Identity

Identity is the evolving story you tell about who you are and why you act as you do. It is shaped through experience, reflection, and communication. Your identity brings together values, emotions, competencies, and aspirations across different contexts, and it is continually revised as relationships and environments change (Giddens, 1991; Bauman, 2005). Rather than being singular or fixed, identity is made up of multiple, overlapping strands tied to roles, relationships, and group memberships. These strands vary in importance depending on the context. Identity work refers to the ongoing effort to integrate, prioritize, or separate these strands so that your actions remain coherent and aligned with your sense of self.

Professional Identity

Professional identity is one strand within the broader braid of personal identity. It reflects how you understand yourself in the context of your field and how others recognize your actions as legitimate within professional standards (both sides of this are crucial to note). It combines personal values with disciplinary knowledge, skills, and norms. Importantly, professional identity is demonstrated through practice and is not simply conferred by a title or credential.

Internships, placements, and early career roles are excellent places to consider professional identity work. When identity formation is left to passive, subconscious absorption, students may adopt behaviors and values rewarded by the work site (or previous sites) even if those habits conflict with their deeper beliefs or goals (Trede, 2012; Trede, Macklin, & Bridges, 2011). By contrast, a well-developed professional identity supports ethical decision-making, a sense of belonging, and adaptability in complex or ambiguous situations (Cruess et al., 2015; Wald, 2015; Tomlinson & Jackson, 2021; Toubassi et al., 2023).

Developing Professional Identity

Culture is the environment in which identity work takes place. At the societal level, it is about values, status, and credibility. At the professional level, it provides the language, norms, and rituals that signal competence and ethics. At the organizational level, it translates these expectations into routines, metrics, and power dynamics (Trede, 2012).

Research across disciplines identifies four recurring patterns in professional identity development associated with work integrated learning (Braun & Clarke, 2006):

• Becoming – learning to think, feel, and act as a member of the field, often experienced as growing competence and confidence.
• Aligning – adjusting personal values and behaviors to fit stakeholder expectations and workplace culture.
• Exploring – discerning the kind of professional you want to be across different roles and settings.
• Struggling – facing challenges when identity development is disrupted by conflict or constraint.

Your professional identity is relational and linguistic. This means identity becomes meaningful through conversations and the language communities use to signal belonging. It evolves and is enacted through organizational structures. Finally it is valuable to note that identity is fluid. This means revising your professional identity is not an error; rather, it is a normal and necessary part of growth as roles, experiences, and contexts shift (Giddens, 1991; Bauman, 2005). Making identity work explicit helps avoid viewing professionalism as a checklist, rather than as a form of personal and accountable judgment shaped by values, evidence, and cultural context, informed by ongoing reflection and open to revision.

Identity and Ethnography

Ethnography is a practice that requires the researcher to understand themselves. Identity plays a central role in ethnographic work because it shapes how we see, interpret, and interact with the world. Every ethnographer brings their own identity into the field. This is why reflexivity is essential in ethnography. Reflexivity means being aware of how your own position (your race, gender, class, education, and other social markers) affects the research process. It involves asking: How does who I am shape what I see? What assumptions am I bringing into this space? How might my presence influence the behavior of others? Ethnographers do not aim to erase their identity, but to account for it honestly and critically.

Ethnography is also sometimes a tool for exploring how identity is constructed and performed in specific cultural or institutional settings. Whether studying a workplace, a community, or a digital space, ethnographers often ask: How do people express who they are here? What roles do they take on? What language, rituals, or norms signal belonging or exclusion? In this way, ethnography helps us understand identity not as a fixed trait, but as something shaped by context, relationships, and power.

In autoethnography, the researcher’s own identity becomes the subject of inquiry. Through personal narrative, they explore how their experiences reflect or resist broader cultural patterns. Autoethnography invites vulnerability, but also offers insight showing how individual lives are shaped by collective forces. Your professional identity is not something you receive, it is something you build.

All three ways of thinking about identity apply to your experience of an internship. Ethnographic thinking can help you observe how identity is negotiated in your placement site, how norms are communicated, and how you are invited (or challenged) to belong. It can also help you reflect on your own growth: what you are learning, what you are resisting, and who you are becoming.