MSUCOM Peer Mentor Awards

By Megan Rao

April 28, 2008

Rachel Rosenbaum, Nicole Janowicz, Dr. Celia Guro, Christine Brooks and Mark Hauswirth

     On April 15, 2008, three MSUCOM students received the annual “Peer Mentor of the Year” Award, and one Mentor was named the first ever “COM Peer Mentor Person of Courage”.

      Mark Hauswirth, Nicole Janowicz, and Rachel Rosenbaum were the awarded second-year Peer Mentors by way of student vote. The Peer Mentor Program was started by COM’s Dr. Celia B. Guro, Director of Counseling and Private Development, over two decades ago. The tradition of colleague and faculty-nominated second-year medical students providing assistance, guidance, and advice to first-year medical students through the Program has continued to today.

      “The program itself, I love it, because it allows students to go to students for help,” says Hauswirth. “It gives you an opportunity to help people right now… [and] to instantaneously give back to the college and to your colleagues.” As a Mentor, Hauswirth has helped pioneer a “Fit for Life” program for medical students at MSUCOM, which educates on holistic prevention of illness.

      “There’s a lot of knowledge to be passed from class to class,” according to Rosenbaum, whose mentorship focuses on balancing school and other responsibilities. Spending a few hours a week tutoring, reviewing, and discussing personal issues with those she is mentoring, she feels honored to be able to give back to the students after she herself received good help from her own Peer Mentors. The Peer Mentors advise on an expansive range of issues, from settling down in East Lansing, to curriculum, to balancing time.

      Christine Brooks, also a Peer Mentor, has been deemed a “Person of Courage” by the program; having interned at the Betty Ford Center, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in California, Brooks has returned to MSUCOM and has reached out to the medical community as an educator on the disease of alcohol and drug addiction.

       “I feel honored and blessed to be recognized for doing something I felt would benefit other people,” she says. “I appreciate Dr. Guro’s mentorship and her willingness to recognize people for doing what they think is right.”

      Information about the Peer Mentors can be found on the bulletin board in the connector wing of Fee Hall. For more on the MSUCOM Peer Mentor Program, please contact Dr. Guro at guro@msu.edu.