The interplay of curriculum structure and professional identity formation of medical students: Birds of a feather flock together

Professional identity formation (PIF) of medical trainees is defined as “a representation of self, achieved in stages over time during which the characteristics, values, and norms of the medical profession are internalized, resulting in an individual thinking, acting, and feeling like a physician”. Although important, medical education takes place within curricular structures that are often not deliberately created with PIF in mind. The thesis explores the interaction between curriculum structures and PIF in two recently introduced curricular structures: 1) The Bachelor-Master structure, providing an option to interrupt or terminate medical studies; 2) The final year of medical school designed as a transitional year to graduation, during which students work in authentic settings with the clinical responsibilities approaching the level of a starting resident, in elective rotations.
We found that the Bachelor-Master structure does not stimulate students in any way to permanently stop their medical training, but there seems to be a tendency to insert a break in the program at the bachelor-master transition. This can also be seen as an interruption of PIF. For the transitional year, findings in the thesis suggest that transitional-year electives lead to early specialty preference streaming. We also found a relation between transitional-year characteristics and students identifying with members of the professional group, a process called ‘social identification’. Finally, we found relatively small differences between strength of identification with professional and interprofessional groups, suggesting that at this stage of training PIF does not seem to hamper interprofessional group processes.