Near-Peer Teaching Opportunities Influence Professional Identity Formation as Educators in Future Clinicians

Abstract

Teaching is a key role of a physician. Despite this, medical students are rarely exposed to the necessary skills and techniques throughout the duration of their education to prepare them for this component of their training. The gross anatomy lab provides a safe environment for students serving as near-peer educators to teach and learn to manage unexpected and uncomfortable situations. Students acting in near-peer teaching roles see a range of benefits from addressing personal weaknesses to improving communication skills and enhancing their anatomy and clinical knowledge, but there remains a lack of insight on how these experiences shape students’ professional identity. This study examined how the professional identities of second-year medical students are shaped by serving as peer educators (PEs) in a gross anatomy laboratory. Gross anatomy PEs from the 2022 and 2025 cohorts recorded audio diary reflections at the end of each week they served as a PE highlighting how this role impacted how they view themselves as future physicians. Audio diary recordings were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using the framework method which includes familiarization, code application, and interpretation. A total of 26 audio diaries averaging 4 min in length were recorded across 11 PEs. Themes included Balancing Workload, Role of a Near Peer, Learning to Communicate, Learning to Collaborate, and Learning through Teaching. Students recognized that in addition to reinforcing their didactic training, serving as a peer educator in the gross anatomy lab helped them build skills necessary to fulfil their future role as a physician educator.

Introduction

Teaching forms a critical part of a doctor’s professional identity [1–5]. Professional identity formation (PIF) is a multifaceted process that involves more than just mimicking the behaviors of a doctor. Rather, it requires the development of professional values, moral principles, actions, and aspirations through ongoing self-reflection [6]. In recent years, there has been an increase in attention to supporting the professional identity formation of medical students, specifically their identity as educators [5].

Whether it be to patients, students, residents, or colleagues, teaching is an integral part of both clinical practice and academic medicine. In recognition of the fundamental role of physicians as educators, several regulatory and accrediting bodies now include educating learners, patients, and other members of the healthcare team as key competency [7–9]. Medical students gain at least a third of their medical knowledge from residents, highlighting the weight of near-peer teaching [10]. Near-peer teaching is the phenomenon whereby senior trainees that are one or more years senior in training teach more junior trainees [11]. Despite the importance of teaching, most physicians have received little or no preparation for this critical aspect of their career and many trainees feel ill-prepared to assume this role [1, 12, 13].

It is well supported that medical students benefit from serving as peer educators (PEs). Benefits include improved medical and anatomy knowledge, test scores, teaching skills, confidence, and interprofessional skills such as communication and leadership [1–4, 14–24]. These skills also have the ability to impact patients as good communication skills are significantly correlated to patient trust in their physician and feelings of support, which can increase patient satisfaction and overall wellbeing [25–27]. Other advantages of near peer teaching are seen in higher cognitive and social congruence between students and teachers and the creation of a learning environment conducive to learning success [2–4]. By way of this environment, PEs are also able to transmit the hidden curriculum of medical school to more junior learners [20, 28].

Frequently used during the clerkship years, studies have recommended implementing near-peer teaching earlier to better prepare students to achieve teaching-related competencies [15]. This recommendation is supported by Alwazzan et al. who found that when reflecting on their identity as educators, residents looked to their experiences peer teaching in medical school to form their perceptions [29]. When implementing near-peer education programs prior to clerkship, the gross anatomy laboratory provides an ideal environment to promote knowledge and skills gained by teaching [30–32]. Anatomy is a basic science topic taught early on in medical school, allowing students opportunities to develop their skills before they assume formal teaching roles [33]. Cadaveric dissection is already acknowledged as an invaluable learning tool in medical education that helps to develop professionalism and human values and positively influences the care of future patients, and these benefits can extend to PEs as well [32, 34].

While there has been an emphasis for students in PE programs to develop skills related to professionalism and professional identity as a physician, [35], it can be argued that an additional goal of PE programs should be to influence the identity development of physicians-in-training as educators. In K-12 education programs, student teaching experiences are influential in shaping the “teacher identity” that will shift over time with more experience [23, 36]. Providing opportunities for medical students to practice as educators can work to create a stronger teaching culture among physicians.

Study Purpose and Research Question

Previous studies recognize the myriad benefits of near-peer teaching, but few studies have examined the effect of near-peer teaching on the professional identity of the near-peer teachers. This study seeks to qualitatively examine the role of near-peer teaching experiences on the second-year medical students in a gross anatomy lab using thematic analysis of reflections. Therefore, this study sought to answer the following research question: How are the professional identities of second-year medical students shaped by serving as PEs in a gross anatomy laboratory?

Materials and Methods

This research is informed by a constructivist worldview that recognizes multiple realities that are socially constructed by individuals. This research approach is appropriate to guide this work as study participants completed audio diary reflections describing their unique experiences and evolving self-concept as future physicians while serving as peer educators. This study is further informed by the conceptual approach to PIF in medical education outlined by Jarvis-Selinger and colleagues [37]. This approach recognizes that identity formation is an adaptive and developmental process that is formed through integration of roles and responsibilities into a cohesive sense of professional self. Recognizing that practice evolves and varies throughout training, the authors describe identity formation as a process occurring at two levels: (1) individual development within the person and (2) collectively with socialization into roles and participation with the community.

Finally, we must attend to the positionality of the researchers. The researchers are all anatomy educators who teach in the gross anatomy laboratory and have a variety of years of experience in anatomy education. The team believes the gross anatomy laboratory environment to be an appropriate setting for students to explore their skills and identities as educators. Our membership within an educator identity group may have influenced the interpretation of the data. As such, the researchers engaged in reflexive dialogue to attend to our interpretations as they related to educator identity formation.

This study was granted ethical approval by the Institutional Review Board of Indiana University (#2,001,920,373).

Setting and Participants

At Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans (LSUHSC-NO), second-year medical students that received a grade of honors are recruited to apply to serve as PEs for the gross anatomy course. The PEs act as both laboratory assistants and mentors to the first years, helping them navigate the intricacies of the dissection laboratory and the difficult transition from undergraduate studies to medical education. The application consisted of an essay asking why they wanted to participate in the PE program. The applications were judged blindly by the course faculty and the twenty individuals selected were notified by the course director. Prior to beginning the course, the PEs met with the course faculty for 1 h to discuss their roles in the course and answer any questions. Study details were presented in this course introduction and students were able to provide their consent to participate in this study by visiting a QR code to a short online survey where they could provide demographic and contact information. Students from the 2022 and 2025 cohorts were invited to participate in this study (note: students from the 2023 and 2024 cohorts were not included because the PE program was put on pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic during academic years 2020–2021).

The gross anatomy course at LSUHSC-NO is a traditional, discipline-based course with regional dissection progressing from back to extremities to cavities and ends with head and neck. The course is a first year, first-semester course comprised of approximately 180 contact hours and the laboratory accounts for roughly 100 contact hours. To ensure the continued academic success of the PEs, only four PEs join the faculty per laboratory session, and additional PE serves as a standby for each lab session in case of emergency. PEs are not permitted to assist in lab on their exam days or days when they have mandatory sessions in their second-year courses. The PEs sign up in advance and can adjust their schedules to accommodate both their studies and responsibilities to the course. For reasons of equity, the PEs are scheduled for a minimum of three sessions assisting in the laboratory, translating to at least 10 h of contact time with the students per PE.

Data Collection and Analysis

Participating students were asked to record an audio diary reflection at the end of each week in which they served as a PE. Audio diaries were chosen as the method of qualitative data collection as they allow longitudinal engagement with the participants within a specific context over time [38]. Audio diaries are ideal for studying PIF as they promote exploring participants’ experiences, thoughts, and feelings over time [39]. Each audio diary reflection had the students respond to the following prompt: “In your role as peer educators, you are facilitating someone’s medical education and shaping their learning experience. How does this experience factor into your own education? Has this impacted how you see yourself as a future physician?”.

Participants in the 2022 cohort were given unique online folders and were asked to record their weekly reflections and upload them to their folder. Online folders were only accessible to the PE and the research team. Participants in the 2025 cohort received a unique link to a Zoom room by email calendar invite at the end of each week. The room was set to automatically record audio to the cloud so the participants could begin their audio reflection upon entering the room. The newer form of data collection was thought to reduce the burden on students to upload their recording to a folder.

Audio diary recordings were imported to Otter.ai for transcription (Los Altos, CA). All recordings were listened to following transcription to ensure accuracy of transcripts. Audio diary transcripts were analyzed using the framework method which involves several iterative steps including familiarization, development of preliminary codebook, application of codebook to the entire dataset, charting, and interpretation [40]. Researchers (M.K. and J.N.B.) performed the familiarization step by taking marginal notes and independently coding the transcripts. The researchers developed independent codebooks, met to reconcile codes and ultimately develop the analytical coding framework. One researcher (M.K.) applied the framework by coding the transcripts in Dedoose, qualitative data analysis software, v. 4.12 (SocioCultural Research Consultants, LLC., Manhattan Beach, CA) and created an inter-coder reliability test for another researcher to evaluate the consensus of the applied codes (J.N.B). Cohen’s kappa was 0.75 which indicated good to excellent agreement. The researchers then met to discuss excerpts that had coding discrepancies and reconciled codes by coming to consensus on the code that best described that excerpt. Charting was performed using Dedoose by generating a matrix of codes that had been applied to each participant transcript. Finally, all researchers met to organize the codes into thematic categories and interpret the results.

Trustworthiness of this study is established through reflexivity and longitudinal engagement. The team met periodically throughout the study timeframe to attend to reflexivity and discuss thoughts, assumptions, and experiences during the data analysis process [41]. Finally, participants recorded several audio diaries across a semester timeframe which provides credibility to the results.

Results

A total of 11 PEs consented to their audio reflections being used in this study, two from the 2022 cohort and nine from the 2025 cohort. Participants recorded a total of 28 reflections that ranged from 1 to 13 min (average of 4 min per reflection). Participants recorded between one to six audio diaries with the average completion percentage of audio diary recordings per PE sessions at 58%. Five themes were found throughout the reflections: (1) Balancing Workload, (2) Role as a Near-Peer, (3) Learning to Communicate, (4) Learning to Collaborate, and (5) Learning through Teaching. Several themes contained subthemes, as seen in Table 1.

Table 1.

Themes and subthemes with description and representative quote

Theme	Subtheme	Description	Quote
Balancing Workload	The responsibility of a PE forced students to learn how to manage their time		“I think part of that balance of being a good physician is taking care of yourself. And like, if you don’t take care of yourself outside of work that I don’t think you’ll be as truly as focused and productive when you’re at work.”
Role as a Near-Peer	Acting as a Supporter	PEs provide emotional and academic support	“[O]bviously I’m there to help teach them anatomy but there’s also a different dynamic to being a teacher slash tutors, making sure that like, students are just good in general, like taking care of themselves.”
	Acting as Leader	PEs are responsible and hold leadership positions in the lab	“I was pretty nervous to have a leadership educational role in the lab, but I thought I handled it pretty well. I was able to communicate the students very clearly and it was kind of weird how attentive they were [listening] to everything I said.”
Learning to Communicate	Explaining things Differently	Rephrasing content or instructions is valuable to students	“My experience as a peer educator thus far has been helping me learn and reinforce my previous experiences with having to take these topics that could be new to my audience and translating it or rewording it in a way that my target audience, so in this case were students, in the future will be my patients, can understand.”
	Physicians as Communicators	One part of the physician role is to communicate effectively with patients	“I think it’s ultimately really increasing my communication skills, which is vital towards being a physician. Most of the job is communicating with your patients, to come to a diagnosis and then to communicate with your patients more to come to a plan of action and treatment, to form relationships and to build trust. I think this experience is the big practice in all that.”
Learning to Collaborate	Community of Practice	Finding a community of like-minded others in medicine	“It’s a glimpse into how the rest of my training journey will go. I will always be surrounded by both people more experienced than myself and people less experienced than myself. Being able to form connections with these people now will allow me to better interact in the future when patients are involved.”
	It’s okay to say “I don’t know”	Recognizing it’s okay to have gaps in knowledge and admit to them	“It definitely is highlighting to me so far the importance of being willing to admit when you don’t know something but being willing and open to figure it out with the students.”
Learning through Teaching	Teaching reinforces Material	Teaching helps PEs renew their anatomy knowledge	“The lab itself was on the interior abdominal wall, I was able to sift a bunch of different tanks on the different layers. Internal, external oblique, identifying direction of muscle fibers was actually really nice. I got a review for myself.”
	Learning to Teach	Education is more than reciting facts	“I think my first lab session was getting a lay of the land and what my job will be, but I felt rewarded by being able to give students a year below me advice on how to proceed with the dissections, and just general advice on technique for using the tools.”
	Physicians as Educators	The role of a physician is to educate patients, learners, and members of the healthcare team	“One of the central roles as a physician, whether or not you decide to go into academic medicine is definitely education.”

Balancing Workload

Students discussed how serving as a peer educator was a time commitment that took time away from their second-year coursework. Despite this, they reflected on how, as a physician, they would be required to balance many responsibilities at the same time. One student stated:

I was kind of stressed about my own classes. Just because we’re learning so many different bacteria, viruses, yada, yada, yada. And I was kind of overwhelmed with the amount of content we’re learning. But I had to go to [anatomy] lab so that took away even more study time for me. But I guess it kind of gave me some good insight into what being a physician will be like in the future. A lot of times you might not want to do something because you feel like you’re getting pulled another direction but sometimes you just have to put on a smile and help whatever you can… But learning how to balance going into lab and staying professional and helpful is definitely going to take some practice but I feel like I’m off to a good start already. (2022)

Their role as a peer educator helped students to understand how to better manage their time in a way that may benefit them in the future as physicians.

Role as a Near-Peer

Peer educators described their roles as that of a leader or that of a supporter. PEs as leaders described how they assisted in resolving interpersonal issues and how students looked up to them as leaders in the lab, giving them a sense of responsibility to the students. One student described how within the hierarchy of medicine students have limited opportunities to feel a sense of authority. This student stated being a PE impacted their perceptions of their identity as a physician by:

Seeing myself in more of a leadership role in our education. A lot of the time we get told how much stuff we don’t know. So being in a role where you’re seen as somebody who does know something is a little refreshing, but a lot of responsibility and something we don’t take lightly. (2025)

Students described themselves immediately as a source of support for first-year students, but also described how being a peer educator was preparing them to support others in the future. One student described how they hope their future patients will feel supported in their care and that serving as a peer educator gave them confidence that they will be successful in that role:

Having the students look up to me for advice both in the anatomy lab and medical school, and just life in general makes me feel accomplished and also respected. I know the students know I’m someone that they can trust and lean on and vent to, and I hope that’s exactly how my future patients will feel. (2025)

Learning to Communicate

In this theme, students discussed how physicians need to be effective communicators to best serve their patients. This process included learning how to explain things differently so that their audience, whether that be current students in anatomy or future patients, can understand what they are saying:

That’s great practice for anyone in the medical field, being able to explain something out loud to someone else in a way that makes sense. But also explaining it in a way that’s not condescending or demeaning in any way, but more of a helpful, general understanding that makes sense to them. (2025)

Students further described how they felt that teaching in the lab exposed some of their weaknesses regarding communication. In recognizing the necessity of this skill, one student reflected on how they were not as prepared as they needed to be their first day as a PE and how that impacted their perceptions of physician communication:

As a doctor, when you’re going in to deliver news or something to a patient, it’s probably a good idea to have an idea of what you want to say and to really get across in way you don’t miss anything. If that’s just jotting down like a little bit of an outline, and that way the patient’s really getting all the information they need and all the information that you want to convey to them. Because once you’re in front of that person, it’s easy to kind of get sidetracked and get distracted, go off on tangents, and maybe miss something along the way. (2022)

Learning to Collaborate

Other intrapersonal skills that students developed over the course of their time as PEs were collaboration and teamwork. Some students found that serving as a PE offered them a glimpse at the community of practice in which they will belong as a physician. One student described a significant moment during their teaching that changed how they view themselves and their profession:

I would say that before it has occurred in a peer educator [role] that I viewed myself as a solo portrait. But now, what comes to mind is that it is not just single portrait, but a sort of expanded group or family photo of people that have a common goal, pursuit of practice, and expand upon medicine. So yeah, I wouldn’t say before I was kind of single minded and sort of alone, I mean, but now interacting with each tank I see a group effort, in the sense of that I’m not just a singular physician, but I work as and with a group of people. (2025)

In addition to learning to collaborate better, students felt more comfortable acknowledging gaps in their own knowledge and admitting to their colleagues that they are unsure of something:

Being a peer educator has helped solidify my own knowledge and helped me find some gaps. I mean, I can’t know everything. And I feel that being honest with myself and with those that I have been interacting with has helped in the sense that, you know, I can be more open with myself and my own knowledge gaps and find comfort in that won’t know everything. But I can rely on a team of people to fill in the gaps that I can’t fill. And that has helped my own education to know that I can depend on others. (2025)

Learning Through Teaching

Learning through teaching was the most common theme found in the reflections. First, some students believed that the actual act of teaching was the best way for them to reconnect with and study the anatomy content required for their STEP 1 exams:

Serving as a peer educator factors into my own education by reinforcing anatomical concepts that I may have forgotten and needed to brush up on. Explaining concepts, pointing out structures, even quizzing the students helps me solidify material I’ve learned in the past. I believe that the best way to learn something is to teach at someone else and the peer educator program really exemplifies that. (2025)

Other students explained how the being in the anatomy lab provided them with a safe environment for them to gain formative teaching experiences prior to beginning their clinical rotations. One student talked about how they had erroneously assumed that teaching was primarily answering content-based questions. However, they realized that most students needed help with practical skills or study tips, the things you cannot find in a textbook, reframing how they saw the role of an educator:

I thought that that was interesting and helpful to see like, okay, how can I help someone with not just book knowledge, but like how to acquire that knowledge or like how to hone in on this skill and stuff like that. (2022)

Finally, students ascertained through their experience serving as a PE that physicians, as defined by their role, are educators whether or not they pursue academic medicine:

Pretty much everyone along the line chain of command has to be able to teach some kind of skill or knowledge or something. The attendings help to teach the residents, the residents help to teach the interns who help teach the med students. Some of them are better at it than others at explaining things. And so hopefully, when I’m in that position, a couple years after my time during anatomy lab, the program like this will help me will help me be a better explainer, if you want to use that word or teach, I guess, teacher is a good word to use. (2022)

Discussion

This study describes how serving as a peer educator assists in the professional formation of the student at the level of the individual as they learn to teach and explain content at the level of the learner, and at the collective level as they explored their understanding of the role of physicians as educators and communicators. Similar to other published literature on this topic, many students discussed in their reflections how serving as a PE increased their learning about anatomy and improved their generic and pedagogical skills [21]. Through the PE reflections, students in this study demonstrated how they were internalizing the social expectations, behaviors, and values of the profession at the level of the physician educator. While they were sensitive to how others perceived them, they began to develop an ability to see themselves in relation to a community of educators [42]. Reflective practices, in particular, are crucial to PIF as they enable individuals to assess their values, attitudes, beliefs, reactions to experiences, and learning needs [43, 44]. By doing so, individuals can make informed choices about how to act in difficult or morally ambiguous circumstances that are common in clinical practice [6, 42]. However, many curricula that aim to foster PIF, such as near-peer teaching, often fail to incorporate reflective practices. By including guided reflection as part of the experiential learning process, both individuals and researchers can gain insight into the direct effect of being a PE on PIF as a medical educator.

Professional identity is realized through “doing” rather than “being.” Alignment between identity and work is essential for identity construction [45]. When medical students fulfil the work of an educator, it is easier to see themselves in that role. This experiential learning in a particular role facilitates the formation of possible selves as educators that are retained, rejected, or edited via the development of skills over time [46]. Not all students directly indicated that they see themselves as educators, but several reflected on how their teaching skills evolved over time, particularly between their first and second reflections. Other PEs focused more on the collaboration aspects and their roles as leaders and supporters. As Pratt et al. argued, this shows that identity formation may be incremental versus all or nothing [45]. For the participants who did explicitly reflect on the role as physician educators, most PEs did not discuss this in their first reflection (after their first week in the lab), but in later reflections. These findings support the need to have trainees reflect on skill development, roles, and professional identity to support the formation of the identity as an educator.

It is perhaps not surprising that the most common subtheme found in the reflections was that serving as a peer educator reinforced the learning of the material. While this benefit is supported by previous literature [1, 3, 4, 11, 16, 21, 22, 47, 48], medical students are learning what it means to become a doctor while at the same time forming an identity as a medical student [37]. During the preclinical years, medical students are rightfully occupied with developing a foundational base of medical knowledge to pass licensing examinations and for safe practice in the future as a physician. One of the requirements for the development of PIF is a sense of self-efficacy, or a belief in one’s capacity to perform the behaviors necessary of a person within that particular role. As individuals experience themselves as accepted and competent in the medical community, they are able to embody the role of a medical student and physician without feeling like a fraud [49]. In this sense, serving as a near-peer educator can give medical students an opportunity to practice key educator competencies in a low-stakes environment, while also benefiting from content review.

The community of practice approach is a common lens through which identity can be explored and in this study it serves to situate how the students navigated their developing identity as an educator while also exploring their membership as both a medical student and future physician [50]. Reflections within the community of practice subtheme showed students finding their community, in which they can work as a team towards a common goal. Since these reflections show that students can begin to develop their identity as a physician educator over the course of one semester, we recommend that opportunities to serve as a PE be extended to all students during pre-clerkship years. As PE participation increases, a supportive and professional community of practice of physician educators can evolve [51]. Situated learning within a community of practice typically allows students to observe and interact with more experienced educators, supporting their developing identity as an educator themselves [52]. Interestingly, students did not discuss how interacting with faculty members influenced their membership to a community of educators. This could be an area of future investigation, to determine the impact that interactions with anatomy faculty have on student’s developing identity as educators.

Teaching in the gross anatomy laboratory provides great opportunities for students to engage with the professional skill of uncertainty tolerance (UT) through the specific categories of ambiguity, complexity, and probability [53]. PEs are tasked with assisting students with their dissections and each donor provides a multiplicity of possible expressions of a structure and ambiguity in presentation. While previous research has shown that working with a team of peers positively impacts UT in medical students [54], our results illustrate how PEs gained valuable training in UT through learning to collaborate with their peers and feeling comfortable acknowledging their gaps in knowledge. Admitting to not knowing is a key part in the socialization of medical students in uncertainty training [55]. As such, the benefit may be twofold where the PEs gain valuable uncertainty training for themselves but also model this critical skill to their peers. Reflection is also a key part of learning to deal with uncertainty, which also aids in their training [56]. Engaging in critical reflection helps students develop narrative patterns of thinking. Practice with critical reflection helps students understand context, values at risk, and other perspectives in a situation that brings about uncertainty [52]. Some research has evaluated the positive impact that peer educators have on the UT of medical students in the gross anatomy lab [54], but little on the direct outcomes for the peer educators themselves. This suggests room for future work examining the impact serving as a PE in gross anatomy has on uncertainty tolerance in medicine.

Establishing community and forming identity can help physicians reduce burnout [57, 58]. Burnout, an increasing worry for residents, is a phenomenon defined by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment. The results of burnout include worsening physician wellbeing and patient outcomes [59, 60]. When there is a mismatch between expected and actual workload of residents, burnout rates increase [61]. Increased satisfaction with role responsibilities can reduce burnout among residents [62]. PEs reflected on being able to see themselves as effective educators which may increase their satisfaction with the role during residency. In addition, residents must develop skills necessary to become physicians while learning how to balance their workload to manage burnout [63]. By serving as PEs, students recognized the importance of staying organized and coordinating multiple tasks, all necessary skills to fulfil the role of a clinician educator. Future research should evaluate whether the self-efficacy as an educator that is formed during near-peer teaching in undergraduate medical education translates into role continuity as an educator in residency.

Limitations

The transferability of this study is limited by data collection from a single peer educator program at one institution. Furthermore, the study is limited by a small sample of PEs who consented to participate in the program. While the study is strengthened by participants completing more than one reflection during their time as a PE, we hope to optimize the collection of audio diaries to increase response rate. Finally, we recognize there may be a bias in participant selection. Only students with a grade of honors were invited to be PEs and their perceptions may not be representative of all medical students. Furthermore, only a portion of PEs agreed to participate in this study which may represent a self-selection bias. A future direction could be to formally incorporate reflection into the peer educator program, along with formal instruction on teaching practices.

Conclusions

This study focused on the impact that near-peer teaching has on medical student’s perspectives of themselves as clinician educators. Our research demonstrates that exposing pre-clerkship medical trainees to the role of an educator facilitates and strengthens their professional identity as educators. Students who serve as PEs gain communication skills, increased tolerance for ambiguity, and increased ability to balance their workloads, all of which may mitigate burnout when they enter residency and have increased teaching responsibilities. More explicit and frequent opportunities to serve as near-peer educators, along with guided reflection throughout the process, should be considered for trainees throughout undergraduate medical education.

Author Contribution

Conceptualization: Jessica Byram, Jason Mussell; methodology: Jessica Byram, Jason Mussell; formal analysis and investigation: Jessica Byram, Megan Kruskie; writing — original draft preparation: all; writing — review and editing: all; funding acquisition: N/A; resources: N/A; supervision: N/A.

Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, JCM, upon reasonable request.

Declarations

Ethics Approval

Approval was obtained from the Indiana University Institutional Review Board #2001920373.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was gained from all participants. Participation was voluntary and there were no inducements to participate, financial, or otherwise.

Competing Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.