I am currently a second-year medical student at the University of Bristol and can honestly say that I can’t imagine myself doing any other degree!

I joined Medic Mentor in its very early years as an applying student and participated in one of their first summer schools. I subsequently went on to receive multiple medical school offers and I was awarded a Medic Mentor Scholarship to study medicine at university. As one of their scholars, I then started by presenting at their conferences, which was scary at first but has given me a huge confidence boost! I am now one of the Summer School mentors who help aspiring medical students to develop the skills that they need to be a successful applicant and excel at medical school. I am also responsible for producing the medical aspects of the study guides and creating the follow-up videos for the Virtual Medical Society to explain the answers, which has been great fun. I have grown so much with Medic Mentor already and am starting work on their research team to get experience in a new area.

I made the decision to take a gap year between the end of secondary school and the start of university, so I applied for deferred entry and was successful in my applications to both Birmingham and Bristol. This was because there were two things that I was desperate to do before I started medical school; I spent the Summer in Malaysia training in Taekwon-Do under one of the world’s best masters and the Winter in the Austrian Alps working as a German-speaking ski instructor. This had the great side-effect of spending the entire year honing my teaching skills across all ages.

Once at Bristol I have been proactive in taking these skills to the next level. I am a Basic Life Support instructor within the medical faculty teaching CPR and other life-saving skills to first-year medical students during both terms and have been involved in outreach projects to help teach over 2000 lay-people CPR across Bristol. I have gotten some incredible feedback from this and I hope to take more of a leadership role here in future.

Academically, I finished top of my cohort at Bristol in first year and have been active in going to different national conferences spanning emergency medicine and orthopaedics. At present I would like to go into anaesthetics or critical care, but I will be exploring lots of other avenues when I start clinical teaching next year. My end goal would be to eventually become a professor in one of these disciplines and have a leadership role in medical education.

In terms of hobbies, I have been doing Taekwon-Do for 15 years now. I represented England at the European championships where I became vice-champion for under-18s in two different events, and I now represent Bristol as their club captain. This year I discovered trampolining and have now developed a minor obsession with it! Despite only doing it since October, I have also been elected captain of the trampolining team for next year, making me captain of two different sports teams over two years. My roles here involve teaching and supporting all of our members in training sessions and at competitions, as well as leading the development of the club to take it to new heights as head of the committee. I have also recently started making my own kombucha, a type of fermented tea, where I’m enjoying trying out lots of different flavour combinations. My current favourite is lemon and ginger because of its acidic twang, but watch this space!

You can listen to Chris’ interview on Bristol Medical School as part of the Becoming a Doctor Podcast series here.

If you would like to post Chris a question, please comment below and he will get back to you!