Medical students are not blank slates: Positionality and curriculum interact to develop professional identity

Excerpt

As Stubbing et al. [1] have rightly pointed out, medical students do not enter their training as ‘blank slates’. We carry with us diverse life experiences, which influence early notions of what it means to be a doctor. As co-authors of this accompanying commentary, and as medical students from universities in the US, Canada, and Australia, we entered medical school with a range of preconceptions of what makes a doctor. In writing this commentary, we have drawn from our varied and unique perspectives, including our respective experiences as members of communities often underrepresented in medicine, including LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender), racialized, disabled, refugee, undocumented, and low socioeconomic status communities. Of course, we do not represent the communities to which we belong, and our composite identities include communities well-represented in medicine. Further, our lived experiences cannot possibly capture the multifarious backgrounds of physicians in training. However, these experiences have been influential in our trajectory—they guided our aspirations to pursue medicine as a career, and at times hindered our pathway to medicine, and continually shape our notion of what it means to be a physician. As a result, this commentary aims to reflect on how diverse medical student positionalities influence professional identity formation. Moreover, we aim to highlight the role of medical education institutions’ formal and hidden curricula in empowering students to develop a professional identity that embraces their positionality. …