pre-professionaladj.n.

1909 Science 8 Oct. 460/2 With six or eight years available for the total pre-professional and professional training, there should be ample room for breadth as well as for intensity.

1948 Mind 57 387 University instruction in psychology should serve..as a preparation for other fields (e.g. law, medicine, engineering), in the form of pre-professional courses.

1975 N.Y. Times 28 Dec. iv. 12/4 New pre-professional (a currently popular term in education) programs, such as Mills's prelaw ‘Administration and the Legal Process’.

2003 New Yorker 6 Jan. 53/1 She says that in the ten-year grind of pre-professional ballet training many dancers sacrifice their sense of pleasure in the quest for a kind of featureless perfection.

1932 Jrnl. Higher Educ. 3 335/1 No one is in a position to say authoritatively that the curriculum which Mr. Wilkins suggests will take three years..for non-professional students and two years..for the preprofessionals.

1953 Social Forces 32 58/1 Young pre-professionals who plan to teach, be ministers, practice law or medicine.., and work in public affairs, can profit from studies of the most perplexing and distressing personal experiences which men and women have to face.

1970 Jrnl. Gen. Psychol. 83 140 When I speak to audiences, I find that the myth is still believed firmly, even by preprofessionals.

1991 T. H. Goldsmith Biol. Roots Human Nature p. x We do not teach science very effectively except narrowly to preprofessionals.