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Attrition From Premedical Studies Among Latinas: Case Studies

Minorities are significantly underrepresented in the U.S. physician workforce. Female minorities wishing to become doctors face additional gender barriers, since women who enter college with the desire of becoming physicians are more likely than men to exit programs of undergraduate studies (“premed studies”) that lead to medical school. To explore the factors that may cause minority women to lose interest in a medical career, in-depth one-to-one interviews were conducted during the first quarter of freshman year with minority women who had said prior to matriculating that they were interested in pursuing a career in medicine. Interviews with seven Latinas were analyzed to develop grounded theory to identify potential causes of attrition from premedical studies within this underrepresented group. Findings point to the importance of linking such students into premedical-student support systems at the beginning of their freshman year to retain them in the premedical pipeline and argue that the mechanisms that push students out of the “premed pipeline” operate at the institutional level to passively, rather than actively, discourage premedical students’ career ambitions.