get the most out of the SIR Annual Scientific Meeting.


Resident and fellow mentors are especially valuable as medical students prepare for fourth-year IR sub- internships. On rotations, they help students get the most out of clinic, consults and catheter time while helping them fit in as valued members of the team. Faculty mentors provide the 50,000-foot perspective of a career in IR and what this specialty looks like beyond the bubbles of medical education and academic medicine. They help students take their first steps in IR research, realize career goals and identify what training programs best align with those goals. Faculty mentors have been through the rigorous residency application process and may serve as training program directors or department leadership themselves, so they can help students craft personal statements, navigate the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS) and prepare for interview day.


Residents and fellows The importance of mentorship extends beyond a successful residency match, as IR residents look to develop the professionalism, clinical proficiency and technical skills needed to become successful IRs. Junior residents often find a mentor in their senior resident counterparts, who may introduce them to the hospital system along with both the conspicuous and hidden residency curriculum. As residents advance in their training, they acquire the skills to mentor the incoming resident cohort. These cyclical junior-senior relationships are indeed bidirectional, for the senior residents begin to cultivate their skills as a mentor in a low-stress environment with their junior resident.


Attending mentors become increasingly important throughout residency, for they often exemplify the type of physicians that residents aspire to be. These mentors help build technical proficiency and critical thinking skills by challenging and providing feedback. The longitudinal task of gaining a mentor’s trust enough to intervene on patients safely is arguably one of the most important lessons that shape residents. While this graduated autonomy is


different for each relationship, mentors often have a keen insight into exactly what is needed for growth. Mentors also serve as critical resources for the job search and can vouch for residents as they embark upon the careers.


Finding mentors Finding mentors may be daunting at first due to the many avenues and networks present in this specialty. It is useful to consider the potential for unstructured mentorship, where these relationships grow naturally, or structured mentorship, where mentees and mentors are formally matched. Unstructured mentorship relationships can form over referrals from friends and colleagues, social media and between sessions at national conferences. These unstructured mentorship relationships are often more enduring and, in some instances, may last years or decades. Structured mentorship is often available for trainees at their home institutions. Here, trainees are paired with faculty based on their interests and career goals.


The SIR Mentor Match tool helps trainees bypass some of the barriers to mentorship.8


This tool, which is


available for all SIR members via SIR Connect, allows mentees to get virtually paired with faculty mentors across the country. The MSC mentorship initiative is available for medical students to be paired with resident and faculty mentors; last year, this initiative saw over 150 students get connected with over 50 IR physician mentors.


Becoming a mentor Trainees should consider the full-circle importance of passing on what we have been given by becoming mentors ourselves. We have a responsibility to help build the IR community and invest in the future of our specialty. Residents and fellows are uniquely positioned to act as mentors for medical students, as they have many interactions with students on a daily basis. They can exert a significant influence on students who are in the process of forming their personal and professional identities. Residents and fellows can participate as mentors in the SIR Mentor Match and MSC Mentorship Initiative. Medical students can serve as peer mentors


for younger students and as mentors for their schools’ IR interest groups. They are uniquely positioned to serve as mentors for pre-medical and undergraduate students as they were recently in the position of taking the MCAT and applying to schools.


Conclusion Mentorship for trainees in IR is critical as they navigate the path from medical student to resident to practicing physician. This bidirectional relationship comes in many structures and modalities but always provides benefit and satisfaction for all those involved. As Dr. Salem said, the importance of mentorship in IR cannot be understated, as these relationships have played out over several decades to allow IR to become one of the most innovative and critically important specialties in all of medicine. Continued focus on mentorship will allow IR to retain its status as a versatile and high-quality discipline that advances therapies at a speed that eclipses other specialties.3


References


1. Deb L, Desai S, McGinley K, et al. Mentorship in Postgraduate Medical Education. In: P. Stawicki S, S. Firstenberg M, P. Orlando J, J. Papadimos T, eds. Contemporary Topics in Graduate Medical Education—Volume 2. IntechOpen; 2022. doi:10.5772/intechopen.98612.


2. Salem R. The 2022 Society of Interventional Radiology Annual Meeting Dotter Lecture: Mentorship. JVIR. 2022;33(11):1278–1285. doi:10.1016/j.jvir.2022.08.013.


3. Li S, Sun VH, Galla N, et al. Gender-based survey analysis of research and mentoring in interventional radiology. JVIR. 2022;33(5):578- 585.e3. doi:10.1016/j.jvir.2022.01.010.


4. Xiang DH, Snyder A, Capua JD, et al. Mentorship in interventional radiology: Addressing obstacles to pursuing research and innovation among IR trainees. Acad Radiol. 2022;29(8):1275-1281. doi:10.1016/j.acra.2021.10.028.


5. Patel VM, Warren O, Ahmed K, et al. How can we build mentorship in surgeons of the future?: Building mentorship among surgeons. ANZ J. Surg. 2011;81(6):418–424. doi:10.1111/j.1445-2197.2011.05779.x.


6. Waljee JF, Chopra V, Saint S. Mentoring Millennials. JAMA. 2018;319(15):1547. doi:10.1001/ jama.2018.3804.


7. Racine H. The need for IR mentorship. Published April 27, 2022. irq.sirweb.org/perspectives/ the-need-for-ir-mentorship.


8. Healy NA, Cantillon P, Malone C, Kerin MJ. Role models and mentors in surgery. The American Journal of Surgery. 2012;204(2):256–261. doi:10.1016/j.amjsurg.2011.09.031.


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