The purpose of this focus session is to better understand how medical students navigate the challenge of using the biomedical science knowledge learned in the preclinical curriculum to solve clinical problems encountered in clerkship rotations as they begin the transition from students to physicians. To address this, students entering the family and community medicine rotation at our institution were asked to write brief reflective essays in response to the prompt: How is biomedical knowledge relevant to clinical medicine? Mid-clerkship, these same students were asked to select a patient encounter and complete a reflective writing assignment designed using the principles of Kolb's experiential learning theory as an organizing framework. We conducted a directed content analysis to interpret meaning from student reflections through the lenses of knowledge encapsulation theory and illness script theory.