College of Medicine Celebrates the 9th Annual Mentorship Award Ceremony

May 12, 2026 · College of Medicine · News

Faculty, students and alumni filled the College of Medicine atrium this month for the 9th Annual Mentorship Award Ceremony, an evening set aside each year to recognize the physicians and scientists who shape the next generation of Saudi doctors well beyond the lecture hall.

Now in its ninth edition, the ceremony has become one of the most anticipated fixtures on the College of Medicine calendar. Nominations are submitted by students themselves throughout the academic year, each one a short account of a mentor who stayed late to walk through a difficult diagnosis, made time between clinical rounds for a worried first-year, or simply modeled the kind of physician a student hoped to become. A faculty committee reviews the nominations and selects the honorees recognized on stage.

Mentorship carries particular weight inside Alfaisal's College of Medicine, where small cohort sizes and a deliberately low student-to-faculty ratio are treated less as a marketing point than as an operating principle. Students move through pre-clinical years and clinical rotations in close, ongoing contact with the same faculty, and the college has long argued that this sustained relationship, more than any single course, is what produces confident, well-rounded physicians.

This year's ceremony opened with remarks from college leadership on the responsibility that comes with training future doctors in a healthcare system undergoing rapid expansion under Vision 2030, before turning to the honorees themselves. Award recipients were introduced one by one with excerpts from the student nominations that put them forward, drawing warm applause from a room that included many of the mentors' own former students, now residents and practicing physicians, who returned for the occasion.

For the college, the ceremony is also a reminder of what accreditation reviews and curriculum documents cannot fully capture: the informal, human side of medical education. Awardees spoke briefly about mentors who had shaped their own careers years earlier, describing mentorship less as a formal duty than as a habit of attention, one they hoped this year's honorees would in turn pass on to the students now beginning their own journeys through medical school.

As the College of Medicine looks toward its tenth mentorship ceremony next year, faculty say the tradition has become self-sustaining: each cohort of newly minted physicians arrives having watched mentorship modeled for them, and many return, later, as mentors themselves.