This study explores what motivates a student to enter medical school by first measuring students' strength of motivation and then by looking for relationships between motivation and career-related values and approaches to learning. Validated and reliable questionnaires were used to obtain data. This study found no differences in strength of motivation based on sex, nationality or age, but it did find that the reasons underlying motivation to enter medical school are interrelated and based on interpersonal and intrapersonal factors such as wanting to help people, being respected and successful and fulfilling a sense of achievement. An examination of the data, drawing on correlation and multiple regression analyses, confirmed performance approach and performance avoidance goal structures in first-year medical students. It also yielded a two factor model of the performance-approach goal structure. Students motivated to do better could be driven either by positive self esteem or by perceiving medicine as a means of enhancing their social status. Students who set their own goals and work towards them are more likely to succeed. Future recommendations include investigating if and how students' motivations change over time. (Contains 4 tables.)