Chan, T. M., & Sachdeva, S., & Wang, X. (2025, April), Enhancing Clinical Immersion Experience with Peer-Mentoring Support  Paper presented at 2025 ASEE PSW Conference, California Polytechnic University, California. 10.18260/1-2--55173

\bibitem{asee_peer_55173}
  Chan, T. M., \& Sachdeva, S., \& Wang, X. (2025, April), \emph{Enhancing Clinical Immersion Experience with Peer-Mentoring Support}
  Paper presented at 2025 ASEE PSW Conference, California Polytechnic University, California.
  10.18260/1-2--55173

Tiffany Marie Chan, Saahil Sachdeva, and Xianglong Wang.  "Enhancing Clinical Immersion Experience with Peer-Mentoring Support".  2025 ASEE PSW Conference, California Polytechnic University, California, 2025, April.  ASEE Conferences, 2025.  https://peer.asee.org/55173 Internet.  17 Jul, 2025

\bibitem{asee_peer_55173}
  Tiffany Marie Chan, Saahil Sachdeva, and Xianglong Wang.
  "Enhancing Clinical Immersion Experience with Peer-Mentoring Support".
  \emph{2025 ASEE PSW Conference, California Polytechnic University, California, 2025, April}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2025.
  https://peer.asee.org/55173 Internet.  17 Jul, 2025

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_55173
author = "Tiffany Marie Chan, Saahil Sachdeva, and Xianglong Wang"
title = "Enhancing Clinical Immersion Experience with Peer-Mentoring Support"
booktitle = "2025 ASEE PSW Conference"
year = "2025"
month = "April"
address = "California Polytechnic University, California"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/55173}
number = {10.18260/1-2--55173}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Long thought to benefit biomedical engineering students, clinical immersion programs around the U.S. have been enjoying a boom over the past five years. However, the actual implementation of the program greatly varies depending on the student body and the curriculum design. Therefore, the best practices for implementing these clinical immersion experiences are rare, especially the ones that can provide immediate benefits to the students.
Our clinical immersion program is a 10-week immersive experience for third-year undergraduate students at the teaching hospital of our medical center. The highlight of our clinical immersion program is a weekly 3-hour session to observe surgical procedures. Even with a relatively small yearly cohort size of 12, post-COVID capacity restrictions pose significant challenges for the clinical immersion instructors. Observing students are required to be split into many operating rooms, leaving many students performing clinical observation without an expert in medical device design. These challenges can significantly limit the participating students’ learning effectiveness.
In this paper, we propose a highly translatable peer-mentoring model to support students’ learning experiences during clinical observation sessions. In this pilot year of the peer-mentoring program, we hired a current fourth-year undergraduate student, who was part of the clinical immersion cohort in the previous year, as a peer mentor for the current cohort. The peer mentor assisted the instructors in managing the schedule for students to observe in the ORs prior to the observation sessions, went around the ORs to check in on each student during the observation sessions, and provided debriefing to the students and instructors after the observation sessions. In addition, the peer mentor generated resources for the students to prepare for the potential observation topics and clinical speakers’ seminars, as well as held weekly workshops to promote the formalization of potentially identified clinical needs and providing spark for potentially translating the found clinical needs into entrepreneurial or senior design projects.
The assessments were primarily qualitative interviews focusing on students’ interactions and satisfaction with the peer mentor, while supported by quantitative course evaluations and attendance records for the workshops. We performed one interview with the peer-mentor and four interviews from the cohort of the students this year to learn more about the efficacy of this program. We transcribed and analyzed these interviews for recurring themes relevant to the interactions between the peer mentor and the students. The qualitative analysis was performed in NVIVO 15. Our project has been exempted by our IRB office (IRB 2267358-1).
Our review of the interviews, surveys, and attendance records indicated the implementation of a peer mentor had positive impacts for the learning outcomes of our clinical immersion program. From the summaries of the midterm evaluation, the students widely regarded the speaker resources as valuable and appreciated the peer mentor’s presence in clinical immersion sessions, but many did not attend the workshops due to scheduling conflicts, which averaged about two students per workshop. The interviews highlighted the profound respect and appreciation the students had for the peer mentor. Students regarded the peer mentor as an accessible expert in the program that could advise and assist in the learning experience, particularly in the final project at the end of the course. Students perceived the peer mentor as a bridge between the students and clinical participants, making communication less intimidating and the process of clinical needs finding more accessible. The peer mentor reflected the importance of accommodating the needs of each student to ensure a productive experience for all members of the cohort.
Future directions for our investigation in the peer mentor program include refining the scheduling of the workshops for increased accessibility for students and better tailoring the content towards the design process for medical devices. We would also like to further investigate the effects of student demographics on the peer-mentoring outcomes. 
AU  - Tiffany Marie Chan
AU  - Saahil Sachdeva
AU  - Xianglong Wang
CY  - California Polytechnic University, California
DA  - 2025/04/10
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Enhancing Clinical Immersion Experience with Peer-Mentoring Support
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/55173
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--55173
ER  -