Background: Professional representations orient students toward their future profession and influence their view of what things are important to learn.
Purpose: To analyze medical students' professional representations and their background.
Methods: One hundred nine 1st-day medical students wrote an essay titled "My work and future as a physician in the 21st century" and filled in a questionnaire about their background. The essays were content analyzed to identify the dimensions of their professional representations.
Results: Four dimensions of representations emerged: impersonal-personal, foreclosed-reflective, traditional-transformative, and idealistic-realistic. The professional representations were associated with the students' gender, previous experiences of working and studying, their sources of information about the medical profession, and the time of career choice.
Conclusions: Our study revealed different subgroups of medical students in view of their professional orientation. The relevance of this finding for the recruitment and educational practices of medical schools is discussed.