Bridging the gap: How a medical student is empowering success for equity-deserving groups
By Alexander McComb
Out of 600 medical school students who have worked under him in his career, Dr. Rob Hegele said Maud Ahmad is in the top 10.
“Research is actually a special skill that not every [medical] student demonstrates an aptitude for that he clearly has,” said Hegele. High praise from the Distinguished University Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, and the Jacob J. Wolfe Distinguished Medical Research Chair.
Ahmad, a fourth-year medical student, has been the driving force of two significant research projects with Hegele; the first called Five things to know about Apolipoprotein B; and the second one investigating patients with genetically elevated triglycerides.
The first paper was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last fall and has been downloaded thousands of times, and the latter published this year in Atherosclerosis Plus. Ahmad also presented his research on triglyceride elevations at a national conference held in Montreal.
But perhaps Ahmad’s most important undertaking is his work outside hospitals and classrooms. He is helping students like him achieve their goals.
When Ahmad was applying to medical school, he said there were many challenges for underrepresented students like him to access mentorship in how to set themselves up for success as an applicant.
“We didn’t have people who could walk us through the process and explain to us what it takes to get into medical school, how to be a stand-out applicant,” Ahmad recalled.
So, once he got in, he decided to help change the landscape of the School’s application process.
“I just wanted to make my support system proud and pursue something I’m interested in. And I feel very lucky to have gotten accepted to medical school and dedicate myself to something that I’m genuinely very, very passionate about”
—Maud Ahmad
In his first year of medical school, in September 2021, Ahmad teamed up with classmate Jayneel Limbachia and some of their friends to create ACCESS Inc. (Admissions Counselling and Coaching for Equitable Students Success), a zero-cost mentorship program for equity-deserving students interested in medicine.
Mentors in the program give guidance to prospective medical school students on what the application process looks like, what to do to make their application stand out, offer one-on-one interview preparation, help with essay editing and answer any questions related to getting into medical school and what they should expect after they get in.
“We felt that it would be a meaningful initiative for us to create some sort of a mentorship program where we can talk to students who are underrepresented,” he said.
ACCESS Inc. had their inaugural mentorship cycle in January 2022 where 79 mentors signed up to help 79 mentees. Since then, Ahmad said the program has grown year-over-year, with many of the original mentees who got into medical school now becoming mentors.
The program’s executive group have sent feedback surveys to mentors and mentees after each cycle, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. He reported that between 64 and 72 per cent of mentees have received an interview or a subsequent acceptance into medical school.
Because of the data his team received, they decided to turn it into a research project and program evaluation. They presented an abstract at the Ontario Medical Student Education Research Conference in January, sharing their data, next steps, and advice they’d give to other schools interested in creating similar programs. Following this, they teamed up with Dr. George Kim, associate dean of Admissions at Schulich Medicine & Dentistry, to publish a mixed methods paper in the Canadian Medical Education Journal.
“People were interested in hearing about our initiative and implementing this sort of program at their own schools. It was a great opportunity to share our data on the success of ACCESS Inc. so far,” he said.
Over two years later, Ahmad still thinks back to what pushed him to get to medical school and the passion that sparked his journey.
“I just wanted to make my support system proud and pursue something I’m interested in. And I feel very lucky to have gotten accepted to medical school and dedicate myself to something that I’m genuinely very, very passionate about,” he said.
