Mentoring

All physicians attend Grand Rounds every Friday from 7-9AM, where there are two hour-long presentations. Some of these are formal presentations. However, many are interactive sessions where ideas can be bounced back and forth regarding optimizing patient care, testing innovative treatment modalities, conceptualizing new research strategies, and modifying hospital policies to enhance the patient experience. These interactive sessions provide a way for physicians in our Department to learn from each other and from others in the Keck School of Medicine.

As with any top-tier medical school, the Keck School of Medicine has frequent school-wide workshops dedicated to mentoring junior faculty. Some of these workshops are designed to provide guidance in how to apply for grant funding. Others are focused on leadership, negotiation, handling difficult conversations, teaching strategies, etc. All are freely available to all USC faculty.

Each faculty member has an individualized mentoring team tailored to their own needs and career goals. In addition, all junior faculty members meet twice a year with mentoring committees comprised of the senior faculty, who can provide critical support and guidance.

The process of mentoring is given below:

1. 1. Mentees include every Clinical Assistant and Associate Professor (including any Division Chiefs at these levels).
   2. Each mentee will identify an Individual Mentoring Team having at least 3 faculty members, of which a maximum of 2 can come from USC OHNS. It is acceptable to have a mentor from an OHNS department outside USC, if desired. It is the responsibility of the mentee to solicit feedback from their Individual Mentoring Team at least twice a year, ideally through group meetings or conference calls.
   3. The chair meets with assistant professors quarterly for group mentoring..
   4. All faculty get one-on-one mentoring with the chair during the annual review process.
   5. Division chiefs meet with faculty in their division every 6 months for mentoring.

Audiology and SLP faculty mentoring occurs informally on a daily basis. Most commonly, this happens during lunch. While eating together, team members discuss clinic issues, complicated patients, research, and teaching. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of the complicated audiological and speech/language issues that our clinics have, this kind of frequent, low-key interactions seems to work best.

As with any top-tier medical school, the Keck School of Medicine has frequent school-wide workshops dedicated to mentoring junior faculty. Some of these workshops are designed to provide guidance in how to apply for grant funding. Others are focused on leadership, negotiation, handling difficult conversations, teaching strategies, etc. All are freely available to all USC faculty.

In addition, all audiology and SLP faculty have a get-together twice a year for 2 hours, where we discuss what we do, what the clinical challenges are with various types of patients, how we go about approaching solutions. Career development and strategies for advancing our programs are also discussed at these meetings.

Audiology and SLP faculty mentoring occurs informally on a daily basis. Most commonly, this happens during lunch. While eating together, team members discuss clinic issues, complicated patients, research, and teaching. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of the complicated audiological and speech/language issues that our clinics have, this kind of frequent, low-key interactions seems to work best.

As with any top-tier medical school, the Keck School of Medicine has frequent school-wide workshops dedicated to mentoring junior faculty. Some of these workshops are designed to provide guidance in how to apply for grant funding. Others are focused on leadership, negotiation, handling difficult conversations, teaching strategies, etc. All are freely available to all USC faculty.

In addition, all audiology and SLP faculty have a get-together twice a year for 2 hours, where we discuss what we do, what the clinical challenges are with various types of patients, how we go about approaching solutions. Career development and strategies for advancing our programs are also discussed at these meetings.

The faculty includes experts in clinical patient care and research. At each participating rotation site, there are board-certified faculty members who instruct and supervise all residents. Each faculty member brings his or her expertise through participation in teaching rounds, instruction in clinics and surgery, formal teaching conferences, and research. All faculty members are strongly committed to resident mentoring.

Furthermore, all residents have a dedicated clinical mentor throughout the residency program. These are selected within the first few months of starting internship. The resident should initiate a meeting with their clinical mentor at least twice a year to discuss their residency training, their career goals, and their plans to achieve their goals.

A resident may choose to add additional clinical mentors as they begin to develop key areas of interest, or they may simply change. This is up to the discretion of the resident. In addition, each resident should select a research mentor prior to beginning any research project. The research mentor will help the resident develop a hypothesis and the appropriate methodology for testing it. The mentor will guide the resident throughout the project, but it is up to the resident to carry out the research and to write it up for submission to a scholarly journal.

All the OHNS administrative staff participate in our weekly staff meeting to discuss the administrative affairs. We invite school or other department guests to provide administrative-related training twice a year. This also helps staff build important professional connections.

1. There are regularly-scheduled one-on-one meetings to clarify the career goals and objectives for each individual.
2. Quarterly feedback and annual performance reviews will be provided to direct reports by their supervisor.
3. Serial training will be provided about each topic of the core duties and issues that we discuss during our weekly staff meeting, such as:
   • How to achieve accurate and effective calendar management to meet the clinical operation needs
   • How to process business expenses: Reimbursement, Pcard verification, etc.
   • How to solve eMarket ordering issues
   • How to arrange and coordinate events & travel
   • How to prepare and update CV/Biosketch for faculty
   • How to stay one-step ahead of your routine clinical and academic support duties