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Alumni associations are one of the most important ways in which physicians stay connected to their medical schools. The relationship between alumni and their medical schools is mutually beneficial; it allows current students to interact with and learn from the experiences of alumni while allowing alumni to maintain contact with an environment that offers opportunity for their continued intellectual growth.
Alumni, a vital source of support for medical schools and students, are uniquely positioned to enrich the academic experience and serve as mentors for students and recent graduates. Such support of medical students by alumni includes providing guidance at career workshops, preceptorships and student "shadowing" as well as offering insight and information regarding internship, residency, and fellowship training programs. Medical alumni associations (AAs) provide support for student travel to present research or to participate in international medicine. The associations may provide assistance and/or direct oversight for student-run "free" medical clinics. Medical AAs also sponsor special events such as the "white coat ceremony" and provide funding for extracurricular activities such as intramural sports and art or literary magazines authored by students. Without the strong support of medical school alumni, these and many other programs would not grow, endure, or even exist.
In their support of medical student programs, AAs face a variety of challenges; two of the most consistently encountered are engaging and maintaining their graduate membership and raising funds to support sponsored programs. Helping alumni remain relevant in changing medical and world environments is another challenge for AAs. Organized communication among leaders of medical school AAs traditionally has been limited to a few brief sessions occurring at the annual meeting of the Association of American Medical Colleges. A formal structure for organized communication among medical school AA officers has not been described previously and could facilitate address of these and other challenges.
Sharing of ideas among regional medical school AAs is an ideal way to organize and energize each individual AA. A group of AA officers in the New York metropolitan area has been meeting for 6 years, collecting and collating thoughts and ideas to invigorate themselves and to develop a set of "best practices and programs" for new and existing medical school AAs. An initial effort and experience, along with data collected from...