Becoming Doctors: Examining Student Narratives to Understand the Process of Professional Identity Formation Within a Learning Community

BACKGROUND: Professional identity formation is a key aim of medical education, yet empiric data on how this forms are limited. METHODS: Our study is a qualitative analysis of student reflections written during the final session of our Becoming a Physician curriculum. After reading their medical school admission essay and their class oath, students wrote about a “time, or times during your third year when you felt like a doctor.” The reflections were qualitatively analyzed by the evaluation team, looking for themes found in the reflections. RESULTS: Narrative themes separated into 4 distinct categories, specifically that performing physician tasks can make one feel like a doctor, demonstrating caring is a fundamental task of doctors, integrating personal ideals with professional values promotes professional identity formation, and the theme of never feeling like a doctor. Subsets of these broad categories provide further insight into individual and integrative tasks. Patients, patient families, and students through their own reflection prompted learners to feel like doctors in 74% of narratives, whereas physicians or the care team did so in 26% of our narratives. CONCLUSION: Students are able to reflect on times during their principal clinical year where they feel like doctors, taking a step toward forming a professional identity. Having faculty prompt and support such reflection can help faculty understand the student experience of their principal clinical year and promote professional identity formation.