ABSTRACT
Medical students are indeed strangers in a strange land, and this is at once their vulnerability and their strength. They interrogate significant rite-of-passage experiences, such as the anatomy course, their first patient, death and dying, patients from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, and how issues of social justice intersect with the practice of medicine. Students writing journey poems accepted, at least implicitly, that part of the medical education experience is identity formation, and saw themselves as growing in both knowledge and wisdom. There were also journey stories that embodied the sense of the student acquiring special, privileged knowledge, developing new perspectives and ways of seeing as a result of the process of becoming a doctor. Student poems acknowledged both positive and negative physician role models as they observed the way that their resident and attending teachers interacted with patients. They even find time to write about love, society, and the meaning of life.
