Facilitator's Guide for Session II-How to choose Mentor and find an Elective?

Second Session: How to choose mentor and find an elective?
Date: June 14th 2014
Format: Lecture via Google Plus
Faculty: Basmaa Ali MD
Length: 90 Minutes
Objectives

1. To help students in choosing a mentor.
2. To guide them to find electives for themselves.

Pre-Session Work:

• Meeting to discuss MBTI within teams and choose specialty for each student
• Meeting to choose possible Mentors
• Students submitted their CVs to the Group leaders CVs. A sample of CV was provided by faculty and everyone was asked to follow the pattern.

The session was divided into three parts:

1. How to choose mentors?
2. How to find electives?
3. QA session

How to choose mentors?

This part of the session consisted of:
I.Definition of a Mentor and qualities of a good Mentor:
"A mentor was defined to be a person who teaches or gives advice to a less experienced person often a younger one." A mentor teaches , supports, councils, sponsers and if necessary provides protection to its mentee.
A good mentor should have following qualities:

• Integrity
• Trustworthy
• influential
• Available
• similar ethics and values
• Good communicator
• Openness
• Fun

It is better to have a committee of mentors consisting of:

1. Process mentor
2. Content mentor
3. Project mentor
4. Elective mentor

II.Finding the right Mentor
Students were asked to
Actively seek mentors
Look for the past performance of the mentor, as it is the best index for the future performance.
This part went well but many students still had questions about choosing mentors as most of the faculty in their surrounding had no online record of their recent research work
Note: A list of Process, Project, Content and Elective Mentors for the students in the programme was provided. Note: The powerpoint slides containing the details of faculty members selected as mentors has been uploaded to kemumentoring.blogspot.com
III.How to approach a Mentor?
Students were given a detailed briefing on how to approach a mentor. Each student was asked to write a cover letter. A cover letter must contain
The detail of mentor's most recent research work
How you (mentee) can help him in his research
Ask the mentor to schedule a meeting ASAP
Attach your CV and send it to mentor by mail or give him by hand.
This part went quite well as students got every detail they needed to know about approaching the mentor.

How to find an Elective?

This part of session was aimed at guiding the students about how to put their efforts in the right place. It consisted of following points:

I.Why do an Elective?

• An elective can help in students learning more about
• Other skills
• Different specialities
• Other mentors
• Different settings
• Geography they want to work in

II.What to learn in an elective?

An Elective is aimed at learning following things

• How to increase patient outcome?
• How to decrease risk for yourself/
• Business of medicine
• Ethics of medicine

III.How to choose an elective?

Before applying for electives one must know following things:

• Which speciality does he want to work in?
• How to choose a mentor?
• In what kind of settings he wants to work in?
• Geography of the place he is going to work.

This part was good but due to shortage of time, things could not be explained well. Students wanted to know more about how to apply for electives? and what sort of electives can help them in pursuing a specific career.
Question Answer Session:
QA session could not happen due to shortage of time and students were asked to mail their questions to the faculty if they have any.
Session could not get started at the given time so Elective part and QA part was not satisfactory.
Every student was asked to fill the feedback form about the session and write cover letters and submit them to faculty within one week.
Overall this was a good session except the sound quality and time management needed to be improved. Composite feedback by all the students has been uploaded to the blog.