The Virtual Advisor Program: Linking Students to Mentors via the World Wide Web

Abstract

Background: Emergency medicine (EM) is a popular specialty for medical students choosing a career. Many attend medical schools without an affiliated EM residency and lack both the formal mentorship and informal guidance provided by medical school advisors (or faculty) involved in an accredited EM training program. Others desire specialized advice based on geographic or specific academic interest. Objective: The authors describe user characteristics of a Webbased virtual advisor program that paired medical students with EM faculty advisors. Methods: Prospective users access the system from a link on the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) home page. On the initial visit, demographic information is collected. Faculty and student guidelines are provided. Students desiring individual advice may register for a virtual advisor who can assess career goals and qualifications. Volunteer faculty mentors are assigned on the basis of the student's geographic and

Mentoring programs for medical students - a review of the PubMed literature 2000 - 2008

“…The mentoring programs reported pursued different main goals : (1) to provide career counseling [5,15-17,21,24], (2) to develop professionalism and to support students in their personal growth [14,19,22,23], (3) to increase interest in research and to support an academic career [5,13,18], and (4) to foster students' interest in a specialty for which a future shortage is projected [12,20]. …”

“…Integrating undergraduate students into internal-medicine research programs and encouraging mentoring relationships with internists working in the primary care field not only produced higher research productivity, but also contributed to a higher percentage of graduates opting for internal medicine training. A similar goal is being pursued by the American Society of Emergency Medicine (EM), which provides a specialty-specific two-tier online career guidance program to attract students to EM and to provide role models for those who choose EM [20]. …”

“…Six of the programs offer one-to-one mentorships [12,13,15,18,20,24]; in two programs, small groups of students are mentored by a faculty member or a senior physician [16,22], and six programs feature both settings, i.e. one-to-one and group mentoring [5,14,17,19,21,23].…”

“…In some programs the mentors are special faculty career advisors. A virtual mentoring relationship was provided in one program only [20]. …”

Growth and performance of fully online and blended K-12 public schools

“…Much of the published literature involves a qualitative synthesis of anecdotal evidence from those involved in the K-12 online industry and not based on an explicit theoretical framework. While some of the available virtual school analyses focus on virtual schooling in general and others on virtual charter schools more specifically (Coates et al, 2004;Gill et al, 2015;Pazhouh et al, 2015), little is known about whether virtual and blended schools are serving the full range of the student population and whether they are doing so successfully. It is important to extend research on virtual and blended schools to examine whether the assumptions of the 'market' perspective are empirically grounded, especially on the balance between private and public benefits of online schooling that has been given scant attention.…”