Studies of medical students in this country and in America have shown that not only their career expectations but their general perception of what it is to be a professional medical man are developed over time through their contact with university teachers of medicine. In America in particular as they worked their way through the four years of the teaching programme medical students became rather more interested in following specialist causes and began to think of their future careers in terms of speciality practice, teaching medicine, and medical research as opposed to general practice. This trend does not appear to occur in Britain, partly because specialist careers are not always so widely available and partly because of the limitations on specialist practice within the National Health Service. Nevertheless, it is also the case in this country that those students who eventually enter general practice tend to be those who experience difficulties in studying medicine, and although the others do not necessarily express a preference for research or other forms of specialist medicine this is probably because the emphasis in our medical schools is on those major clinical specialities concerned with direct patient care. Over their years at medical school, that is to say, students experience a process of socialization which develops within them a professional self-image, the image of themselves as doctors vis-a-vis patients, which is consonant with what their teachers think of medicine as such and of the prestigeful activities of professionals in the medical sphere. In addition to learning the technical requirements of their role, as doctor, medical students are taught to acquire the characteristic attitudes and values appropriate to that role as a calling, an occupation for which they may live, as well as off which they may make a living.1 In spite of the lack of similar studies of students entering other professions it does not seem sociologically unreasonable to suppose that similar processes of socialization occur for all those vocations for which it is the special business of the universities to teach. For the most part, university students meet few professionals in their prospective careers who are not themselves university teachers or engaged in research, and it is likely therefore that the teacher's evaluation of professional excellence is what the student chiefly comes to absorb as the proper standard to accept. Medical students, indeed, might well be rather less influenced than others in this way, since amongst the very few professionals who have regular contact with people in all walks of life the general practitioner surely ranks as the most visible. Whatever their background medical students will have met a practising professional in their chosen career against whom to contrast their teachers. The preference of first year American medical students for general practice possibly arises from this fact, especially as the Merton research also found that a firm decision to enter medicine as a career had been made quite early on, before the age of fourteen on the part of about half the students interviewed. Education for other vocations, it might be assumed, is begun without such clear determination in mind; as Startup's study of second-year students at the University College of Swansea has shown, some 61 per cent of students of social studies, including sociology, entered university because they did not wish to commit themselves to a career immediately on leaving school, and only 28-6 per cent of them had an 'occupational' reason for entering university, as compared with 48*4 per cent in the applied sciences.2 Without a suitable model on which to base a career choice the impact of the