Members, Please Sign Up To Be Mentors; Influence a Next-Generation Vascular Surgeon

Sep 15, 2019 Re-posted from the September 2019 issue of Vascular Specialist

Wanted: Mentors to help shape a medical student or resident’s career.

The Society for Vascular Surgery’s online community, SVSConnect, is introducing a new “Mentor Match” feature. It provides a simple way to match general surgery residents and medical students with vascular surgeons who can help guide the younger people in their careers in the specialty.

“In surveying our residents and students, they told us how much they’d like someone to mentor them. We’re telling them we heard them,” said William Shutze, MD, who is spearheading the initiative with Nam Tran, MD. “They’re interested in our specialty – and now we need a big pool of volunteers to help them.”

Needed are a very diverse group of mentors, from all practice types and from all over the county/world.

Signing up is easy. Mentors must be SVS members and able to sign in on SVSConnect. Once logged in, they just click the “Mentor Match” tab in the main menu and head to the “Get Started” page to enroll. Mentees will be able to sign up later, and all will be notified when the matching process can begin.

Mentees fill out forms indicating their interests in having a mentor; they may choose from different practice settings, training options, research, even navigating work/life balance. Once they locate a possible mentor, the mentee will reach out via email to get the relationship going.

Drs. Shutze and Tran hope that beyond providing career guidance Mentor Match also will draw more surgeons into vascular surgery. Though SVS has taken several active measures in recent years to grow the vascular surgery workforce, it’s anticipated demand will exceed supply in coming years. Mentor Match will be a valuable tool to increase the visibility of the specialty and encourage students and residents to explore it as a career option, said Dr. Tran.

“Unless students and residents are fortunate enough to already know or have been introduced to a vascular surgeon, there is very little opportunity for them to be exposed to vascular surgery and to consider it as a career,” Dr. Tran said. “Mentor Match will help fill that need, and more. Dr. Shutze and I hope hundreds of members answer this call.”

Sign up at vsweb.org/SVSConnect.

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