Evolving perceptions of the medical profession among medical students: A large-scale NLP analysis

Medical students' perceptions of the medical profession shape their identity and career decisions. However, little is known about how these perceptions evolve over the course of undergraduate medical education. This study addresses this gap by exploring how medical students' views of the profession change across different years of training.

We employed an inductive constructivist approach to analyse data from 53,312 open-ended responses from the 2021 China Medical Student Survey (CMSS), representing over 120 medical schools across China. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques, including topic modeling and sentiment analysis, were used. We examined how students' narrative descriptions of the medical profession and their sentiment scores varied across different years of undergraduate medical education.

Students' perceptions of the medical profession centred on two broad areas: academic aspects (specialised knowledge, skills, educational requirements, and lifelong learning) and career aspects (professional image and career prospect). Across all undergraduate medical education years, academic aspects appeared more frequently than career aspects. However, as students progressed through training, references to career prospect and educational requirements increased, indicating a developmental shift toward more pragmatic and future-oriented concerns. Sentiment analysis revealed consistently positive attitudes. However, the average sentiment scores gradually declined with each successive year.

By examining students' descriptions of the medical profession and their emotional tone, this study provides a clearer understanding of how views of the profession evolve throughout undergraduate medical education. The increasing attention to career-related concerns alongside the gradual decline in sentiment highlights the need for educational strategies that address students' developing expectations, career planning needs, and emotional well-being. These nationally representative findings offer important insights into medical students' perceptions of the profession, highlighting the value of NLP in analysing large-scale qualitative data and the need for future cross-cultural comparisons to explore how these perceptions evolve in diverse educational contexts.