When Mentorship Changes the Way We Think

Through the HMI Program, I connected with Geoff Stetson, an alumnus of the program and CEO of MedEdMentor, who volunteered to mentor anyone in the course who wanted to discuss their scholarly projects. I took him up on the offer.

I arrived with a completely different project in mind. My original idea focused on integrating mental and physical rehabilitation for veterans, an important and urgent issue in Ukraine today. I expected that mentorship would help me refine that project. Instead, it helped me discover something I had not fully recognized before.

During our first conversations, Geoff listened carefully and asked a series of thoughtful questions about my teaching experience. Rather than immediately focusing on the project I had proposed, he became curious about the way I described my classroom practices, my students, and the learning environments I was working in.

Through those questions, he began to notice something I had never clearly articulated to myself: that my experience was deeply rooted in active learning, and that the way I was practicing it was genuinely unusual.

In much of Western medical education, active learning has become a source of frustration for learners. It is widely deployed but rarely aligned with how students are assessed. Many learners see it as busy work: exercises that may prepare them for clinical settings but do not prepare them for the high-stakes exams that ultimately determine their progress. The disconnect between how they learn and how they are tested has created skepticism about active learning itself.

My situation in Ukraine is fundamentally different. Because of the war, my learners are being thrust into their professional roles far earlier than expected. They are not preparing for hypothetical clinical scenarios. They are living them. That reality changes everything about how active learning functions in my classroom, from what happens in each session to how I assess learning to how I gather and respond to student feedback. The details of that approach are the subject of the manuscript that Geoff and I are currently writing together.

Once we identified that active learning was the real story, the question became: how do we turn a rich but loosely defined set of ideas into a structured manuscript?

This is where Uni, MedEdMentor's AI research mentor, played a critical role. Geoff and I had generated a lot of promising material through our conversations, but it was scattered across multiple threads, observations, and half-formed arguments. Geoff used Uni to help us take all of those vague ideas about how active learning was being adapted and deployed in my context and shape them into a meaningful narrative arc for the article.

Uni helped us see which ideas were central and which were peripheral. It helped us identify the structure that would make the argument clear and compelling for a health professions education audience. It did not replace the thinking we had done together. It organized it, refined it, and gave it a form we could build on, connected to the existing corpus of literature.

That combination of human mentorship and AI-assisted structure made the difference between having interesting ideas and having a manuscript in progress.

Working on this article has become more than an academic exercise. It has been a process of intellectual discovery. Each conversation with Geoff and each iteration with Uni helped me understand not only the scholarship of active learning but also my own teaching practice more clearly.

What I once considered simply my everyday teaching experience began to reveal deeper patterns. Through dialogue, reflection, and mentorship, those experiences gradually transformed into a framework that could be shared, examined, and discussed within the broader community of health professions educators.

This experience reminded me that scholarship is rarely created in isolation. It grows through conversations that challenge our assumptions and through mentors who help us see the value of our own work from a different perspective.

For me, this journey also carries another meaning. As educators working in Ukraine during wartime, we often focus on resilience, adaptation, and survival. Yet participating in a global community of educators reminds us that even in the most difficult circumstances, our experiences can contribute to international conversations about teaching and learning.

If you are an educator sitting with ideas that feel too complex, too context-specific, or too difficult to articulate, I would encourage you not to set them aside. Those may be exactly the ideas that need to be explored. MedEdMentor offers 1:1 consultations with Geoff and access to Uni as part of different services. Sometimes all it takes is the right conversation and the right tools to see your own experience in a new light.

I came to MedEdMentor expecting to refine a project. Instead, I discovered a direction I had not fully seen before, and I gained the tools and support to turn it into scholarship. That is what good mentorship does. It does not give us answers. It helps us recognize what we already have and shows us what to do with it.