What do the first year medical students ask their mentors: the report of a 4-year study

Entering University can cause stress and tension in the first year medical students due to the changing educational environment, the volume and difficulty of the courses and the distance from their family. This can lead to academic failure, mental health, depression and life style change. The purpose of this study was to investigate the problems of the first year medical students, classify them and to investigate the changes of these problems in a year.

This research was a qualitative study conducted from 1393 to 97. The target sample was a group of 3rd and 4th year medical students who had participated in faculty mentoring program as mentors. Every two weeks, the subjects were contacted by the coordinators about the problems that the mentees (first year students) faced and the answers the mentors provided, and these data were recorded in the forms. Referring to the forms, the codes were extracted at the initial stage and then classified according to the similarity of the items between these codes.

During the four years implementation of the program, 3420 forms were collected and reviewed. The questions and problems of the first year students in this study were categorized into four groups of learning problems, psychosocial, role modeling and organizational issues.

The results of this study emphasized the importance of support system in the fields of study (providing appropriate scientific resources, learning and study methods, time management and curriculum planning); psychosocial fields (increasing interpersonal relations management skills, stress management, skills for balancing personal and educational life, and improving the accommodation condition), and recalled the importance of introducing the appropriate role models for medical students.