UMM To Launch Medical Doctor Mentoring Program for Students

MACHIAS, ME – The University of Maine at Machias is now part of a medical mentoring service that will take place on rural UMaine campuses and will be run by UMM Alumnae Kelsi Bean and a Maine physician.

UMM is hosting an introductory meeting for the program and is inviting all interested students and community members who wish to learn more about becoming a doctor. The meeting is set for 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 25, in Science 102. This is the first building on the right from the main entrance to campus.

This mentoring service will help rural students achieve their goals of becoming a doctor. The service is free for those who look to move into the medical field, and the mentors are volunteering their time to set up local physician contacts, allowing students to shadow and work with medical staff.

Separate from the networking, Bean will work individually with students to talk about med school aspirations, pre-requisites, reviewing documents, mock interviews and more.

Bean is a UMaine Machias graduate with a BA in Behavioral Science. She went on to fulfill her goal of medical school. She attended EMCC for an AAS in Emergency Medical Services and UMaine Orono for post-baccalaureate classes to complete her medical school prerequisites. Bean worked for the Machias Fire Dept in 2005 and the Machias Ambulance in 2007. Working on the ambulance, she said, taught her a lot about medicine and herself. It helped her realize her loved of medicine and her decision to pursue medical school.

UMaine Machias, she said, did a great job of allowing her to explore different career paths, even when she needed to move to a different university so that she could follow the career path of her choice. “They also instilled a love of learning and a love of rural Maine in me. The professors were always approachable and supportive, and they helped to shape who I am.”

Bean will be pursuing electrophysiology, which follows the diagnosis and treatment of arrhythmias, as a career specialty. This path will involve becoming a cardiologist and then completing a fellowship with electrophysiology.

One reason that she began this mentoring service was to help students pay for their meals and housing while trying to balance a premedical course load. “A lot of smaller campuses don’t know how extensive an effort is made at private wealthy universities to groom and prepare their pre-medical students for the application process. We are trying to bridge that gap, to help make sure all future applicants have similar resources at their disposal,” she said.