Mentorship in Residency
Written by Lindsey Ulin, MD
Mentorship is critical in medicine, and it’s unlikely any of us made it this far without mentors. Now that you’ve had a few months to adjust to your new job, it’s never too early to think about finding mentors. Residency is incredibly busy; how can you have time to find mentors? Here are five tips:
Use existing structures- Find out if your program has a mentorship structure in place, for example, are you assigned faculty and/or peer mentors? If you’re not sure if your program has this, it’s worth asking about. If the answer is no consider suggesting creating a program, but see tip number four before taking that task on yourself.
Know what you’re looking for- Mentors serve many purposes and it can be helpful to find different mentors for clinical, research, and work-life areas. Mentors with career interests that are different from yours can be helpful as you may want advice from someone potentially not evaluating you. If you don’t know what you’re interested in yet a mentor can help you work through figuring it out. Think about what you hope to learn from them before meeting whether that’s understanding their career journey, hearing about their current work, getting involved in a project, figuring out your next move, or perhaps all of the above. Even if your interests change, which is almost to be expected to a certain degree, they can still point you in the right direction.
Interest emails- Send interest emails, introducing yourself and asking to meet with faculty. This can be intimidating but they’ve all been in your shoes and it’s hard to imagine anyone will not excitedly agree to talk to you. You can also ask a faculty member who knows you well to send a warm hand-off email connecting you. This is especially helpful with alumni too, as mentors don’t need to just be current attendings at your institution.
Don’t overcommit- Tip 2 sounds like I’m suggesting finding 10 mentors and having time to meet with them all is impossible in residency. Mentorship does not have to exist solely in more formal sit-down meetings. It can be a quick phone call or zoom and you get to decide the follow-up intervals on your time. You can also think of mentors as a point person to go to intermittently with questions, and concerns even asynchronously over email. Some mentor-mentee relationships naturally take different courses but you cannot have too many people in your network. Be honest with yourself and your mentor about your time commitment to projects. Residency is hard and it’s completely understandable to express interest while also setting a boundary with your time while on busier rotations. I did zero research projects as an intern, although acknowledge if you’re interested in a competitive fellowship, you likely need to get involved sooner.
Be curious- You’ll find some mentors naturally after working with them. It’s easy to be so focused on work and tasks, but take time at work to get to know your faculty, their interests, and of course as people. Mentors don’t need to just be attendings as fellows, and residents ahead of you can serve as great mentors with the more recent memory of what you’re going through.
