From Mentee to Mentor - Eric Sullivan, MD

Eric Sullivan, MD has been involved with IAFP since medical school at the University of Chicago, originally through the Mentor Connection program. His interest in public policy led us to pair him with Dr. Margaret Kirkegaard. 

So how did that mentoring relationship support you during medical school?

Dr. Sullivan:
It was a really lovely connection. Dr. Kirkegaard is just a wonderful human being, and was so generous with her time. When I first started meeting with her, when I had expressed an interest in health policy or the ways that family medicine doctors might get involved in the healthcare system, she immediately thought of different people that she knew in her Rolodex of people that she could put me in touch with. I had a number of meetings with different people that she put me in touch with. I just didn't have any other opportunities like that in my normal medical school curriculum to meet with family medicine physicians specifically, who had gone on to do a lot of different things, people like her who were in health consulting, someone who had been working with the correctional system in Illinois, someone who had been working with the Medicaid system. So, it was just really invigorating to see all these different career paths and having that exposure at an early time helped me feel even more confident in going into family medicine.

You ended up matching into the Northwestern Family Medicine Residency Program at Erie Family Health Center in Chicago, and staying involved with IAFP and volunteered to be a mentor as a resident for another medical student. 

Dr. S. 
It was just nice to be able to pay it back, or pay it forward, I guess. My student was similar to me in that he had taken a little time off between undergrad and college, so we were actually pretty close to the same age, even though he was a few years behind me in medical training. So we, you know, kind of had that immediate connection of being kind of in a similar place in life. [We talked about] The latter parts of medical school and the first parts of residency, and kind of what were the best ways to maintain that balance between work and life when you might have things going on outside of your medical training. He had his first kid around the time that I had my first kid, and so we were swapping stories and tips. I think both of us found it very rewarding to just have that informal connection, um, that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to establish, but for the mentorship program it was really nice to have those chats together.

What type of person do you think would benefit from a mentoring relationship with you, now that you're a couple years into your practice?

Dr. S. 
At the risk of maybe overselling myself, I would be happy to have a mentor relationship with anyone in their career that's earlier than me; med student, resident, someone in their first or second year of “attending-hood.” I think I have at least some lessons that I'd be happy to share. I think in my own experience of trying to find mentorship, random questions just come up and you're not really sure who's the right person to ask. And so I think, ultimately, through the mentorship program, I hope that I and other mentors in the program can be that person.  I think that that's where the IAFP mentorship program can really be helpful.  It’s also a way of getting people exposure to people outside of their training pathway. That's been a really big positive of being involved in the IAFP over the years, is getting to know people in family medicine at different institutions throughout Chicago and Illinois, because then those connections can be so useful, both for the big things like job changes and small things, like a research question. I would certainly welcome anyone who would like to talk to me about any part of that process, from M1 year on up. I think I'd hopefully have something valuable to add at any stage of the process.