What does it mean to enter a profession?

[Jaider]

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What does it mean to be entering a profession? Any thoughts? Maryland wants to know. 🙂

 

[SuzieQ3417]

Lol...ah yes, I remember all too well struggling to define that word for their secondary. May I suggest Wikipedia as your first reference? It's a fairly thorough definition, and at least makes a good starting point for your brainstorming. I'll even provide the link for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession

Good luck!

 

[crys20]

from the latin word "profos" meaning "to trust" 🙂 people will trust you as a professional. that's a big obligation! you could go from there.

someone at my DMU interview told me that. 🙂

 

[red dot]

i think they want to know what it means to/for you to enter a profession, not what it means in general

 

[erin682]

A lot of med schools are really pushing the idea of 'professionalism'. Mine went so far as to have a 'professionalism' forum. Anyway the idea is the to be professional is to show that you respect your career and in our case patients. You show this in your compassion, dress, interactions with colleagues etc. Anyway that may be sort of the type of thing they are trying to get from you. I think the idea someone mentioned about the greek for trust would fit under this too.

 

[Jaider]

Thanks for your ideas. You guys are lovely. 😍

 

[Fermata]

They want you to drink the punch.

 

[Thundrstorm]

Yeah, that was a tough/vague question. I used wikipedia to get the juices flowing, and I also used the article that the "optional" BU essay question was based on. I talked about professionalism in general and then about medicine specifically, touching on the doctor-patient relationship, ethics, the changing nature of medicine, and cultural awareness. Basically, my Maryland essay was like a 300 word abstract of my BU essay.

 

[jmugele]

I read an article last year sometime (I think it was the Journal of Internal Medicine or something like that) describing a consensus they had reached describing what professionalism was. It's basically a job that follows a certain set of codes or ethics. For medicine these contained four, if I remember correctly -- patient primacy, patient autonomy, social justice, and one more I'm forgetting.

I think "profession" connotes something specific, though, and it's been traditionally used to describe only a small subset of jobs, including medicine, law, and education, that require a strict code of ethics.

Anyway, sorry for being so vague -- I read this in passing and don't remember all of the details.