Larner Mentors

Mentorship is a cornerstone of professional growth in medicine. Throughout their careers, physicians rely on mentors for guidance, encouragement, perspective, and connection. Medical school is often where those relationships begin.

The Larner Mentors Program provides a foundation for building a lifelong network of mentors and colleagues. By connecting students with faculty and resident mentors, the program helps foster meaningful relationships that support learning, career exploration, personal growth, and a deeper connection to the Larner community.

In addition to mentor-mentee matching, Larner Mentors offers training, networking opportunities, social events, and professional development resources designed to help participants build successful and rewarding mentoring relationships. As students progress through medical school, the program serves as a gateway to the broader community of mentors, peers, and professional connections that will support them throughout their careers.

For more information contact: 
Dr. Eileen Kelly (eileen.kelly@uvm.edu), Director, Larner Mentors program

Guiding Principles for Larner Mentors Program 

The program ascribes to a guiding list of principles. Many of these are research-based and come from both the face-to-face mentoring and the e-mentoring literature: 

• Multiple-mentor model – Mentees need to have an array of mentors to succeed, someone outside of their area of interest, someone inside. Larner Mentors will pair mentors who have similar interests to those identified by the mentee; we encourage the mentee to find other mentors or peer mentors to assist with identified goals.
• Mentee-driven model – A mentor-driven model is most effective in settings like community mentoring programs, where adults mentor children and youth. With adult learners as mentees, a mentee-driven model is more appropriate. Therefore, Larner Mentors will provide support and suggestions for student mentees to direct their mentoring relationships.
• Provision of program structure – Throughout the course of the academic year, the program will send out mentoring tips and discussion suggestions – what is called “coaching” in the mentoring literature. The coaching messages will provide topics to discuss, reinforcement for you to stay in contact with your mentoring partner and provide a line of communication between the program and the participants. Applying this sense of structure to the individual mentoring partnerships, we suggest that you schedule a few meetings out. Why? Because for busy medical professionals, if we don’t get these important but not urgent meetings on our calendars early, they will be crowded out my many other responsibilities and meetings.
• Utilize useful suggestions, be purposeful in your planning – throughout the academic year Larner Mentors will provide opportunities for training, coaching, and mentor-mentee professional development. Some of these activities will come under the heading of the Office of Intercultural Excellence. Be strategic in the use of your time - attend events and use the techniques that seem valuable to you.
• Value of program and partnership assessment – Larner Mentors is committed to the assessment of the program, to make mid-course corrections as needed, and to quantify the outcomes of the program. Likewise, assessment between mentors and student mentees is important, so informal techniques for mentoring partnership assessments will be sent periodically. 
• Confidentiality – Any sensitive issues that are discussed within the mentoring partnership should be held in confidence. If a topic is brought up and either party is not comfortable discussing the topic, the topic will be considered “off-limits” and the discussion should change to other topics without any negative ramifications.
• No-fault mentoring policy – The Larner Mentors program has a no-fault mentoring policy. Some mentor-mentee pairs simply don’t meet the needs of both mentoring partners. This could be due to scheduling conflicts, or any other reason. If that is the case then the no-fault mentoring policy applies– just contact eileen.kelly@med.uvm.edu with your request.
   

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