The Neurology Resident Mentoring Program is a longitudinal 4-year experience that focuses on guiding residents in four key areas:
1) Career decisions
2) Structured development of a scholarship project
3) Defining personal and professional career goals.
4) Leadership Development
The program starts with identifying mentor-mentee pairs, developing a simple structured mentoring plan, and codifying frequency of mentor-mentee meetings with annual reports to the program director.
Mentorship Program Director: Nimish Mohile, MD
Current Mentors:
Neurology Year Two
- Mentor-mentee kickoff event at the start of the year.
- Mentor-mentee pairs meet at least quarterly to discuss progress, career goals and interests. Mentees are guided on elective choice, identifying research projects and begin to work on setting goals.
- 2-3 informational sessions are held specifically to expose residents to the breadth of possible scholarship projects in the department: i.e. research projects, QI projects, education research and global health.
- At the end of the academic year, mentors begin to work with mentees to begin planning for fellowship applications.
Neurology Year Three
The focus of this year is to work on a structured and guided scholarship project to present at the annual Schwid Symposium, submit to a national meeting and culminate in a manuscript. Residents will participate in monthly meetings in which they will discuss development of their projects, learn new skills and identify resources. They will also meet individually with assigned mentors, project mentors, the mentorship director and other relevant faculty to ensure success of the project. Residents will submit a research proposal to describe their research question, hypothesis, study design and methods. Faculty and co-residents will critique and provide feedback to strengthen the project. The proposal will need to undergo final approval by the research mentor and the mentorship director prior to starting the project.
Monthly meetings will focus on the following topics:
- Finding your project and mentor
- Development of a research question
- Reviewing the literature on your topic
- Study Design
- Research Methods
- Proposal presentations and critiques
- IRB guidance and Data collection
- Statistical Methods for Data Analysis
- Writing an abstract
- Creating a poster
- Presenting your work
- Writing a manuscript

Residents will work on the scholarship project during the year with guidance of mentors, peers and senior research faculty. They will submit and present their work at the annual Schwid symposium in June. Residents are also strongly encouraged to submit the work to a national meeting. They are also encouraged to complete their scholarship project with a manuscript. This process will be guided by mentors, co-residents and will take advantage of editorial experience of departmental faculty.
Neurology Year Four
Residents are encouraged to continue their scholarship work but will be expected to make their own timelines and be more independent. They will also be expected to submit a research proposal for any new projects.

The primary focus of this year is a curriculum that culminates in creation of a structured academic development plan that the resident will initiate after completion of residency. Workshops will also help residents understand strengths and learn critical leadership skills.
The curriculum is focused on defining core values and understanding strengths in order to define and achieve goals. Monthly topics listed below:
- Identifying, clarifying and prioritizing your values
- CV workshop: strengthening your CV and aligning it with your values
- Developing long term goals: deciding what you want to do with your life
- Identifying the short term goals that will lead to success
- Creation of a 1 year learning contract
- Determine your personal mission and vision
- Using your time wisely and efficiently
- Building and sustaining teams
- The work of becoming a leader
- Using Emotional intelligence in your professional life
- Using your strengths to lead better