2025 Scholars' Research Symposium Abstract: Transitional Understanding of Kindness in Medical Students.

This was a qualitative study assessing students' understanding of kindness in medicine. The themes of definition of kindness, clinical environments, how providers practiced kindness, and ethics were derived from the qualitative data. Important findings include the loss of kindness in negative clinical environments, the emphasis students placed on kindness being a decision in the clinical environment, the importance of context to kindness, and exposure to clinical environments aiding students' preparedness to face ethical challenges. Future work could investigate integration of humanistic values such as kindness into the medical school curriculum.