Are new values and norms learned and internalized in professional school? This question and other related ones will be considered in the study of which this paper is a preliminary report. To specify norms and to consider the structure of relations in a set of norms, nursing students' prescriptions of what various kinds of personnel in a hospital should do were studied. At different stages in their educational programs, 129 students (alphas) who had already completed a 4-year liberal arts program, and 53 students who were in the process (betas) responded to questionnaires which listed tasks and requested indications of who generally does and who should do each task. Extensive data include the following findings: (1) a trend toward the classification of tasks by the respondents as intern tasks, professional nursing tasks, and technical nursing tasks, (2) a preponderance of do-responses over should-responses, and (3) greater imputation by alphas than betas of both performance of tasks and obligation to perform them to nursing students and staff nurses. It was suggested that the study of the relatively trivial prescription might be useful in the study of socialization, as a methodological exercise, and a means of generating hypotheses, as well as for the substantive relationship of the prescriptions to the professional development of the student. (JK)