Giving a Boost

Contact: Kenzie Bultman, M3, bultman@wustl.edu

Giving a Boost (GAB) is a volunteer organization established to support pre-medical students lacking access to mentors in medicine. By offering guidance on medical school applications free of cost, we aim to alleviate some of the financial burden, reduce disparities in the application process, and increase diversity in the workforce of future physicians. While we cannot assure that our services will guarantee acceptance into medical school, we aim to reduce the stress of applications for our mentees, and we volunteer our time to provide the guidance that we ourselves wished for during this journey. So far, GAB has mentored students across 30+ campuses, leading to acceptances to top medical schools including Harvard, Columbia, PittMed, and WUSM. 

More info can be found here: https://www.givingaboost.org/

Basics on Mentoring

There will be two rounds of mentoring sessions. Primary/secondary application mentorship will run from March– August. Interview preparation mentorship will run from August – December. Interview preparation is a separate sign up, and you are not required to participate in both rounds of mentoring (you may do just applications, just interviewing, or both).

Mentors and mentees will be matched up based on similar backgrounds, interests in medicine, goals in their professional careers, and how they would like to do mentoring (zoom or in-person). It is expected that mentors and mentees “meet” about once a month to go over application materials. Each mentoring relationship will look different based on mentor/mentee preferences. Pre-medical mentees are briefed on the time commitment that they can expect from their mentors. Ultimately, if a mentor wants to devote more time to their mentor/mentee relationship, that is their decision! 

Mentors will indicate how many mentees they would like to take on. For primary/secondary application mentorship, the time commitment will likely be around 4 hours/month/mentee. This includes reading application materials and providing feedback, as well as meeting one-on-one with their mentee. 

We will have periodic “quality assurance” checks with mentors and mentees, and our leadership team has put together resources to offer advice and information to mentors about the medical school application process.

Becoming a Mentor

There are no “qualifications,” everyone is encouraged to sign-up. The greater the diversity we have in mentors, the better we will be able to provide advice to our mentees. The sign-up sheet asks about important activities from the AMCAS application in order to best match up mentors and mentees (for example, creating a mentee-mentor pairing based on a strong interest in medical education). 

In order to ensure we are providing the most helpful information to our mentees, there will be a required, short (about 1 hour) asynchronous training.