By Doug Brunk, San Diego Bureau
On his application for medical school, Dr. Jeffrey A. Toretsky remembers writing that mentoring goes hand in hand with being a physician.
Maybe that's because during his undergraduate training at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he was mentored by Dr. Jonathan Finlay, a pediatric oncologist who “had a contagious enthusiasm for his work,” recalled Dr. Toretsky, a pediatric oncologist at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, known for his research work in Ewing's sarcoma. “It was his enthusiasm that led me to where I am today.”
Two years ago, Dr. Toretsky followed Dr. Finlay's own example by mentoring students from a science, mathematics, and computer science magnet program at an area high school. Each year, two students from the program spend a summer with him in the research lab of Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Dr. Toretsky assigns the students a month's worth of reading before they set foot in the lab, to “get them up to speed on the background science,” he said. “They have to expand their knowledge of molecular biology. Then they have to learn specific details pertaining to the projects underway in my laboratory [including] lectures by me and my laboratory colleagues. From there, they meet individually with all the postdoctoral fellows and graduate students in my lab.”
The students' main goal is to generate a list of scientific hypotheses based on research going on in the lab. Then they choose one hypothesis, design experiments, and work shoulder to shoulder with members of the lab to learn the techniques necessary to address their hypothesis.
“Watching the students make choices and get excited about careers in science is rewarding,” Dr. Toretsky said. “So is thinking that they may have the opportunity to discover things that I won't have the opportunity to learn about.”
For example, he said, Audrey Kubetin, a student who spent the summer of 2006 in his lab, will graduate from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md., this spring; Dr. Toretsky graduated from high school in 1980. “She has a 27-year offset to my career,” he explained. “If I think about where technology has come in 27 years and where it's going to be 27 years from now when she is approaching the prime of her career, she's going to have opportunities that I can barely dream about today.”
Even though Ms. Kubetin's summer research project did not achieve results that addressed her hypothesis, Dr. Toretsky hopes that she remains enthused about pursuing a career in science. “The experiments Audrey pursued were never done before, so her getting a successful result was a total unknown,” he said. “For me, it was a little bit frustrating because I would have liked her to have more success in the results, but with research, there are always surprises.”
Physicians who aren't mentoring others in some way “are missing out on an opportunity for immense reward and immense contribution,” he said. “If you can incorporate some young minds in your work, they will see the joy that you get out of your career, giving you a chance to inspire somebody that could soar into the next generation of medicine.”
Immersion in 'Real-Life Medicine'
Last summer, Dr. Osama Aaflaq received the “mentor of the year” award from first-year medical students at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. In their nomination letter, the students described him as “a family man who understands the stressors of being a physician and won't hesitate to share his mechanism for not only being the best doctor he can be, but how to stay true to your family and yourself.”
Dr. Jeffrey A. Toretsky, pictured with high school student Audrey Kubetin, has two students spend the summer in his laboratory making and testing research hypotheses. Sally Koch Kubetin/Elsevier Global Medical News
Each academic year since 1998, two medical students have “shadowed” Dr. Aaflaq during his shifts as an emergency department physician at Memorial Hospital of Carbondale. “It's more like immersing [themselves] in real-life medicine,” he said in an interview. “They see how the real things happen, rather than sitting in a classroom and learning about it.”
Usually he takes first-year students because he considers that the most challenging year of medical school. “It's a maze that they get into,” he said. “They need some guidance.”
Dr. Aaflaq likes being a mentor because he views learning as a two-way street, noting that he learns as much from medical students as they learn from him. Most medical students ask a lot of questions, “and you want to provide them with good, accurate answers,” he explained. “This is always an element that pushes you to strive more and read more to answer these questions. Sometimes, you're asked a question that you don't know the answer to. The simple thing to say is, 'I don't know. Let's look it up.' So we look it up together, and we both learn something new.”