Mentoring interns and students

Students and interns can use mentoring to explore medical writing, recognise transferable skills and develop professional judgement. A writer can contribute through university mentoring, a supervised placement or an academic project.

Career-focused student mentoring

The University of East Anglia's student mentoring programme in 2017 supported current students and recent graduates with professional insight for entering employment. ¹ It offered two formats. ¹

Format	Commitment and purpose
Insider Insight	Information sessions offering insight into a career sector or business area.
Six-month mentoring	One-to-one advice over six months to broaden horizons and guide first steps into employment.

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Mentors received a handbook, online training, newsletters and a professional-network group, with networking events involving students, mentors and careers staff. ¹ Campus meetings were encouraged, supplemented as appropriate by telephone, email, video calls or professional-network contact. ¹

One medical writer's sessions included students from first to final year studying biological sciences, biochemistry, English literature and creative writing, as well as research staff considering work outside academia. ² Her discussion topics were: ²

• Different types of medical writing.
• A typical working day and how much it varies.
• Core analytical, scientific, language and writing competencies.
• Pharmaceutical work environments and their motivations.
• Speculative applications and medical-writing tests.
• Making a CV attractive to employers.
• Managing projects.
• Networking and assertiveness.
• Challenges and successes in her own career.
• Employment and freelancing: differences, benefits and challenges.

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A recurring discussion was which skills from degree courses or academic research transferred to medical writing and which needed further development. ²

A practitioner-led clerkship or fellowship

In 2013, a pharmacist running a medical-writing business offered a four-week medical-communication clerkship through an adjunct appointment held at a pharmacy school since 1996. ³ A fellowship established in 2001 helped pharmacists improve communication skills and explore medical-writing careers through practical experience and education; by 2013 it had expanded to include a research project. ^{4, 3} A medical communicator willing to mentor someone eager to learn and invest time and energy can use this model. ³ Informal mentoring alongside it particularly encouraged pharmacists to consider medical communication. ³

Capstone mentoring and independent judgement

In one graduate biomedical-writing capstone, students worked over two semesters with both an academic/writing mentor and a content expert. ⁵ Finding a content mentor was an early student responsibility, starting by identifying who conducted the relevant research. ⁵

The mentoring approach guided students towards a feasible, specific medical-writing research question rather than supplying it. ^{5, 6} An illustrative discussion narrowed oncology to target-specific informed-consent documents for phase 3 paediatric cancer trials, then required a research question, rationale and original research rather than a review. ^{5, 6} The next stages involved a survey assessing plain-language standards, ethics-committee queries and only three survey responses—insufficient for the research. ⁷ At that point, the mentor moved from asking the student to work it out independently to joint brainstorming and reworking the project, with an additional semester needed. ⁷

Mentors need to judge when encouragement and persistence should give way to a pause, including when illness, family events or disasters disrupt a student's work. ⁷ They must adapt to individual personalities, strengths and limitations, helping develop thought processes, time management, critical thinking, networking and problem-solving as well as writing mechanics. ⁷

Ten academic-mentoring guidelines describe how to provide that support. ^{8, 9}

1. Give concrete general guidelines rather than detailed instructions.
2. Guide the mentee to discover what to do independently.
3. Provide structure without corrections: use prompts such as style, clarity, organisation or grammar, alongside deadlines, guidelines and examples, so the learner develops critical thinking.
4. Treat setbacks, including rejection or a failed survey, as learning experiences and help the mentee recognise their value.
5. Assess the individual when deciding how to help with a difficulty: a push, a break or a longer supportive conversation may suit different people.
6. Understand limitations, including health, fear, age or family circumstances. Respect privacy: personal information should not be solicited, but volunteered information can inform support.
7. Advise on job searches, cold-calling, networking, recruiters and job sites; review tests and CVs or résumés, and provide recommendations or references.
8. Be honest about limitations, beginning with strengths, without assuming that a weakness makes the person unfit for medical writing; performance can depend on the structure of a particular job.
9. Teach professional communication through emails, job applications, discussion boards, web pages and social media; connect learners with professionals and introduce them to AMWA early in their studies.
10. Show care and approachability, respect the mentee and expect respect in return.

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