Medical students as teachers and role models for their future colleagues

Abstract

Medical schools seldom involve students in applicant recruitment. The authors describe the role of junior medical students in recruitment at the University of Ottawa, aiming to increase the Franco-Ontarian applicant pool for the French-language medical program. The students have designed workshops reflecting their study program and offered them, since 1997, to 719 Ontario French-language high school students and to 291 francophone undergraduate university students. The workshops emphasize role modeling by medical students who act as physician-teachers while attendees act as medical students. Evaluation measures include attendee surveys, medical student focus groups and faculty admissions statistics. Attendees give uniformly positive evaluations, highlighting the importance of role modeling. Medical students find teaching enjoyable and highly educational. Admissions statistics show that the Franco-Ontarian applicant pool has more than doubled in spite of an almost fourfold increase in tuition fees. This experience has shown that junior medical student involvement in recruitment activities can benefit both the trainees and their institution.Practice points•Medical schools need to train a sufficiently large and diverse physician workforce to meet societal healthcare needs.•Institutions need to develop recruitment strategies to attract qualified applicants and give special attention to minority groups that are underrepresented in medicine.•Allowing junior medical students to act as teachers and role models for high school and university students during recruitment activities can be a useful strategy for institutions: medical students are highly effective in sparking the interest of young people for the medical profession.•Medical students who participate in the recruitment activities find their teaching experience both stimulating and educational; many aspire to teach when in clinical practice.•The recruitment program presented here can be adapted to health sciences and many other disciplines.