Virtual Mentoring: A Novel Approach to Facilitate Medical Student Applications to General Surgery Residency

OBJECTIVE: The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly altered the landscape of medical education, particularly disrupting the residency application process and highlighting the need for structured mentorship programs. This prompted our insti-tution to develop a virtual mentoring program to provide tailored, one-on-one mentoring to medical students apply-ing to general surgery residency. The aim of this study was to examine general surgery applicant perception of a pilot virtual mentoring curriculum.DESIGN: : The mentorship program included student -tai-lored mentoring and advising in 5 domains: resume edit-ing, personal statement composition, requesting letters of recommendation, interview skills, and residency pro-gram ranking. Electronic surveys were administered fol-lowing ERAS application submission to participating applicants. The surveys were distributed and collected via a REDCap database.RESULTS: Eighteen out of 19 participants completed the survey. Confidence in a competitive resume (p = 0.006), interview skills (p < 0.001), obtaining letters of recom-mendation (p = 0.002), personal statement drafting (p < 0.001), and ranking residency programs (p < 0.001) were all significantly improved following completion of the program. Overall utility of the curriculum and likeli-hood to participate again and recommend the program to others was rated a median 5/5 on the Likert scale (5 [IQR 4-5]). Confidence in the matching carried a premedian 66.5 (50-65) and a postmedian 84 (75-91) (p = 0.004).CONCLUSION: Following the completion of the virtual mentoring program, participants were found to be more confident in all 5 targeted domains. In addition, they were more confident in their overall ability to match. General Surgery applicants find tailored virtual mentor-ing programs to be a useful tool allowing for continued program development and expansion.(c) 2023 Association of Program Directors in Surgery. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)