[An extensive mentoring program for undergraduate medical students: goals, design and realization].

In this paper, the design and implementation of an institutional mentoring program for undergraduate medical students at the Medical University of Vienna are presented. Faculty members act as senior mentors in a small group setting enabling also peer mentoring (73.6% of mentees reporting a direct benefit from their co-mentees). Program acceptance by mentees and mentors is very high (71.7% of the mentees and 77.1% of the mentors giving the highest out of four rating categories). The adequacy of this program was studied by analyzing the topics discussed in the mentoring groups: the most frequently covered aspects are diploma thesis, clinical clerkship, studying abroad and career planning. Additionally, sex-specific distributions of mentor recruitment and selection as well as participation by students were documented (e.g., female proportion of 29.9% and 53.2% of mentors and mentees, respectively). Both feedback and content analysis demonstrate the success of this large-scale project.