Called “medical mentorship programs,” schools like Harvard Medical School are partnering with pre-medical students at MIT to give college students an up-shot of knowledge about course selections, medical school applications, and medical specialties. For the HMS-MIT program, the Harvard Medical School students are MIT undergraduate alums. It’s a strategic pairing to spark undergraduate ambition and respond to questions with real-world experiences.

MIT is far from the only school to offer medical mentorship programs. Schools likeStanford University offer a “Minority Medical Alliance Medical Mentorship Program” for California Bay-area disadvantaged pre-medical students at community and state colleges. One student who benefited from this medical mentorship program recently announced the launch of a national mentoring program, geared towards minority students, now on-line.

Pre-med students are just one group who can receive special benefits when they participate in mentoring programs through their college or university. The benefits of alumni mentoring students are a hot topic for mentoring programs. Universities and colleges are grabbing onto the idea that with rising costs of classroom education, students need the kind of real world connections to help to prepare them for rapidly entering the workforce immediately after graduation. There’s a new kind of pressure on undergraduate students, attending classes with the knowledge that a mortgage-sized payment will be waiting for them upon graduation. Both students and their parents have even started shopping for colleges that offer these kinds of mentoring opportunities. An alumni mentoring program is the perfect compliment to the modern education.

Here at Mutual Force, we’re part of the solution for colleges and universities – not just businesses – that want to offer mentoring programs to their students. Medical mentorship programs are just one of the areas of study in which schools can link students with alumni, living anywhere in the US or abroad, with the practical experience to respond to student questions. And, schools that use the Mutual Force mentoring platform can also build a virtual library of these mentoring exchanges.