The only regret premedical student Lawrence Fried has about his time at Cornell is not getting involved with more activities.

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Lawrence Fried took advantage of semesters in London and Washington, D.C., to study health-care policy.

"I would have liked to work on-staff at the Cornell Daily Sun," says Fried, a student in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, "but I just didn't have the time." It's easy to see why; he not only has several internships, research projects and speaking engagements to his credit, but he also has worked as an announcer for the Cornell student-run radio station, WVBR.

"I have a lot of different interests," he says. "This was one of the reasons I wanted to come to Cornell. I didn't want to be locked into a six- or seven-year pre-med program that would limit the cultural breadth of my education. The atmosphere on campus when I visited was so alive, so vibrant, different than any other school I'd been to."

Needless to say, Fried isn't your typical pre-med student. While at Cornell he spent a semester in London as well as in Washington, D.C. In London, Fried took classes in history and the arts -- he has published poetry, and he is interested in acting -- but also studied Britain's national health-care system. That interest developed during the summer of his sophomore year when he interned at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, verifying patients' medical information. After discovering that many of the hospital's patients weren't showing up "because they turned out to not have health insurance," Fried decided to turn his job into a research project. His findings on the statistical analysis of uninsured health-care populations were presented at Beth Israel, which implemented some of Fried's recommendations to reduce the no-show rate.

In London, Fried also worked at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, where he saw a very different perspective on health care. "Patients in England had a totally different set of expectations about what was owed to them," he says. "Over there, because of the single-payer health-care system, patients focused on their care, rather than the actual cost."

However, Fried says, neither system is perfect. "There are pros and cons to both. For instance, in England it can sometimes take up to six months to see a specialist, which, obviously, isn't great. My goal is to combine the benefits of both systems to come up with a new way of thinking about health-care policy."

To this end, Fried spent the fall 2005 semester in the Cornell in Washington program, interning at the Alliance for Health Reform, where he helped raise Congressional awareness of health-care issues. Health-care policy is a definite career interest, says Fried, who hopes to get a master's degree in public health after medical school. For now, he is waiting to hear from several schools while thinking about doing some acting on the side.

Graduate student Joseph Murtagh is a writer intern at the Cornell News Service.