ABSTRACT
Medical students must play at being a professional long before they become one and internalize a professional conception of themselves. Students do not take on a professional role [and identity] while they are students, largely because the system they operate in does not allow them to do so. Internalization involves the equally profound experience of students' eventually striking a symbolic articulation of their emerging professional identity with their remaining multiple identities and relationships in private life. This chapter examines the nature of identity and symbolic articulation. To have an identity is to be socially situated and assigned membership by self and others in a particular reference group, organization, social world, or 'scene'. Multiple identities symbolically articulate with one another in the way persons sort out the convergence and divergence of assumptions, definitions, attitudes, and values between the perspectives of different identities, as well as in the way they rank identities by assigning them different social values.
