INTRODUCTION: Students selected during their early years have a strong influence on humanitarian disciplines and teacher experience. By the second year, the undergraduate student experiences impressions from previous expectations before entering college. They build professional identities from competing discourses of diversity and standardization; use and negotiate these discourses differently and experience the building process differently, depending on your unique social identities; and as a result, they build different types of professional identities. OBJECTIVE: To investigate or track students in professional identity formation from high school to medical school, in a private institution in Salvador / BA. METHODOLOGY: Cross-sectional observational study with a quantitative / qualitative approach. Students in the 5th and 6th semesters of medicine, 2019.1. Questionnaire via email, or in person. Descriptive statistical analysis, IBM SPSS Statistics20.0 program. Numerical variables were analyzed following central and dispersion trends. A qualitative analysis by content analysis. Study was cleared by the local ethics committee under approval number 03547118.6.0000.5544. RESULTS: 197 students answered the questionnaire. Mean age 21.86 +/- 2.3; 111 (56.3%) female; 88 (44.7%) Catholics; 99 (50.3%) of the 5th semester and 98 (49.7%) of the 6th semester. 197 (100%) single and 130 (69%) live with their parents. 184 (93.4%) without previous vocational training. Mean pre-vestibular course time of 1.21 years (SD +/- 1.03). 181 (91.9%) participate in some extracurricular activity. 137 (69.4%) answered vocation as motivation to do medicine. 190 (96.4%) participants answered that there was a change in the way of thinking and acting in front of the patient and humanistic issues. 161 (81.7%) answered that the expectations were met by the course. 120 (60.9%) respondents do not feel unmotivated, guilty or ashamed when they fail during clinical practice. 190 (96.4%) perceive the influence of teachers in their education. 186 (94.4%) perceive humanistic content in the curriculum. 99 (50.3%) strongly agreed that there is competitiveness within the course. 94 (47.7%) strongly agree and 72 (36.5%) agree that they feel “more medical” after the start of clinical / hospital practices. 34 (17.3%) strongly agreed, 35 (17.8%) agreed and 73 (37.1%) agreed in part that they feel using the patient as an object. 89 (45.2%) strongly agree and 80 (40.6%) agree that the choice for a specialty may be influenced by a teacher / physician / mentor. 43 (21.8%) of the participants strongly agreed that there is influence on the way they behave and dress, 69 (35%) agreed with the statement. CONCLUSION: It is possible to infer that students enter the course very young and without any experience in the higher education environment. The vocation as motivation followed by the desire for knowledge and the influence of parents and family, point to the humanistic side in choosing the course, also pointing to the influences of the hidden curriculum such as the desire of the family and the presence of a family member practicing the profession. There is satisfaction with entering the course, with their experiences and how they have positively transformed students: the proximity to the patient, the curriculum, the teacher.