Many fields have institutionalized the expectation to take on a (usually unpaid) internship. These issues relate to social and economic justice in two ways: first, students with greater access to social and economic resources have greater ability to find and complete an internship whereas other students find unpaid internships to be a costly barrier to entry; second, students performing the internships are vulnerable because as they often lack basic protections and are incentivized to not speak out against poor treatment (Bocchiaro et al., 2012; McLeod et al., 2019; Roscigno, 2019). Consequently, although required for-credit internships have potential to provide students with experiential learning benefits, those benefits are likely greater for students who already have means and they must be weighed alongside the issues of sexual harassment and discrimination, which are disproportionality felt by minority students. In this article, the authors focus on the issue of identity formation related to the internship because identity formation provides a crucial theoretical foundation for understanding social and economic justice outcomes. The formation of two different identities are relevant here, first is the formation of a professional identity that occurs during an internship. Using the concept of liminality (van Gennep, 1909; Turner, 1969) they view the internship as a space during which interns transition between their previous identity as a student and their new identity as a professional. Viewing the internship as a liminal space helps to understand the larger transition that the intern is experiencing when they are not yet a professional but also not quite a student anymore. The second relevant identity formation is the temporary identity that people develop as they step into the role of an intern. Saks and Ashforth (1997) posited that people create a temporary identity when they enter a temporary space (e.g., internship) as a means of coping and functioning while protecting their core identity. Similar to literature studying temporary workers (Garsten, 1999), the temporary nature of interns' roles and identities is critical for understanding how power differentials emerge and operate during internships that cause interns to experience and persist through poor learning experiences and exploitative work relationships, as well as how these factors influence the longer-term development of a professional identity.