by Zainab Khan, Staff Writer
This year, Fountain Valley High School Medical Society is continuing their partnership with UCI undergraduates through a mentorship program.
The mentorship program provides high school students interested in the medical field with guidance from undergraduate students with similar career goals. All the mentors are highly involved with medical career-related internships, hospital volunteering and clinic work.
Medical Society partners up with undergraduates from University of California, Irvine’s (UCI) CrescentOC, a club that operates a student-run clinic for those in need of medical care.
The purpose of the mentorship program is to give high school students mentors to refer to for questions about internships, careers or even classes.
Senior Celine Ton (’16) has been in the Mentorship Program for two years.
“As a junior, I was paired with my mentor Afsheen, who taught me a lot about which classes to take during high school and college,” said Ton (’16). “This year, my mentor Sina described his rationale for choosing to go UCI, and explained what to look for in a university, such as research opportunities and which AP courses transfer over.”
Linda Huynh, FVHS alumni and founder of the Mentorship Program, was involved in similar programs at UCI so she created Mentorship and extended it to include FVHS. In the past two years there have been 35 mentors and over 50 mentees.
FVHS’s Medical Society has had multiple activities with the mentorship, including a college application workshop, a pair-up social, surgical skills day and a shadowing day at UCI. Shadowing day, this year on January 25, is when the students are allowed to the UCI campus to attend mentors’ classes, eat UCI food, tour the campus, research, visit dorms and learn about campus life in general.
“My favorite part of the mentorship program is the Shadowing Day. We get to follow our mentors to classes that they take or have taken at UCI. It’s really informative to be able to experience that classroom environment. I couldn’t believe how many people were crammed into the lecture hall for Biochemistry!” said Ton (’16)
