To nurture great health professionals and mentor them successfully through their demanding academic and clinical years, some UMDNJ professors will do almost anything — even arrange 7 AM breakfasts at LePeep, a diner on Route 1 in Edison. David Kountz, MD, RWJMS acting senior associate dean for community health and associate professor of medicine, has been hosting tables for 8, 10 and 12 — crowd size varies from large to small — for the past eight years. At RWJMS, “we have established a comprehensive patient-centered medicine course (PCM) for first and second year students. This, as well as other activities in our residency programs that focus on humanism, enhances the opportunity for students to be more compassionate and better listeners when they graduate,” Kountz says.

“New Jersey has great diners and the important thing for me as an advisor was to pick a compatible environment off campus where we could validate a helpful, collegial relationship. We get there when the doors open so it’s not super-crowded,” he laughs. “I like to eat breakfast but what I really want them to know is that they are important and that we’ll drop anything to help them.” His staff comes, too. The comfort level created in the diner sets the framework for students to depend upon Kountz as well as his staff for anything from a missing stethoscope to dealing with a bout of depression. The breakfasts also allow for “vertical advising” where first, second, third, and fourth year students share insights and survival tips: How do you get through a course? What should I do over the summer? What is the match process really like? How do I give patients appropriate optimism? “I’m always available for one-on-one sessions, especially for problems or crises,” Kountz explains, “and they catch me everywhere. But there is a level of detail students can offer one another that faculty just can’t. I’m also teaching them to be future mentors.”

Within all eight schools, on all five campuses, and in hundreds of clinical and educational affiliates, the UMDNJ way to growing great health professionals goes beyond the passé and predictable. The human touch is evident everywhere.

From day one on the Camden campus, students become members of what Paul Randolph Mehne, PhD, RWJMS associate dean for academic and student affairs, calls a learning community of colleagues. “If someone is struggling with a concept, every other student is responsible for that individual’s education. There is no competition for grades. These adult learners are being offered wonderful opportunities along with responsibilities to one another as well as this community.” In their Whitman Society of Learners bi-weekly program, course directors are students who choose content as well as who will teach. Through the Urban Health Initiative, three Camden clinics — adults, children, and women — are run entirely by students. “The students do everything and learn how to be leaders,” Mehne says, “from obtaining the grants to fund the operation to selecting drugs for the clinics’ formulary. We also challenge students to stay ahead technologically and they’ve designed the first UMDNJ clinical site to be fully paperless with electronic health records. This is how our environment works. They can see all the pieces. That’s the philosophy we have.” Passive, lecture-based curricula are limited. Patients themselves are the open books.

Now, meet just a few of the real people of UMDNJ in these stories of outstanding students and their mentors.