Background To become a good doctor, developing a professional identity is as important as having the right knowledge and skills. Great attention has been given to professional identity in medical school because it plays an important role in the transition from student to doctor. Nonetheless, the necessity of acquiring a tremendous amount of knowledge and skill during medical school training does not create sufficient opportunities for students to develop their professional identities. Thus, this paper pays careful attention to how students’ learning experiences in medical school affect this development. The research questions are as follows. 1) How do medical students’ perceptions of doctors change or strengthen after entering medical school in the process of professional identity development? 2) What kinds of knowledge have medical students accumulated while attending medical school? How do their learning experiences affect professional identity development? 3) What is a doctor’s role and the career’s meaning to medical students, and what understanding does this awareness bring to their learning experiences and lives as future doctors? Methods In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 Korean students in their fourth year of medical school; all had more than one year of experience in clinical settings. The students’ learning experiences and professional identity development were used to analyze the data using inductive thematic analysis. Results When students first entered medical school, they perceived their identities as “given to” them by society. However, various learning experiences during the medical school years affected them, causing them to think about becoming a doctor according to their own perceptions and the meaning of becoming a doctor in the profession. Although an isolated medical community and a competitive student culture hindered them from searching for their professional identities, informal learning experiences, including active interaction with patients, senior doctors, and others outside the medical community, enabled them to develop their professional identities. The medical students experienced a conflict between individual and professional values as they considered what kind of doctor they would be in the future. Conclusions The findings noted in this study extend the understanding of professional identity and informal learning experiences in medical school.

The current safety education and training system has a number of problems, namely that the actual risks in the field are not reflected and that workers cannot be engaged in safety education. Therefore, we conducted a study to build a VR-based safety education system that reflects the problems actually occurring in the field. The risk points of the electrical construction sites were derived through in-depth interviews with various stakeholders such as field workers, safety managers, and management. A risk scenario was also constructed by analyzing the causes and effects of existing accident cases. A safety education system was constructed to which the established risk scenario was applied. In the virtual construction site, the site’s own model, safety equipment, and members were implemented in a 3D model to form a virtual reality environment. This environment is intended to provide an educational environment wherein workers can immerse themselves in safety, specifically because this VR-based environment can induce active participation by providing safety information through various experiences. In addition, in this study, a VR-based safety education system that reflects the field conditions was designed to prepare basic data for the modernization and activation of safety education.

No abstract