Online Medical School: Unexpected Moments of Mentorship

Abstract

My clinical research mentor is a breast surgeon, a researcher, a teacher, and mother to 2. As a first-year medical student during the COVID-19 pandemic, connecting with my mentor is often the most exciting part of my day. She is the closest I get to any surgeon, the closest I feel to any operating room. Our meetings about manuscripts and data are one of the few things in my slew of Zoom lectures that feels “medical”—for the good of something larger than my capacity to memorize electrolyte imbalances in the kidneys. This afternoon, my mentor logs on from a different part of her home. I can faintly make out the backyard behind her, rain coming down in sheets as she catches me up on her day. She props her chin into her hands, telling me about a young woman with invasive breast cancer and the hours she spent scraping away a tumor with her thoracic surgeon colleague. She sighs and I can hear her sons’ voices in the background. “Mommy,” I hear one whisper while she continues to listen to my laundry list of data use agreements and deadlines. “Mommy,” he whispers again, asking for more TV time with his brother. My mentor looks up and tells him no. When he persists, she explains that she is working and that he is being disrespectful to her students and herself because she cannot yell or scold him in front of her camera. I watch this exchange, enthralled by her calm voice as he asks for snacks and television and waves a Lego contraption across the kitchen island. I watch her straddle her roles as researcher, mentor, and mother. The pandemic has posed challenges for medical education and mentorship is no exception. I cannot shadow in the hospital or meet with my advisors in clinic. I cannot see what a day-to-day looks like in this specialty or that, or how research is tied into clinical practice and vice versa. There is no room for small talk in the hospital cafeteria line or bathroom run-ins where I hear about the more elusive parts of being a surgeon—when do you drop off your kids for childcare? Who picks them up? What is it like to raise 2 children, have a partner who also works, and maintain a healthy family? How do you do it all? Even in nonpandemic times, these questions were hard to ask. But building a relationship in-person allowed for students like myself to read the room and pick the right moment to ask questions that could inform my decisions, especially those categorized as taboo. My basic science professors often call this “the golden minute” in the lecture hall when students approach the podium and ask off-the-record questions about course content or lingering anxieties and aspirations. The golden minute in mentoring relationships, for me, has existed in time spent walking around the hospital with my advisors, grabbing a snack at the coffee cart together, or in conversations that arise from a family photo or stick figure drawing in their office spaces. These golden minutes are harder to find when relationships are reduced to emails or phone calls and Zoom fatigue sets in. In my years of preparation to become a doctor, I have never seen what it actually looks like to be the things I want to become—a juggler of surgical practice, clinical research, teaching, and family. But I realized, watching my mentor with her sons, that I was seeing exactly the things I had wanted to see and had, in fact, never had a chance to see in nonpandemic times. These golden minutes were not only setting a real-time example of intersecting roles and responsibilities but opening a window into a version of mentorship unique to virtual platforms, a kind of role-modeling that revealed granular moments of sacrifice, struggle, and negotiation. Virtual platforms can show the interstices of private and academic life that offer students invaluable opportunities for professional development if advisors are willing to let the students in. It is a mode of mentoring that I hope continues through and beyond the pandemic. “I’m so sorry, my sons are getting so smart,” she apologizes. They compromise: Her son will get another bowl of granola and will read a book to his brother instead of watching more TV. “Not at all,” I say. “Thank you.” Truly, thank you, I want to say again. Relief spreads across my face; a glimmer into her life was a vision of what my future could look like. Author’s Note: This essay was written in the fall of 2020 when the author was a first-year medical student and in-person classes had not yet resumed. Acknowledgments: The author would like to thank Dr. Oluwadamilola Fayanju for her continuous mentorship and permission to share this story.