Coordinator of mentoring activities
Association of Resident Physicians, RomaniaCoordinator of mentoring activities
Scholarship without mentorship has no sense. Without a mentor who can supervise the whole academic activity of the student, the grant has no relevance. Medical school is really expensive, even if students are not Roma.
But, first of all, these scholarships aren’t a form of social assistance, but have a strictly academic purpose. You cannot achieve this without achieving some performance indicators like participating in international conferences, the competence to write a synopsis for a scientific article or being able to create a scientific portfolio which could ensure a continuous academic career. The mentorship system is the innovative aspect of this program, because this system no longer exists in Romania. Now there is only the classical system of a teacher and course assistant. Most mentors were selected well - they are resident doctors who’ve been through all these steps before.
By combining Roma and non-Roma beneficiaries and mentors, we have a perfect example of a project of high quality medical education. We have plenty of examples of people who succeeded - not only from this project, but also from previous projects, supported by Open Society Institute Budapest. We have Dana Pirjol, who now is at Cambridge and Corina Stanciu, who received plenty of Erasmus scholarships. We have grant-holders who finished their residency and now are mentors. They understand how the responsibility of a mentor is important and the varied problems of students they must guide.
We will continue to promote this model, because we are trying to convince the local authorities, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education to think of a strategy and to start to build from our results. We
have demonstrated that this mentorship model really works and has great success. But without continuity, it would be a shame to stop here. We have to think about what we must do further. We have six resident doctors and people with extraordinary CVs, but what’s going to happen next?
