Medical Student’s Perceptions of the Mentoring Program: A Survey from Religious Medical School in Taiwan

Background: Tzu Chi University (TCU) in Taiwan offers a mentoring program that differs from others since it comprises triple mentors: faculty mentors, Tzu Cheng/Yi De (TC/YDs who are senior volunteers), and school counselors. This study aimed to analyze medical student’s perceptions of the triple mentors’ role functions using a self-developed assessment tool. Methods: The Role Functions of the Mentoring Program Scale (RFMPS) was developed through literature reviews, focus groups, and underwent exploratory factor analysis for internal consistency and reliability. The RFMPS consists of 16 items measuring the triple mentors’ role functions on a ve-point Likert scale. Items covered four role functions: mental counseling, educational guidance, career counseling, and humanistic/moral guidance. Student’s perceptions were collected through an online survey and analyzed using a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Results: The overall response rate was 64% (116/171). Faculty mentors provided students with preferable guidance counseling in all four role functions; TC/YDs particularly offered prominent humanistic/moral guidance and career counseling; school counselors were less preferred and guided students in need. Besides, students were evenly guided regarding their gender and year. The RFMPS was a reliable tool for evaluating the mentoring program as a whole. Conclusions: Faculty mentors, TC/YDs, and school counselors comprehensively performed their role functions in the mentoring program. Humanistic/moral guidance is current and comparable to educational, career, and mental guidance counseling; the mentoring program can extend its scope by including humanistic, moral, or spiritual connotations.


Background
An effective mentoring program is one of the most important elements in higher education, since it not only helps students understand themselves and their world but also facilitates their personal development [1,2]. In this regard, Tzu Chi University (TCU) in Taiwan offers a unique mentoring program that differs from others, including triple mentors: the faculty mentors, Tzu Cheng/Yi De (TC/YDs), and school counselors.
More speci cally, the faculty mentors are teachers from the Department of Medicine who provide guidance and advice, stimulate re ection, serve as role models, build networks, and answer questions [3][4][5][6]. The TC/YDs are senior volunteers appointed to accompany students; they enlighten positive characteristics, be as role models, and promote humanistic literacy to students [8][9][10]. The school counselors are licensed and appointed to offer guidance, counseling, and psychological advice for students in need [11,12]. At TCU, three to four TC/YDs and one faculty mentor are assigned to every 10 to 13 students; every month (approximately four times a semester) TC/YDs and faculty mentors gather and interact with the students. However, the medical student's perception regarding such a speci c mentoring program was not known.
To date, numerous study tools have been developed based on the aspects, such as career, psychosocial, personal/emotional function, pedagogical knowledge, professional development, interpersonal problems, and role modeling [13]. Few assessment tools have conceptualized humanity and morality as part of the mentoring programs; therefore, an assessment tool: Role Functions of the Mentoring Program Scale (RFMPS) was developed. The primary aim of this study was to analyze medical student's perceptions of the triple mentors' role functions using a self-developed assessment tool.

Setting and participants
A total of 116 medical students voluntarily and anonymously completed the online survey. The survey was distributed two months after the beginning of the fall 2019 semester via social networks. The participants' demographic characteristics are presented in Table 1. The undergraduate year of participants ranged from rst-year to sixth-year, with 54.3% males and 45.7% females. The most frequently contacted mentors with the students in descending order were TC/YDs, faculty mentors, and school counselors; percentages of students who never interacted with the faculty mentors and TC/YDs were low (16.4%, 4.3%), except for the school counselors (59.5%).

Discussion
This was the foremost, quantitative study to examine a mentoring program at a religious medical school, analyzing medical students' perceptions regarding the role functions of faculty mentors, TC/YDs, and school counselors. Table 3 and Table 4 together indicated the triple mentors were distinguished in role functions. Overall, faculty mentors offered medical students with the most preferred guidance counseling in all four role functions, especially educational guidance; TC/YDs provided prominent and preferable humanistic/moral guidance and career counseling. Conversely, school counselors were less preferred, which could have re ected in they were for students in need. Moreover, analysis revealed students were evenly guided regarding their gender and undergraduate year. The most featured outcome of this study was that TC/YDs provided the students with prominent humanistic/moral guidance and career counseling, which is novel and important. Table 3 indicated how medical students perceived supportive guidance from the faculty mentors. This nding echoed previous studies indicating the frequency and nature of such guidance were positively correlated with students' perceptions of the mentors' supportiveness and program satisfaction [7,14]. This was also in line with related studies on how faculty mentors' guidance through various approaches can have positive impacts on students [3][4][5][6]. Medical students gave lower scores to school counselors should be interpreted cautiously (Table 3). In this regard, such lower scores could have been based on their limited contact with the school counselors (Table 1), and not on the fact that they were less important. As for the TC/YDs, most students were willing to interact with them at least three times a semester on speci c dates for humanistic/moral guidance and career counseling (Table 1). This was probably since the TC/YDs were senior volunteers with kindness and enthusiasm to education, and had professional careers (e.g., doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and professionals). They were willing to keep a close connection with the students, share their life stories, experiences, and philosophy of life, which echoes TCU's mission statement: To prepare those who embrace "humanistic literacy" and are willing to tend to those in need [8][9][10]. As stated above, the characteristics of the TC/YDs gained themselves a position in the mentoring program and provided comprehensive guidance along with the faculty mentors and school counselors.
Despite there were numerous tools evaluating the mentoring program, few tools have conceptualized humanity and morality as part of such programs. According to the ndings, the mean scores of the humanistic/moral guidance (Table 3 and Table 4) were comparable to other guidance, implicating medical students perceived such guidance as a crucial part of the mentoring program. In other words, humanity and morality could not be more important than other aspects in life; students in the 21st century should not only care about their education, career, and mental health, but their relationship with the society, the environment, and the world.
There are several limitations worth noting. This study focused on the aspect of guidance counseling role functions, which might not be generalizable to other elds such as accountability and effectiveness. All of the outcomes were based on a single perspective of the medical students at TCU, which could result in a lack of representation from other departments or colleges. The fact that the TC/YDs were volunteer, unpaid social elites made it more di cult to be ubiquitous in other schools. Even so, the RFMPS can still be selectively utilized for faculty mentors and school counselors, especially regarding the humanistic/moral guidance. Thus, future research can explore the utilization of the RFMPS on a wider scale, investigate whether the mentoring program at TCU is preferable over other mentoring programs, analyze different participants' perceptions, and conceptualize the humanistic, moral, or spiritual aspects of the mentoring program. In-depth interviews or focus groups could also provide a better understanding of the TC/YDs and offer additional insights into humanistic/moral guidance.

Conclusions
The faculty mentors provided medical students with preferable guidance counseling in all four role functions, while the TC/YDs provided the students with prominent humanistic/moral guidance and career counseling. Conversely, the school counselors were less preferred.
The humanistic/moral guidance is a current conception for mentoring programs; ndings implicated that humanistic/moral guidance is as comparable as educational, career, mental guidance counseling. Namely, the mentoring program can extend its scope by including humanistic, moral, or spiritual connotations.

Availability of data and materials
The survey tool used for the study is provided as supplementary information. All data are stored according to the ethical standards and are available upon reasonable request to the authors.

Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Funding
Funding for the study is provided by Buddhist Tzu Chi Medical Foundation Advancement (Number: TCMF-P 108-04). The funding body play no role in the design of the study and collection, analysis and interpretation of data, and in writing the manuscript.
Authors' contributions