Research Guides: Mentoring at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Dental Medicine: Students

Online Resources

Family Medicine Interest Group Mentoring Resources
For medical students, having a physician who serves as a mentor may be one of the most valuable resources on the path to becoming a doctor. Mentoring relationships are particularly important for minority students or students who are in a medical school that does have a department of family medicine.

Resources in the LMA Community

HMS Office for Diversity and Community Partnership: PROGRAMS FOR MEDICAL AND GRADUATE STUDENTS
HMS-MIT Medical Mentorship Program
This is a pilot program between Harvard Medical School and MIT students. The purpose of the mentorship program is to supplement prehealth/premed advising at MIT with student experiences. Most of our mentors will be MIT alums currently at HMS and will be able to provide MIT-specific premed advice.

Relevant Articles

Read about Harvard Medical School's famous "Mentored Case Book Course".

The mentored clinical casebook project at Harvard Medical School.
Stanton RC, Mayer LD, Oriol NE, Treadway KK, Tosteson DC. Acad Med. 2007 May;82(5):516-20.

Harvard Medical School, Joslin Diabetes Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA. robert.stanton@joslin.harvard.edu

An excellent physician must be aware of the countless issues that affect each
patient's health. Many medical education programs expose students to a broad
spectrum of disparate knowledge and hope they will integrate all the pieces into
a coherent whole. The authors describe an explicit approach to integration used
at Harvard Medical School since 2003 that aims to enhance students' learning in
medical school and throughout their medical careers: the Mentored Clinical
Casebook Project (MCCP). The MCCP is constructed on the premise that such
integration does not occur suddenly but, rather, is an unending process. A
first-year student is assigned to one clinician and follows one patient for one
year. The student is expected to spend as much time with the patient as possible,
in both clinical and nonclinical settings, seek help from the clinician, and
consult other experts and sources to develop a complete picture of the patient's
life. The student must produce a casebook that includes, but is not limited to,
the patient's history; basic science, clinical, socioeconomic, and cultural
issues; and self-reflection. The MCCP is intended to allow students to develop a
deeper and more diverse understanding of what comprises a patient's health care
life, to discern the patient as a person and the person as a patient. This
educational project has been popular with students since its inception, providing
them with a personal framework from which to address the needs of future patients
and introducing them to how much they will continue to learn from their patients.
PMID: 17457078 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]