Surgical Management of Pleural Diseases - Primer for Radiologists.

Professionalism is a term that medical students experience frequently throughout their training.In medicine, as in other work settings, standards of professionalism are deeply gendered and racialized.As medical schools have slowly become more diverse, more research is needed on how medical students with minoritized identities experience professionalism in relation to their own identities. To explore this topic, I conducted 49 in-depth interviews with fourth year medical students at allopathic medical schools across the United States. Representation of medical students with historically minoritized racial, gender, and sexual identities was prioritized. Using modified grounded theory methods, I identified four strategies medical students use to manage tension between their social identities and professionalism standards: 1) ruling specialties in or out based on alignment between the professional culture of a specialty and participants’ social identities; 2) constructing a social identity to fit perceived professionalism standards; 3) withholding parts of social identity that conflict with perceived professionalism standards; and 4) resisting conformity to perceived professionalism standards. These findings demonstrate the ways in which today's medical students perceive medicine’s professionalism standards to be gendered, racialized, and heteronormative. Ultimately, these narrow standards place an undue mental and emotional burden on students with minoritized identities to construct social identities that conform to medicine’s traditional standards of professionalism.