As I spoke about in the first two posts - mentorship shouldn't be hard to come by or inaccessible. People enter the pipeline of medicine from many backgrounds -- different personality types, lifestyles, upbringings -- these all make for variable experiences which continues through medical school into residency, fellowship, and even into the role of an attending.
So what have we done about it and what's the vision?
MENTORx connects premeds and medical students with real people who are just a few years ahead of you. Residents, fellows, attendings. Whoever you think would help you out. We facilitate one-on-one sessions, group workshops, and Q&A with actual people. A few of the motivations that led us to build this out.
First: mentorship needs to be EASILY accessible. The problem is twofold. Mentees often feel like a burden asking a busy med student or trainee to meet and give them advice. And logistically, it can be a nightmare trying to line up two very busy individual schedules. So we built a simple scheduling tool -- mentors who already want to be involved (and aren't being burdened) set their availability and mentees can book in a few seconds at a time that works for both parties.
Second: we want to quiet the noise. While forums, LLMs, and AI-driven Google searches can be genuinely useful, there is simply no equivalent to talking with a real person who has already navigated the difficult journey in front of you. The plan is to have sessions that are both broad and narrow, with general consulting to give people a lay of the land as well as more granular coaching sessions to help with specific hurdles such as: med school apps, rotations, board exams, residency apps, job searches, you name it.
Third: we want to put money into the pockets of the people doing the work. Residents and med students are stretched super thin, often working 60-80 hour weeks and with little to no opporutnity for side income. I'll have a separate post next week about the double edged sword of paid "mentoring", but for now - in order for broadly accessible mentorship to be scalable, paying the people giving up their time may be part of the answer, not just a compromise. While there will always be options for free mentoring on our site, we encourage mentors and mentees to sign up for whatever works best for them. The bottom line is, most big med school /residency consulting firms or tutoring services charge very high prices (hundreds of dollars an hour) and most of that doesn't make it back to the students or residents doing the work.
So far, we've facilitated 46 total one-on-one sessions, 87% of which have been done as volunteer sessions. We've done 1 group workshop for pre-meds where 10 people signed up, and we've been starting to introduce a free, vetted Q&A service for people to ask questions and get real answers. We have 36 mentors signed up ranging from medical students to attendings across many specialties, and hoping to keep building this out as we move forward.
The next phase will be trying to do more group sessions -- including some med school application sessions and general residency application strategy sessions as well as some bundled sessions specifically for people applying into specialties such as General Surgery, Anesthesiology, or surgical subspecialties. If any of that sounds like something you need, browse our mentors and book a session - it takes less time than reading this post!
-Corey
Want personalized guidance?
Book a 1-on-1 session with a med student or resident mentor.
Browse Mentors →