The Journal of Medical Education and Development

Introduction: Evaluation of mentoring program is essential. This study aimed to assess defects and weaknesses of Tehran University of Medical Sciences mentoring program from the perspective of mentees

Methods:   This study is a qualitative study with target group of 15 first year medical students who were mentees in the program. We did semi-structured interviews and extracted primary codes and then classified the codes according to the grunded theory methos..

Result:  We found some points like inappropriate times for call to mentee, consumedly follow up of mentor, inadequate answers of mentors about educational problems, explaining nothing about future problems before facing these problems, barriers about considering non-educational problems in relationship, negative effect of high-grade educational status of mentors, mentors with high age differences, program dependence on mentors’ commitment, personalization of mentor guidance, mis-match of mentors and mentees, unavailability of mentors and period of time with low frequency of relationship of mentor and mentee, as weaknesses of program from the mentees point of view.

Conclusion: Paying attention to mentor-mentee age difference, selection of available and responsible mentors, appropriate matching, enough education of mentors, definition of proper expectations between mentor and mentee and proper  training  is critical to improve quality of mentoring programs in future.