The first year of medical school is late adolescence or early adulthood. Students at this time of the year have partly formed identities, and their life experiences, including certain cultural, religious, and socio-economic status, determine this over the past 2 decades. In medical education, premedical period is particularly important because not only do they acquire medical knowledge, they also develop essential skills, attitudes, and form an identity for becoming future doctors [1].

In this respect, the medical humanity curriculum can be an important way. This curriculum may provide interdisciplinary coverage of humanities or social sciences that help to understand and practice medicine, not limited to biomedical knowledge in medical education. In order to operate the curriculum effectively, the outcome-based education that clearly sets the learning outcome that the curriculum must provide in advance and education accordingly must be preceded [2].

This study focuses on learners’ preconceptions, based on the following reasons. First, exploring students’ preconceptions can be a way of understanding student as beneficiaries of the education. Identifying learners’ needs is a basic step that must be performed while designing a curriculum. This process is important because implementing education at the learner’s level becomes possible. Additionally, it may increase learning motivation and thus, help teach classes more effectively [3]. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the perceptions and needs of students before they advance into medical school. Furthermore, it is crucial to examine whether the curriculum can meet their needs [4].

Moreover, learners’ perceptions have a direct impact on learning achievement. Perceptions about the learning environment, or prior knowledge thereof, is a key element in determining students’ academic achievement. Common misconceptions, such as prejudice and stereotypes, are likely to have a negative impact on students’ education [5]. According to the cognitive theories of learning perspective, learning involved the active construction of meaning. In other words, cognitive theory argues that identifying learners’ preconceptions helps learners build new knowledge on prior knowledge [6].

Several previous studies have examined how freshman medical students form their notions. According to these studies, students entered medical schools with preconceived notions about the social role of doctors and about what it means to become one. However, these beliefs were often inaccurate or unrealistic. Aggregated data showed that the students generally attained these ideas from television drama series [7,8]. These falsely biased perceptions are concerning because they may not be corrected during medical school. For example, in one study, one-third of the students had an anti-obesity bias, which did not improve by the time of their clerkship [9]. Similarly, other studies—for example, on gender awareness [10], social determinants of health [11], relationship between identity formation and emotion [12], perception of professionalism [13], and perception of wellbeing [14]—have identified students’ biases or preconceived notions. However, these previous studies only focus on identifying preconceptions on specific topics. These studies have limitations in showing which topics have stronger biases, and they do not fully discuss the relationships among these preconceptions.

This study focuses on South Korean students. Amid the prolonged economic downturn and severe job shortages, South Korea has high social aspirations for doctors and health care professionals who guarantee stable jobs. In this atmosphere, many students went to medical school at the recommendation of their parents, retried their entrance exams several times, and have grown up with intense academic competition, high performance pressure, and private education [15]. Therefore, tracking whether students can absorb the medical curriculum well, along with understanding their preconceived notions, is a sensitive task that must be undertaken when students enter college.

This study aimed to examine students’ preconceptions about medicine before they entered medical school. It also sought to investigate the unique perceptions about medicine that exist within the South Korean cultural context.

This study was conducted on 110 first-year medical students who just entered Hanyang University College of Medicine in South Korea. To examine the perception of newly enrolled students, the survey was conducted in March when the semester just began. In the first week of the course, the researchers asked students to answer the question “What kinds of preconceptions (myths, beliefs, and stereotypes) do you have about medicine?” Students were expected to produce a 10–20 sentence response paper. The researchers then collected the students’ responses as data for qualitative content analysis. Content analysis method is an analytical tool designed to provide a systematic approach for examining recorded textual data. It is widely used in both the medical and nursing fields. The content analysis method objectively classifies and systematically analyzes accumulated data [16].

The researchers processed the collected data through the code-category-theme from the inductive content analysis method [17]. First, the responses went through data cleaning to extract raw data. After collecting all student responses in an Excel file (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, USA), the researchers filtered out irrelevant answers. Second, they extracted keywords from the responses, which were set as “open codes”. The researchers organized the open codes such that they retained as much of the original text as possible. Third, the researchers grouped the open codes that could be interpreted as belonging to similar contexts, into several sub-categories. The sub-categories related to the individual doctor’s aspects could then be grouped to form the “individual” category. Lastly, by combining sub-categories, the researchers derived five final themes.

This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Institutional Review Board of Hanyang University (IRB approve no., HYU-2020-121). The need for consent was waived by the IRB. The authors confirm that all methods were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations.

Through content analysis, the researchers were able to derive five themes (scientific discipline, practice, doctor, medical education, and stereotype), 12 categories, and 38 sub-categories.

This study showed that students formed preconceptions across subject matters, and they can be categorized into five themes: scientific discipline, practice, doctor, medical education, and stereotype. Based on these findings, we posit the following discussions.

First, it is necessary to look at the difference between the learning outcome expected to be achieved during premedical period and the preconceptions that students formed before entering the medical school. The largest proportion of the collected data was health-related knowledge, which often had a low level of health common sense or ambiguous meaning that the reasons were not elaborately explained. In order to overcome the gap between the target educational performance and the current level of students and to set a proper direction for education, appropriate educational intervention and consensus are essential.

In particular, in the case of the premedical curriculum, which is noted in this study, this is the time for education to cultivate basic qualities to become a doctor before receiving a full-fledged medical education. The essence of the curriculum during premedical period is the convergence of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and for this purpose, extensive liberal arts education in various fields and advanced education in core majors should be conducted in a balanced manner. Therefore, having a narrow view of a particular concept and phenomenon is bound to hinder effective premedical education [18].

For example, our results show that students already believed in various the stereotypes, concerning specific specialties at the time of admission. Especially, the students stated many of their beliefs on “psychiatry” and “surgery”. From an educational standpoint, professors can use such dissonance between the learners’ cognition and emotion to stimulate reflection and develop professional ideals [19]. Likewise, professors can use this discrepancy in various educational approaches to encourage change in students’ attitude, impact, and behavior toward mental illnesses [20].

Previous studies suggest that prejudice against a department can become an important factor that influences students’ future specialty choice. It is crucial to examine in advance students’ preconceived notions about various departments because, depending on the degree, such notions may lead to differences in students’ preferences for specific departments, level of contact with patients, and perceived intellectual excitement [21].

Furthermore, professors can use the results from identifying students’ stereotypes on specialties to construct better career advice for young doctors. This can be done by understanding students’ early career preferences [22]. In this aspect, it is important to detect and modify freshmen’s biased and distorted views of medicine.

Second, it is essential to consider South Korea’s unique social atmosphere and context. Students enter medical schools with preconceived notions about doctors and the expectations that come with the profession. At this point, an individuals’ thoughts, perceptions, and beliefs share a deep connection with the social environment they lived in [23]. In South Korea, being a doctor is representative of high education and income. Many parents aspire for their children to become doctors. Such social aspiration leads to a fierce competition for medical school admission and private education [15]. Statements from the collected data demonstrate that students held positive beliefs toward doctors’ social economic power and job security.

How students form perceptions can be interpreted in the historical context of Western medicine in South Korea. The South Korean medical education system has its roots in the Japanese-style Western medical education during the colonial period. After the Korean War and rapid economic development, the development of social practice of medical care or modern concept of ethics in Korean medicine was delayed during the 20th century, and instead, the influence of Japanese-style Western medical education, which considers medicine a concept of scientific discipline, remains strong. In this context, individuals of doctors were also recognized as successful self-employed people rather than professionals who considered public interest and patient-centered [24].

This historical background is evident in the students’ perceptions of doctors. Studies show that when students think of doctors, they think of personal safety more than social accountability such as financial stability, and physical well-being. In addition, the sub-category within the education outcome also highlighted aspects of “healer” rather than “professional”. In other words, preconceptions remain in disease cure rather than holistic care.

At the same time, media such as movies, TV dramas, and internet websites can also influence the formation of students’ perception. These factors reflect the cultural and social atmosphere of a country [25,26]. This study revealed that the students describe doctors as a group with words such as “exclusive” and “hierarchical”. These results share some relation to the regular subjects of South Korean medical dramas that portray authoritative relationships during medical training processes and power struggles in hospitals. However, medical dramas depict fictional physicians. They sometimes present scenarios which are not true to the medical scene in reality. These dramas show unprofessional behaviors and attitudes that real doctors do not usually possess [27].

Interestingly, first year students viewed medicine as that of Western medicine and regarded Korean traditional medicine as unscientific. Previous literature showed that although medical students do think a lot about Korean traditional medicine, their understanding was not professional. As such, their view was negatively skewed [28].

These results may reflect the conflict prevalent between Korean traditional medicine and Western medicine. The conflict between doctors and Korean medicine doctors is intense, as doctors do not view Korean traditional medicine as an independent medical field like dentistry and pharmacology. The reason is that the two groups are in sharp conflict over their respective benefits on issues such as use of medical devices such as X-ray and application of medical insurance. This may be an important point that should not be overlooked, since in designing curriculums, it is important to identify in advance South Korean students’ preconceptions about medicine.