Sports and Medicine
I thought I was organising events. In reality, I was building a network that would shape my career years later — long before I realised it.
The Long Game
By the time I arrived at medical school, I already knew that sport would be part of my life in some form. I had studied a Bachelors degree in Sports Medicine at university, immersed myself in anatomy, biomechanics, injury, recovery, and performance. It wasn’t a passing interest. It was a lens through which I understood the body, movement, and function. Medicine felt like a natural extension of that curiosity rather than a departure from it.
What followed was not a grand plan, but a sequence of small, logical steps that made sense at the time.
I noticed something early on: while many medical students were interested in sport, there was no formal space for that interest to live. There were surgical societies. Medical societies. Academic societies. But nothing that reflected the multidisciplinary nature of sports medicine itself—where surgeons, physicians, physiotherapists, radiologists, and scientists all contributed to the same outcome.
So we created one.
It became the first multidisciplinary Sports Medicine society for medical students in the UK. Not because we set out to be first, but because no one else had done it yet. We brought together people who were already orbiting the same ideas but had never been placed in the same room. Medical students. Surgeons with an interest in sports injuries. Clinicians who worked pitch-side. Researchers who understood performance and recovery.
The events were simple, but purposeful. Talks. Panels. Conversations. Surgeons interested in sports surgery had an opportunity to speak, to share their work, to be visible to students who were genuinely interested. In return, we learned how these worlds connected beyond textbooks and lecture theatres.
What I didn’t appreciate at the time was how visible this made me.
