCRIPTION: Mentorship and scholarship are crucial for success in academic medicine. URM students often have difficulty finding adequate mentorship support to aid in their scholarly productivity and professional development. This challenge has been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Acknowledging the challenge, our team created a platform for URM students to get early and easy access to dedicated mentors who are devoted to their academic success, share similar backgrounds, and will support scholarly productivity. A pilot program was successfully completed in the academic year of 2020- 2021 and was expanded to academic year of 2021-2022. The program included URM medical students at MCW. The interested students completed a survey prior to the session indicating their past research experience and their expectation from the participation in the program. Students with research experience participated as peer mentors whereas Faculty were recruited based on their interest in mentoring URM students. A virtual workshop was held to introduce the cohort of students to the platform and explore the various means of scholarship including writing case report and letter to the editor. It was attended by 16 URM students with 6 student peer mentors and 9 faculty mentors. After the workshop, we created a MentorMentee model where medical students(M1/M2) were paired with a peer mentor(M3/M4) and a faculty mentor to create teams to work on 15 scholarly projects(mainly case reports). Kern Institute is providing financial assistance for dissemination. EVALUATION: For the academic year of 2020-2021, two faculty and two peer mentors were connected virtually with four URM medical students. The students completed three case reports that were presented at National SHM meeting and one letter to the editor during the two-month pilot program. Overall student feedback was remarkably positive regarding increased mentorship and scholarly opportunities. Based on the feedback, we developed the program including URM medical Students and faculty mentors. Students in the cohort were involved in at least one scholarly project and this program was successful in submitting 15 case reports to National meetings (ACP/SHM/SGIM) and students were able to secure research opportunities. There was exponential growth in scholarly productivity and collaboration from the previous year. DISCUSSION / REFLECTION / LESSONS LEARNED: Our URM mentorship program has highlighted the crucial role of mentorship in promoting scholarly productivity among URM students. Despite minimal prior research experience, creating a platform with dedicated mentors and mentees can create supportive environment to facilitate scholarly productivity in a short time frame. We aim to expand this platform for diverse specialty-oriented opportunities.