<p>I had two Yale premeds as roommates during college. The first defined success as a Nobel Prize, no kidding, although by the end of our freshman year he had announced, sadly, that he had decided he was one quantum of intelligence short of an actual Nobelist, and that he would probably never achieve his dream. (He got an MD/PhD at a leading medical school, and is the long-time chair of Oncology at a world-class teaching hospital.) The second was not quite as specific, but he was really no less ambitious, and very interested in issues of poverty and access to medical care. He is the medical outcomes researcher I described a few pages back, and Chief Quality Officer at a different world-class teaching hospital.</p>
<p>There were other premeds at Yale, of course, who just wanted to get medical degrees and to be doctors somewhere. Many of them did go to public medical schools in their home states. I would say that the pre-meds I knew were probably split more or less evenly among this group, people with outsized ambitions like my roommates, and people who were not as interested in high-level academics but who had a very missionary/service approach to medicine, whose goals were to run clinics on Indian reservations, or in Haiti.</p>