Research has demonstrated that an important element in the successful career development of minority youth is fostering aligned ambition, which incorporates not only the desire to enter a profession, but the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors necessary to attain that goal. We hypothesize that early introduction of a highly structured real-life career experience including interaction with mentors at various stages of career development will foster aligned ambition that may can promote successful career development in minority youth. We have used this theory to create a career development program to inspire minority youth to enter clinical research. The TEACH (Training Early Achievers for Careers in Health) Research program is designed to expose students to realistic career activities and a multi-tiered structure of mentorship. The realistic career activities will occur through a hands-on internship on the Hospitalist Project, an ongoing clinical research project at the University of Chicago. A multitiered structure of mentorship will be provided through structured sessions and activities led by mentors ranging from undergraduate students to experienced research faculty. We believe that minority high school students exposed to realistic career experiences and a multi-tiered network of mentors in clinical research through this program will become more engaged in those experiences and will more readily identify career-specific role models than students exposed to traditional didactic instruction alone. In turn, we believe that minority high school students who are engaged in realistic career experiences and identify career-specific role models will more often acquire career-specific knowledge, cultivate appropriate attitudes, and exhibit goal-oriented behavior (i.e. develop aligned ambitions) relevant to a career in clinical research compared to students exposed to traditional didactic instruction alone. In order to test our hypotheses, we will compare students that were randomized to the TEACH Research program with those randomized to traditional didactic instruction. It is our hope that through our analyses, we will be able to advance the existing literature on promotion of entry of minority youth into clinical research by better understanding how realistic career experiences and multi-tiered mentorship can be used in programmatic interventions to provide minority youth with the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors that can promote their entry into a career in clinical research.

R01GM075292

2005-08-05

2010-07-31