I came to college with very clear educational goals for myself. I chose Brown specifically because I wanted to study what I wanted to study. I had planned on doing a biology and classics double for a while and never really thought about doing anything else. I applied to college and spent the first two years thinking I would be doing a PhD where obviously you do need to major in the sciences.
It wasn’t until I worked with an MD/PhD the summer after my sophomore year that I decided to pursue the MD/PhD route instead. Even after I committed to going that route, I still hated much of what, in my opinion, being pre-med stood for. A large chunk of my closest friends from college are in fact doctors now (well, residents technically), but I don’t think any of us ever said we were “pre-meds.” We were bio, neuro, or comp(utational)-bio concentrators. I think that’s an important distinction. Are you in college to learn or are you there just to get to the next step? In fact, thinking about it now, the one girl I know who always referred to herself as a pre-med on top of being a bio concentrator didn’t get into any medical schools the two times she applied.
Obviously studying what I wanted to study helped me get a higher GPA - and I knew that going in to college - but it also just made me happier. I hated being forced to take certain classes in high school, and so pretty much the only things that guided my course selection were my own interests, physically scheduling my classes, and (for thankfully only a couple of my 32 classes) satisfying concentration requirements. I honestly never really thought about this kind of stuff.
So in some ways, yes, it was key, but it’s also weird to think about it this way because I never did.