Section Spotlight: Taking Peer Mentorship to the Next Level
The goals of the AAO-HNS Young Physicians Section are to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity, while embracing the important role of peer mentorship.
Nausheen Jamal, MD, YPS Chair
Nausheen Jamal, MD
YPS Chair
Previously, the YPS Governing Council (GC) played a more traditional role with respect to Annual Meeting submissions by offering sponsorship of proposals only upon request from the sponsoring members. By sharing our previous experiences, it seemed the initial crafting and planning of the first submission was most intimidating to YPS members. Since many members on the GC had extensive experience with creating and proposing Annual Meeting programming, we chose to take a much more proactive role this year. We distributed calls for topics that are pertinent to early-career otolaryngologists as well as encouraged proposals that showcase section members and their incredible expertise and accomplishments. Additionally, we emphasized the need for presentations that pertained to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and offered active mentorship from GC members to submitting authors.
Our membership enthusiastically answered the call for proposals, and many actively sought mentorship from the GC. Through our new and more intensive pre-submission mentorship and review process, we were able to sponsor several dozen high-quality submissions this year—a dramatic increase from the roughly half dozen that the YPS sponsored annually in years past.
We are proud to have helped increase YPS involvement and engagement with the AAO-HNS via encouragement of Annual Meeting participation and this new mentorship initiative. We hope that this proposal mentorship program leads to a heightened sense of belonging to the YPS and the AAO-HNS, thereby enabling continued engagement and dedication to the worldwide otolaryngology community while highlighting the topics that are important to our YPS constituents and providing them a greater voice in the AAO-HNS.
Although the call for papers is closed for the 2021 Annual Meeting, we plan to continue the active mentorship approach to YPS-sponsored submissions and encourage any YPS members who plan to submit topics pertinent to early-career otolaryngologists or need feedback and support with forming their submissions to contact us. We look forward to interacting on ENT Connect in our YPS community and hope to inspire YPS members to submit in the years to come.
