Our story
Throughout their undergraduate careers, Brittany Tran, Vincent Grospe, and Mericien Venzon were fortunate to find great clinical and research mentors who were able to help guide them on their paths to medical school. They were truly lucky to have such wonderful people be able to offer them insight on how to optimize their activities and application materials; however, they were curious if there were recent applicants who would be willing enough to impart their guidance on them as well. It was difficult to find peers who recently went through the process and were successful, and they wondered if more could be done to help future applicants in their medical school cycles.
With the recent increase in medical school application consultation companies, misinformation on the steps to get to medical school, and the disproportionality in first-generation and underrepresented applicants in medicine, Brittany, Vincent, and Mericien then led the efforts in October 2020 to start AM Med Mentors, an organization dedicated to providing 1:1 mentorship between medical students and pre-medical students from marginalized backgrounds. They built incredible relationships between 60 medical students and mentees, developed professional development workshops, created community partnerships in the Los Angeles community, and created an executive board.
Nonetheless, they recognized that there are many hurdles before matriculating to medical school: doing well in classes and extracurriculars, preparing for the MCAT, and crafting a strong application. It takes an incredible team of specialists to provide exponentially impactful mentorship to students. This need inspired them in March 2022 to co-found AM Med Coaches, a sister organization that would provide guidance to students on how to best tackle these areas. Their mentorship model focuses on providing a family of coaches to help students learn and build skills to use for the future. Therefore, they recruited gifted scholars to pass down their wisdom and knowledge to students.
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