Using Speed Mentoring to Expand Scholarship Perspectives and Opportunities for Fellows

Definitions of scholarship in academia have expanded beyond the historical areas of basic science and clinical research. These realms do not capture the full scope of scholarship, especially in growth fields in medicine. Faculty at our institution are involved in varied scholarly projects; however, fellows are often only encouraged to explore scholarship in their subspecialty division. Meanwhile, many of our incoming fellows express interest in pursuing broad avenues of scholarship, such as improvement science, medical education, and global health. To expose our fellows to a more comprehensive view of scholarship and the full scope of options available at our institution, we developed a toolkit and implemented a speed mentoring event to break down some of the institutional silos for our pediatrics fellows.

Using Kern's 6 steps of curriculum development, we created an online “Scholarship Toolkit,” including a timeline, mentoring guide, and information on 9 scholarship areas (advocacy and community engagement, basic science, biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry research, clinical research, global health, health services research, health technology innovations, improvement science, and medical education).¹  Each scholarship section includes information on primary journals, online resources, academic conferences, courses and other continuing education, funding opportunities, examples of fellow projects, and faculty researchers at our institution. The Scholarship Toolkit was shared with all first-year fellows in advance of the “Scholarship Round Robin.”

The Scholarship Round Robin was designed as a speed mentoring event for all first-year pediatrics fellows and was offered in September of their first year. The event included breakout groups, representing the 9 types of scholarship at our institution. Two faculty in each area of scholarship participated in this 1.5-hour event and led three 24-minute breakout sessions with fellows rotating into 3 different scholarship areas. During each session, faculty provided an overview of their area of scholarship and engaged in discussions with the fellows. During the transitions and at the end of the event, all fellows and faculty were brought together to share key takeaways and broader themes on best practices. Fellows' perspectives were measured using an anonymous, institutional review board-exempt post-event survey, with Likert and open-ended questions.

Twenty fellows from 13 different subspecialty programs and 19 faculty participated in the Scholarship Round Robin. All areas of scholarship had at least 1 fellow participating in a breakout group. Fellows found the event to be a valuable use of their time (mean = 4.7/5) and that the Round Robin exposed them to new areas of scholarship. Fellows felt the breakout sessions were very helpful (mean = 3.9/4), and 100% of fellows rated the breakout groups as helping them gain a better understanding of what careers in specific areas of scholarship entail. Open-ended comments from the fellows included the following:

The Scholarship Toolkit and Round Robin event were an effective strategy to broaden our first-year fellows' perspectives on the range of scholarly areas available and to initiate faculty networking. The Scholarship Toolkit is an important resource they will be able to reference throughout their training. Next steps should explore if the Scholarship Toolkit and Round Robin change fellows' planned areas of scholarship and make the scholarship experience more effective.