Box 3. Access to mentors and role models Mentorship and role modeling emerged as an important topic. Participant E explained how she never saw physicians as role models in her community: To be honest, there was absolutely no one. Professionals in the community seemed to be unattainable, physicians were rotating quickly in and out of the community. In a sense physicians never integrated with the communities, so you never saw that local physician as a person. They were never something that you could say, ”Oh, I could see myself being that person,” because they weren’t a person, they were a doctor. She later explained how this impacted her medical school interview when she was questioned about how she knew she wanted to be a physician when she didn’t have any physician role models. Participant C shared a different perspective about how the physicians and Chief Medical Officer with the Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) were influential in her decision to pursue medicine: “there’s so many really amazing doctors here that are reaching out to students”. Several participants in this study said youth mentorship needs to start at a young age prior to high school. Participant G elaborated that: To me, I think if we’re trying to improve recruitment, we should be engaging students who are at that point of making decisions, and who are open to, I guess, sort of new ideas that aren’t, ”Hey, let’s go work at Diavik”, or you know, like, ”I’m gonna drop out in Grade 10 and go make 80 grand up at the diamond mine.” He further explained how the medical schools that partnered with the NWT for clinical training didn’t conduct enough outreach at the time: I think, you know, obviously there’s these partnerships with various universities, but at no point in the past had I ever seen an ambassador from those schools come down and say, ”This is a realistic program, there’s these spots available, this is what you would be doing, this is what you would need to do to get here.” I had to figure all this stuff out myself, and kind of work towards what I thought would get me into medical school. Participant C echoed the need to highlight and leverage the successes of the cohort of Indigenous physicians who have come out of the NWT: If someone showed an interest in science or medicine at a young age, it’d be great to be able to reach out to this organization and have almost like a Big Brother and Sister program. Because realistically, one of the biggest barriers is just self-doubt for indigenous youth. What better way than having indigenous doctors willing to reach out to them and easily accessible to them to help them jump over that one barrier.