When you walk through the doors of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, you will quickly come to realize that the medical students are more than future doctors. Olympians, musicians, change makers, photographers, and more, the students at Icahn Mount Sinai are dynamic and multi-faceted—many, even possessing dual-identities.
We knew we had to bring these student stories to life and highlight their lives beyond the white coat. And in light of recent social media and admissions insights, we also knew that a segment of our target audience wanted to see more about what a well-balanced life at medical school could look like—from the current students themselves.
Enter SPLIT: a video web series we produced to focus on the dualities of the medical students' passions and pursuits, while following them during a typical day at medical school.
The original pitch and approval for this video web series actually began in early 2020. As a result of the global pandemic however, our marketing priorities shifted drastically, and the production for this series was put on hold. The moment to pause on this project provided more time to fine-tune the vision for the series. Two years later, after a second round of pitches and budget approvals, SPLIT was finally ready to take legs. We immediately began assembling the team and talent, setting up interviews with the three students we decided to feature first: an Instagram and TikTok influencer, an actor, and a changemaker.
After the discovery phase to understand these students' stories and schedules a bit more, we began production timelines to include set locations and storyboarding the vision for each of the scenes (trending transitions, included). Each of the SPLIT videos were filmed in one-day, with the student laying their voiceover after seeing an approved cut of the video.
SPLIT officially debuted in the last quarter of 2022. We launched a microsite, MoreThanDocs.co, where the videos and the students' stories will live, and of course collaborated with the social media team to ensure a strategy to promote the videos, the microsite, and the accompanying hashtag of the same name.
To date, on social media, the SPLIT series has over 26,000 impressions and an engagement rate of 4%. In addition, SPLIT has been included in the content strategy for the School’s website and admissions recruitment campaigns.
