What did you do directly after school? Studies, travel, living etc

Directly after school finished I went home, watched a movie, went to bed. When I woke up I considered what I would do with my life. The world was my oyster! I reshackled the enormous millstone of study around my neck and trundled off to go to university in Brisbane, which is where I would languish for the next four years.

What did you study at University and graduation news etc

I went to Brisbane to study at UQ. Primarily I spent a lot of time in deep study of the physiological effects caused by by-products of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae microorganism. When I wasn't involved in this research project I was struggling through first a bachelor of Biomedical science and then a Bachelor of medicine and surgery, which took six years in total. The course work was pretty arduous, particularly in the first couple of years. The final stages of my medical degree I was able to complete on the Sunshine Coast which was great.

What are you doing since graduation?

When I graduated I decided that a bit of a change of scenery was in order so applied to do my internship year at the hospital in Cairns, a place I knew absolutely nothing about. Turned out that was a fantastic choice, despite my tendency for repeatedly getting horribly sunburnt. It's got monsoonal rains, wild creatures and spectacular natural beauty in all directions. In 2021 I began further training with the Australian college of rural and remote medicine and I genuinely loved pretty much every minute of it. Rural generalism never really entered my consciousness as a career pathway during medical school, but it's brought me to work in all sorts of small towns in the regional areas surrounding Cairns as well as up in the Islands of the Torres Cape. It's fantastic fun, lots of emergency work, interesting tropical medicine, a generous helping of indigenous health and it's really challenging working with sometimes very limited resources. Often we have to work with helicopter retrieval teams for our critically ill patients which is pretty cool.

What were your interests during school… sport, music etc and are you still involved?

Well I'm still hopeless at sports, Mr Robson would shake his head at my feeble forays into College sports. I was then, and still am today a massive nerd. Most of my interests in school were extracurricular, primarily watching horror movies and reading books. I still do a whole lot of both, particularly reading as somebody recently highlighted to me that if you make a decent effort, you might only get a thousand books to read in your lifetime which feels like nothing! This has got me embarking on my most recent venture which is to read at least a book a fortnight for the six decades.

What challenges you faced post-school, and even post-uni?

Probably the biggest challenge for me was studying on the Sunshine Coast while not having my driver's licence. Having to navigate the Sunshine Coast's public transport system with it's byzantine bus routes and more or less complete disregard for timetabling was a particularly harrowing experience and I do not recommend relying on it. Second to that was the realisation that I never really put a lot of effort into learning how to study properly, which really came back and bit me later on when I realised I couldn't just learn by reading then carefully eating the pages of my textbooks to absorb their knowledge. It would have saved me a lot of strife to figure out my own style of learning earlier on.

What are your highlights from school, teachers, programs etc?

I look back very fondly on all my days at St Andrew's, I'm just going to rattle of a stream of the first things that jump to mind:

• Mr Koy's Maths C class developing our own gang sign and doing freakin' sweet moves with matrices.
• Physics being phun with a 'ph'.
• Mr Spring's stories about hitchiking, particularly the (possibly apocryphal) tale of meeting Ivan Milat.
• IT sessions with the grouchy but affable Mr Schmarr
• Having both Kevin Bacon and Kevin Spacey as teachers, how cool is that!
• Meditating on the floor in yoga corpse pose with Mr Dick
• Derailing an entire humanities class with Mr Clarke by asking him about his seemingly innumerable past jobs, including an oyster shucker on a fishing vessel.

Do you stay in touch with friends from school?

I still have good friends from St Andrew’s who I travelled with several times after school, and keep in semi-regular touch with. Even though we are separated across three states and several thousand kilometres I still consider them some of my closest friends, and whenever we catch it feels like not a day has passed since those halcyon days in Year 12.