The Indiana University Medical Student Program for Research and Scholarship (IMPRS) offers a research internship program over the summer for IUSM medical students in which one of the areas of research students can choose from is a community engaged research track, run by Indiana CTSI’s Community Health Partnerships (CHeP). Students in the CHeP track are matched with one of a group of brilliant community engaged researchers who serve as mentors for their summer internship experience.
One of those mentors is Dr. Kathi Ridley–Merriweather, PhD, a qualitative researcher who serves as the Communication, Recruitment, and Outreach Manager for the Komen Tissue Bank (KTB) at the IU Simon Cancer Center, the only biobank in the world that collects “normal” Healthy breast tissue from women and men with no sign of breast cancer, to be used by researchers around the world in projects focused on breast cancer prevention and treatment. Dr. Ridley-Merriweather first became a CHeP IMPRS mentor in 2018 and has mentored students nearly every summer since, finding it to be a rewarding experience. “First of all, I just love mentoring”, Ridley-Merriweather says. “My main philosophy for mentoring is to mentor the whole person, I just really try to take into account everything that they’re doing and everything that is going on in their lives.”
Students who intern with Dr. Ridley-Merriweather get experience and training in qualitative research, through interviewing (“I really think it’s important for them to know how to do all the parts of research, including how to interview.”), analysis, and coding. Students also write and edit manuscripts for publication submission: “I always have a paper going at any given time. Usually I have two,” Ridley-Merriweather says. “It’s really important for them to learn how to write academically. They know they’re going to get a publication from me. I just submitted two papers in the past two weeks that have IMPRS students on them.”
In addition to learning from Dr. Ridley-Merriweather directly, her students also get opportunities to shadow others: “I have a spreadsheet of about 20 physicians and researchers who are open to shadowing. So, they can have one shadowing gig in a week and it will count toward their hours with me because I think it’s important just for them to have that experience.” They also receive opportunities to work directly with patients and community members by helping to arrange, manage and attend recruitment events in the community.
Community engaged research is often underestimated as a path to success for medical students, but Maddie Evans, a former IMPRS intern who worked with Dr. Ridley-Merriweather in 2020, says “We are told from the very beginning that basic science and clinical research are more valuable than community engaged research. Even if someone is interested in community engaged work, they might opt to do clinical research instead in order to set themselves up for success. What’s interesting though is that even though I was told to do clinical research, without fail a lot of the questions I got on the interview trail were about my non-[clinical] science experiences because they are special and different.”
Other former interns of Dr. Ridley-Merriweather also found the experience to be valuable. Cynthia Wu, an intern in 2021 says “Participating in IMPRS through the community health route gave me one of my most meaningful experiences during medical school. I was able to learn skills in qualitative research that I otherwise would not have gained through my medical education. This research experience provided me with a different and wider lens through which I was able to learn in depth about a disparity in the healthcare system. I enjoyed my experience so much that I continued working with Dr. Ridley-Merriweather after my IMPRS summer”.
Precious Okoruwa, an intern in 2022 says “My summer with the KTB was full of rich discussions and learning about healthcare challenges that our patients face that I had no idea about previously and I got to see the impact my work was having on the community. I recommend this program to every first-year medical student that I can because it has been life-changing for me.”
One goal of Dr. Ridley-Merriweather’s is that the mentorship doesn’t stop at the end of the summer for students: “They get someone down the line who’s going to keep mentoring them…Over the past month, I’ve written two letters of recommendation for residency.” Through this experience, students gain not just a great mentor, but also a supportive community. “At the end of the IMPRS summer, and especially if I’ve got some fourth years graduating, I take them all to lunch or dinner, so that the incoming meets the outgoing,” says Ridley-Merriweather. “And then if somebody’s already gone and is doctoring somewhere, we try to grab them on FaceTime during the lunch or dinner just so they can see each other, and then I form a text string so they can just pull it up nine months later if they want to and ask, you know, what did you guys do when this happened and stuff like that? So they have some people that they know that Kathi mentored and that they’re going to understand why they need help.”
Former interns have gotten value from this connection. Okoruwa says “Now, I’m not just a medical student but I’m part of a community, and through this process, I gained friends, research partners, and a mentor who has showed me what it means to truly be supported in achieving any goal that I have.”
Indeed, all of Dr. Ridley Merriweather’s former interns have gone on to great things.
Katie Reif (IMPRS 2023) volunteers as a surgical assistant at all KTB tissue collection events, and is working on two papers with fellow former interns Precious Okoruwa and Katie Vogel; Precious Okoruwa (IMPRS 2022) has been chosen as an IU Elite 50 grad student; Katie Vogel (IMPRS 2022) has submitted her Scholarly Concentration manuscript, which was a continuation of her IMPRS project, to a top-notch health communication journal for peer review; Cynthia Wu (IMPRS 2021) received interview offers at all of the 11 resident programs to which she applied, and has matched with Tufts in Boston; Raiven Owusu (IMPRS 2020) and Maddie Evans (IMPRS 2020) both matched with their first choices (Owusu to University of Wisconsin in OB/GYN and Evans to Oregon Health & Science Hospital in Neurology) and are doing well in their first years of residency; and Stephanie Younker (IMPRS 2018) has completed her residency program in family medicine at Medical University of South Carolina and will start this month as a hospitalist at a small South Carolina institution.
Dr. Ridley-Merriweather looks forward to continuing to mentor students through the IMPRS program in future years. Her favorite part of the experience? “I mentor them in a manner that I hope will help them become the physician that I would like to go to,” says Dr. Ridley-Merriweather. “My favorite part is knowing that I had a part in making a really good physician.”
Contact Sarah Glock with any questions you may have at sardowns@iu.edu.
